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aeeb5dc
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Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.' This is what they had told me all my life. It was the language of survival, a myth that helped us cope with the human sacrifice that finds us no matter our manhood. As though our hands were ever our own.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d0361e1
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I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful -- the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find hi..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a0c4cb2
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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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637e4f1
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What I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2ba6a8c
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These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1bbafd6
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But more than any shame I feel about my own actual violence, my greatest regret was that in seeking to defend you I was, in fact, endangering you. "I could have you arrested," he said. Which is to say, "One of your son's earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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bffe081
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We know how we will die--with cousins in double murder suicides, in wars that are mere theory to you, convalescing in hospitals, slowly choked out by angina and cholesterol. We are the walking lowest rung, and all that stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit. We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f968905
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Thandiwe, when they come for you, do not scream. Do not plead. Do not cry, for your cries are but song to them.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f131326
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You deserved so much more, little flower. You deserved a Wakanda that cherished you." "But this is the Wakanda we have. And while the Midnight Angels breathe, I swear to you... they shall all pay."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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af217a0
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The day after I became king, S'yan offered a single piece of wisdom. 'Power lies not in what a king does, but in what his subjects believe he might do.' This was profound. For it meant that the majesty of kings lay in their mystique... not in their might.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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94fff36
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I wish he'd told me not just of the power of kings, but of the might of the people. I wish he'd warned me that they, too, have secrets. They, too, have mysteries. They, too, possess a power of their own.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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cb0f850
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I was wrong. My enemy is not a beguiler, but a revealer. She brings out of us all the awful feelings that we have hidden away. And makes them manifest. So I know now that this is who I am. Might. Shame. Rage. And now they know, too.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9fd56af
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Every February my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual review of the Civil Rights Movement. Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2ecb783
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The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible- that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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086dbae
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In those years, hip-hop saved my life. I was still half alien to the people around me. I loved them, mostly because I'd realized that there was no other choice. Hip-hop gave me a common language, but that August, on liberated land, I found that there were other ways of speaking, a mother tongue that, no matter age, no matter interest, lived in us all.
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hip-hop
music
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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58db627
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Sometimes it is subtle--the simple observation of who lives where and works what jobs and who does not. Sometimes it's all of it at once. I have never asked how you became personally aware of the distance.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0472f54
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Ororo, I asked you to come because you are my best friend, and because..." "Because some things, my king, are easier to annual than others." --
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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51bc840
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Her country crumbling to dust, and with broken men all around, Queen Shuri went off to her doom. I could have gone with her. But someone had to fight and someone had to live. And after we parted, I wondered- still wonder- how a man walks away and leaves his only sister to die.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b7e719c
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I know the danger. I know we may not come back, and in so doing, doom a nation. I would give my life for my nation. But I will not give the life of my sister. I will not, yet again, be parted from my own blood.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d8372ef
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These were the injuries, among any others, that Sologon- the so-called Buffalo Woman- was made to carry. But every dart endured, every torture tolerated, tempered her. Sologon grew strong. Ruthless. Hard.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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adba2c6
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I wonder if this is it. If I have finally flown too far from home. I think of Ramonda and Ororo. Zuri and W'Kabi. Father and S'yan. But above all, I think of you. and I think of dying out here, of drifting out here, in search of but far away from you.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2734f2c
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And I remember that I have come to bring you back, in the full ambition that it is you who will bring all of us back. What have you discovered here, Shuri?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8c22fed
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Even in their final hours, my parents had hope. Once, they had put their hope in Wakanda. Now, they put their hope in Killmonger who would make Niganda great. Greater than even Wakanda. He promised them power and a country greater than any country in Africa. They were blinded by their desperate faith. Blinded by their hope.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4410a39
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We live in a goal-oriented era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms...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 as God's handwork, but the black b..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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725965a
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The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones's home. They were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years ago, the same ghettos where my mother was raised, where my father was raised. Through the windshield I saw the mark of these ghettos--the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and cr..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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caa6b20
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I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5e7e1d1
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I was only beginning to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger--I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b3b9d63
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But this girl with the long dreads revealed something else--that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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60275f1
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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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44ed481
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So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5e5fe3c
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There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound. --
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f1efcf3
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The truth of us was always that you were our ring. We'd summoned you out of ourselves, and you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you deserved all the protection we could muster. Everything else was subordinate to this fact. If that sounds like a weight, it shouldn't. The truth is that I owe you everything I have. Before you, I had my questions but nothing beyond my own skin in the game, and that was really nothing at all becau..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d1a6b15
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If he could se me here, S'yan would remind me that the handlers of these men are dictators, despots, and strongmen. That their peace is the peace of the dead. I am a king. And while they derive their power from gun barrels, I derive mine from a god. Some days I wake up actually believing this. And every day I wake up knowing my people must believe this.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2411c01
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Either you are a nation, or you are nothing.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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88f59c7
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She had never known her father, which put her in the company of the greater number of everyone I'd known. I felt then that these men - these 'fathers' - were the greatest of cowards. But I also felt that the galaxy was playing with loaded dice, which ensured an excess of cowards in our ranks. The girl from Chicago understood this too, and she understood something more - that all are not equally robbed of their bodies, that the bodies of wom..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9648847
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And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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388c6f7
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I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys...loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language an..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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38c49b4
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that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9387dc9
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writing is always some form of interpretation, some form of translating the specificity of one's roots or expertise or even one's own mind into language that can be absorbed and assimilated into the consciousness of a broader audience.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a325c75
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From hip-hop, I drew my earliest sense of what writing should mean. Grammar was never the point. Grammar was for the schoolmen and their television dreams. Out here, in the concrete and real, sentences should be supernatural, words strung together until they compelled any listener to repeat them at odd hours, long after the bass line had died. And these sentences or bars, linked together into verses, should have a shading and mood that refl..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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148989d
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the jails springing up around me, that argued for ghettos and projects, that viewed the destruction of the black body as incidental to the preservation of order.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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209a03e
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But if you see black identity as you see southern identity, or Irish identity, or Italian identity--not as a separate trunk, but as a branch of the American tree, with roots in the broader experience--then you understand that the particulars of black culture are inseparable from the particulars of the country.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a8792ac
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The crude communal myth about black men is that we are in some manner unavailable to black women--either jailed, dead, gay, or married to white women. A corollary myth posits a direct and negative relationship between success and black culture. Before we actually had one, we could not imagine a black president who loved being black. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama describes his first kiss with the woman who would become his wife as tasting "..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8cffe0e
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The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |