Quinn’s Reviews > Between the World and Me > Status Update

“I saw that what divides me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do.”

“Black-on-black crime is jargon, violence to language, which vanished the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel.”

“You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.”

“I am ashamed of how I acted that day, ashamed of endangering your body. But I am not ashamed because I am a bad father, a bad individual or ill mannered. I am ashamed that I made an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more.”

“All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to “be twice as good,” which is yo say “accept half as much.”

“For all your life, whenever you’ve had a question you’ve been able to type that question out on a keyboard, watch it appear in a space bordered by a corporate logo, & within seconds revel in the flood of potential answers. I still remember days when a song u loved would play on the radio & then disappear into nothing. For a young man like me the invention of the Internet was the invention of space travel.”

“Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have & you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves be4 seeing u killed by the streets that America made. Thats a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with moral authority.”

...And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.”

“The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies--the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects--are the product of democratic will...

“Hate gives identity. The ni**er, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the dream of being white, of being a man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe”