Losing My Cool Quotes

“For Hegel, it is actually the slave who comes out on top in the long run. In that initial life-and-death struggle, which sets the terms going forward, one “I” experiences what Hegel calls the “fear of death” and submits to the other. This “I” decides he “loves life” and concedes the fight. And this initially submissive consciousness, the slave consciousness, on pain of death, now serves the other’s will and works for him. But it is through this very work that, eventually, he will come to surpass his master, Hegel reasons. On a basic level, this is so because it is the slave who masters objective reality, or nature. The slave takes the plants and animals and transforms them, through work, into meals; the slave transforms, with his hands, a tree into a table; the slave is most alive, becomes necessary, develops his spirit. The master, on the other hand, is parasitic, decadent, dependent. Without the slave’s recognition, he is not even a master; without the slave’s work, he cannot prosper.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture: Love, Literature, and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd

“I was haunted by one especially poetic sentence in Heidegger: “Overnight . . . Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. . . . Every secret loses its force.” The more the individual feels a need to keep it real, the more he is pushed toward “averageness” and a “leveling down” of all possibilities and varieties of being. The They separates the individual from himself. For Heidegger and Steele, the stifling of individual freedom by the collective will of the group poses a grave existential threat in itself. It is not a threat that is restricted to the black community by any means. Quite the opposite, it is characteristic of all communities and herds.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture: Love, Literature, and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd

“when I bought and read a copy of The Brothers Karamazov (a very serious book of which I am not sure what Oscar Wilde would have thought). According to Borges, there is a special Islamic night, called the Night of Nights, in which the hidden doors to heaven are cast open wide and “the water in the water jars is sweeter than on other nights.” It was something like this that I felt when I encountered Dostoyevsky for the first time.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture: Love, Literature, and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd

“Everyone in the room—all Franco-French white kids, it occurred to me—knew their Louis Armstrong inside and out, knew the names of the songs, had their favorites. That is phenomenal, I thought. “How do you guys know so much about black music?” I asked. “Are you kidding?” Stéphane, replied, assuming, I think, that I was implying only an American could be so well versed. “This is something the whole world knows. Practically everything except classical is black music!” I refilled my glass with the brandy, which, I noticed, tasted an awful lot like Hennessy—better, though.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture: Love, Literature, and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd

“The vast walls of books in our cluttered little house became Borges's magical aleph and I found that if I looked the right way I could see the whole world.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture

“Pappy's word was his bond and his name was all he had, all that he could control.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture

“The idea struck me as either insane or a joke. And yet, the more I thought about it—that those who have been subjugated might actually over time be able to gain something from that subjugation—the more I struggled with this idea from my comfortable swivel chair, armed with the space and perspective I was fortunate enough to have been granted, the more I found it difficult to dismiss as simply false.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture: Love, Literature, and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd

“Men would prefer anything rather than be free”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture: Love, Literature, and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd

“If it is true that it feels good to look good, then it is equally true that it can feel gangsta to look gangsta and it can feel thugged-out to look thugged-out, or, on the other hand, it can feel smart to look smart. I wanted to feel smart.”
― Thomas Chatterton Williams, Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-hop Culture: Love, Literature, and a Black Man's Escape from the Crowd