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4a9d65c
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There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been "black," and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separate..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6e4c2e3
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Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d1545bf
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The violence that undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence of "Yeah, nigger, what's up now?" were not unrelated. And this violence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1a4ee92
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What was required was a new story, a new history told through the lens of our struggle. I had always known this, had heard the need for a new history in Malcolm, had seen the need addressed in my father's books. It was in the promise behind their grand titles--Children of the Sun, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Kushite Empire, The African Origins of Civilization. Here was not just our history but the history of the world, weaponized to..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cc43c69
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What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest humor to cope.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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eaa0510
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We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything--cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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14b439a
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Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d482c99
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You can no more be black like I am black than I could be black like your grandfather was.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9e6dc2f
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The crews, the young men who'd transmuted their fear into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel any sense of security and power. They would break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies. And their wild reveling, their astonishing acts made their n..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a8fc046
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To survive the neighborhoods and shield my body, I learned another language consisting of a basic complement of head nods and handshakes. I memorized a list of prohibited blocks.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3877f56
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He was born-again, a state I did not share but respected.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e83f897
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When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done--he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad's voice--"Either I can beat him, or the police." Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn't."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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dd7a292
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When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not, and while I couldn't crunch the numbers or plumb the history back then, I sensed that the fear that marked West Baltimore could not be explained by the schoo..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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522bd88
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I learned this living among a people whom I would never have chosen, because the privileges of being black are not always self-evident.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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daa4194
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I loved Malcolm because Malcolm never lied, unlike the schools and their facade of morality, unlike the streets and their bravado, unlike the world of dreamers. I loved him because he made it plain, never mystical or esoteric, because his science was not rooted in the actions of spooks and mystery gods but in the work of the physical world. Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I'd ever heard.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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85076de
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I could not retreat, as did so many, into the church and its mysteries. My parents rejected all dogmas. We spurned the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be white. We would not stand for their anthems. We would not kneel before their God. And so I had no sense that any just God was on my side. "The meek shall inherit the earth" meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ef088f9
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When she got out of the car, my world had shifted. I felt that I had crossed some threshold, out of the foyer of my life and into the living room. Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I'd never had. I submitted before your needs, and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival's sake. I must survive for you.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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84346a3
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ours. By then I'd read Chancellor Williams, J. A. Rogers, and John Jackson--writers central to the canon of our new noble history. From them I knew that Mansa Musa of Mali was black, and Shabaka of Egypt was black, and Yaa Asantewaa of Ashanti was black--and "the black race" was a thing I supposed existed from time immemorial, a thing that was real and mattered." --
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c54ad9f
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The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible-that is precisely why they are so precious.
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inspirational
inspirational-quotes
life
life-lessons
living
people-of-color
security
soul
soul-searching
spirit
survival
surviving-life
thoughtful
thoughts
wisdom
wise-words
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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322a642
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And I knew that there were children born into these same caged neighborhoods on the Westside, these ghettos, each of which was planned as any subdivision. They are an elegant act of racism, killing fields authored by federal policies, where we are, all again, plundered of our dignity, of our families, of our wealth, and of our lives. [. . .] "Black-on-black crime" is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the co..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2c28caa
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But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, "white people" would cease to exist for want of reasons."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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46397c5
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And I would not have you live like them. 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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a237d18
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But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained American glory. In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live-- specifically, how do I live free in this black body?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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74d9683
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Shortly before you were born, I was pulled over by the PG County police, the same police that all the D.C. poets had warned me of. They approached on both sides of the car, shining their flashing lights through the windows. They took my identification and returned to the squad car. I sat there in terror. By then I had added to the warnings of my teachers what I'd learned about PG County through reporting and reading the papers. And so I kne..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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40855b1
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What I came to understand was the great democracy in this, and that what mattered to these boys was not so much what you came to the street with but how you carried what you were given.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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476ff43
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And it occurred to me then that you would not escape, that there were awful men who'd laid plans for you, and I could not stop them. Prince Jones was the superlative of all my fears.And if he, good Christian, scion of a striving class, patron saint of the twice as good, could be forever bound, who then could not? And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and mus..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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973bdb3
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And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c8fa26c
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And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0f5943c
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The new people were something else before they were white--Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish--and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1945cf1
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I had come looking for a parade, for a military review of champions marching in ranks. Instead I was left with a brawl of ancestors, a herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as often marching away from each other.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b9b4ff9
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The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d23d226
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After these readings, I followed as the poets would stand out on U Street or repair to a cafe and argue about everything--books, politics, boxing. And their arguments reinforced the discordant tradition I'd found in Moorland, and I began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as a kind of power. I was learning to live in the disquiet I felt in Moorland-Springarn, in the mess of my mind. The gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the in..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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27c46de
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In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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defddd0
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Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2745c4c
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Perhaps being named "black" had nothing to do with any of this; perhaps being named "black" was just someone's name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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fb3059b
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I do not long for those days. I have no desire to make you "tough" or "street," perhaps because any "toughness" I garnered came reluctantly. I think I was always, somehow, aware of the price. I think I somehow knew that a third of my brain should have been concerned with more beautiful things. I think I felt that something out there, some force, nameless and vast, had robbed me of...what? Time? Experience? I think you know something of what..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a9c97e8
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Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing -- myself. Here was the lesson: I was not innocent. My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And feeling that I was human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not innocent. Could this mix of motivation also affect..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5195762
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But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained American glory. In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live--specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8daf68f
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But while the people advocating reparations have changed over time, the response from the country has remained virtually the same. "They have been taught to labor," the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. "They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex-slaves."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0c0a897
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And I know that there are black boys and black girls out there lost in a Bermuda triangle of the mind or stranded in the doldrums of America, some of them treading and some of them drowning, never feeling and never forgetting. The most precious thing I had then is the most precious thing I have now--my own curiosity. That is the thing I knew, even in the classroom, they could not take from me. That is the thing that buoyed me and eventually..
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curiosity
frustration
perseverance
resilience
struggle
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9520059
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Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7052752
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I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned in curiosity. They were concerned in compliance... 60% of all black men who drop out of school end up in jail. This should disgrace our country, but it does not.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d6d0b5a
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That wisdom is not unique to our people, but I think it has special meaning to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were carried off and divided up into policies and stocks.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8c28985
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I thought back on the sit-ins, the protestors with their stoic faces, the ones I'd once scorned for hurling their bodies at the worst things in life. Perhaps they had known something terrible about the world. Perhaps they so wilingly parted with the security and sanctity of the black body because neither security nor sanctity existed in the first place. And all those old photography's from the 1960s, all those films I beheld of black people..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |