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4cfd2d7
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You will have to man up," we tell our sons. "Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father." This is what they had told me all my life."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f36ed63
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But any investigation into the actual details revealed that the ladders themselves were not equal--that to be a member of the "black race" in America had specific, quantifiable consequences. Not only did poor blacks tend to be much less likely to advance up their ladder, but those who did stood a much greater likelihood of tumbling back. That was because the middle-class rung of the black ladder lacked the financial stability enjoyed by the..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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fea4508
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Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e657fce
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To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism a la carte.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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10df23d
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I was growing, and if I could not name my anguish precisely I still knew there was nothing noble in it
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7bd7392
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This idea was the deep subtext of our lives. It had to be. The visible text was survivalist.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a461ec3
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It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d048a05
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The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one's eyes and forgetting the work of one's hands. To acknowledge the horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning towards something mur..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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78dc727
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The promise of a cost-free escape from history should have made me suspicious. But what ultimately made me question the "rising tide" idea was not the theory itself but all the attendant theories that so often went with it."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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35da8cd
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The Jim Crow South," writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political science professor at Columbia, "was the one collaborator America's democracy could not do without." The marks of that collaboration are all over the New Deal. The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmw..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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19b8808
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As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards' code of ethics warned that "a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood... any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values." A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters--and "a colored man of means who was giving his children a col..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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da49d04
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That war was inaugurated not reluctantly, but lustily, by men who believed property in humans to be the cornerstone of civilization, to be an edict of God, and so delivered their own children to his maw. And when that war was done, the now-defeated God lived on, honored through the human sacrifice of lynching and racist pogroms.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1534ba0
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I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago -- the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth -- loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions -- beautiful writing rarely is. I wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my mother had..
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writing
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ab7d5f0
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I fell back on the old habits and logic of the street, where it was so often necessary to deny humiliation and transmute pain into rage. So I took the agony of that era like a collection notice and hid it away in the upper dresser of the mind, resolved to return to it when I had means to pay. I think now, today, I have settled almost all of those old accounts. But the ache and aftershock of failure remain long after the drawer is bare.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2fffaf7
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I had never seen a black man like Barack Obama. He talked to white people in a new language--as though he actually trusted them and believed in them. It was not my language.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c4ab659
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We forgot that there were those who loved that old country as it was, who did not lament the divisions, but drew power from them. And so, we saw postcards with watermelons on the white house lawn. We saw simian caricatures of the first family, the invocation of a food stamp president, and his anti-colonialist Islamist agenda. These were the fetishes that gathered the tribe of white supremacy, that rallied them to the age-old banner. And if ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8aa1743
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Still later, I read Ira Katznelson's history of discrimination, When Affirmative Action Was White, which argued that similar exclusions applied to other "color-blind" New Deal programs, such as the beloved GI Bill, social security, and unemployment insurance. I was slowly apprehending that a rising tide, too, could be made to discriminate. A raft of well-researched books and articles pointed me this way. From historians, I learned that the ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e96c065
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We were laughing but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge... The law did not protect us and now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say for furthering the assault on your body. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans..
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race-relations
racism-in-america
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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926f75d
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Reparations could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis. But they did launch Germany's reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8091f81
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The weakness in the case for integration was that it ultimately rested on a critical mass of white people playing along, either out of their own particular interests or some sense of morality. History has produced few instances for the former and virtually none of the latter. This made sense. If there is a power that has ever surrendered itself purely out of some altruistic sense of justice, I have yet to come across it.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6992b66
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White supremacy is a crime and a lie, but it's also a machine that generates meaning. This existential gift, as much as anything, is the source of its enormous, centuries-spanning power.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1217075
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I have often wondered how I missed the coming tragedy. It is not so much that I should have predicted that Americans would elect Donald Trump. It's just that I shouldn't have put it past us.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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988a833
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But then he grabbed the mic like a cudgel, raised it to the sky, lightning struck, and the cudgel was now a hammer, and the slave was transfigured into a god whose voice shivered the Earth. And that is the story hip-hop told me then. And for anyone who has felt, as I so often did, ignorant, enfeebled, enslaved to circumstance, this was myth and this was saga, awesome as any Aeneid, Iliad, or Odyssey.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cb587cc
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Mais une societe qui en protege certains par un filet invisible d'ecoles, d'emprunts immobiliers subventionnes, de richesses accumulees, et ne consent a t'offrir que la protection d'une justice criminelle, cette societe la a echoue dans la mise en pratique de ses bonnes intentions - a moins qu'elle n'ait reussi a imposer quelque chose de bien plus sombre. Quel que soit le nom qu'on donne a ce systeme, il n'a eu qu'un seul resultat: notre in..
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us
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d834c0a
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La rue fait de chaque journee une suite de questions piege, et chaque reponse incorrecte peut provoquer une raclee, une balle dans la peau, une grossesse non desiree. Personne n'en sort indemne. Pourtant, la chaleur qui s degage de ce danger permanent, de ce flirt constant avec la mort, est excitante.
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us
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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73dd490
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J'ai commence a comprendre que le but de mon education etait une forme d'inconfort, un processus qui n'etait pas destine a me recompenser avec mon propre Reve personnel mais qui, au contraire, devait briser tous les reves, tous les mythes reconfortants de l'Afrique, de l'Amerique, de toutes les parties du monde, pour me laisser face a l'humanite dans ce qu'elle a de plus terrible.
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education
racisme
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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346bf9a
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Or l'insecurite ne fait que mettre des bornes a ta perception de la galaxie.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6d9e849
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Toute ma vie, j'avais entendu des gens dire a leurs filles et leurs garcons noirs d'etre "deux fois meilleurs", ce qui revient a dire "accepte d'avoir deux fois moins". Ces paroles etaient prononcees sur un ton de deference religieuse, comme si elles recelaient quelque qualite tacite, quelques imperceptible courage, alors qu'en fait elles ne prouvaient qu'une chose: on avait un fusil pointe sur le front et une main qui nous faisait les poch..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cf8221b
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Regarder cette realite en face est douloureux. Mais notre lexique tout entier - relations interraciales, discriminations, justice raciale, profilage racial, privilege blanc et meme suprematie blanche - ne sert qu'a obliterer l'experience viscerale du racisme, le fait qu'il detruit des cerveaux, empeche de respirer, dechire des muscles, eviscere des organes, fend des os, brise des dents.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1e47bd2
|
The fact and wisdom of nonviolence may be beyond dispute-the civil rights movement profoundly transformed the country. Yet the movement demanded of African Americans a superhuman capacity for forgiveness. Dick Gregory summed up the dilemma well. "I committed to nonviolence," Marable quotes him as saying. "But I'm sort of embarrassed by it."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c370da7
|
The episode embarrassed the Obama administration, but it also pointed to the great power of white innocence-the need to believe that whatever might befall the country, white America is ultimately blameless.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1659d42
|
I understood slavery as bad and I had a vague sense that it had once been integral to the country and that the dispute over it had somehow contributed to the civil war. But even that partial sense ran contrary to the way the civil war was presented in the popular culture, as a violent misunderstanding, an honorable dual between wayward brothers instead of what it was. A spectacular chapter in a long war that was declared when the first Afri..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0147bef
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Art was not motivational speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no responsibility to hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world. It must reflect the world in all it's brutality and beauty, not in hopes of changing it, but in the mean and selfish desire to not be enrolled in its lie to not be co-opted by the television dreams, to not ignore the great crimes all around us.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f4f7622
|
The most powerful country in the world has handed over all of it's affairs, the prosperity of an entire economy, the security of some 300 million citizens, the purity of it's water, the viability of it's air, the safety of it's food, the future of it's vast system of education, the soundness of it's national highways, airways, and railways, the apocalyptic potential of nuclear arsenal to a carnival barker who introduce the phrase "grab em b..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ff8817a
|
To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d68594d
|
And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young life, though I had not always recognized it as such.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0bb0354
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Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it.
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race-and-racism-in-america
nonfiction
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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51e9307
|
Indeed, they felt it their duty to disabuse me of my weaponized history. They had seen so many Malcolmites before and were ready. Their method was rough and direct. Did black skin really convey nobility? Always? Yes. What about the blacks who'd practiced slavery for millennia and sold slaves across the Sahara and then across the sea? Victims of a trick. Would those be the same black kings who birthed all of civilization? Were they then both..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ba10dea
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that what divided 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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7e5d54b
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I took these questions to my father, who very often refused to offer an answer, and instead referred me to more books. My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers--even the answers they themselves believed. I don't know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8087c98
|
I saw, not so much a culture of pathology, as a culture fitted for a pathological world. To fight, stab, or shoot over respect seemed ridiculous to those who already had the society's respect. But all the boys and young men of my youth were keenly aware of how little they owned, how little of their lives they actually controlled. And so some of them made their stand on the scuff mark on their suede Pumas, on the trespassing of some corner, ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7d2148e
|
This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9067a2a
|
All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to "be twice as good," which is to say "accept half as much." These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. No one told thos..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cc1222c
|
And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injustice.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |