|
0fa257d
|
Black-on black crime' is jargon, violence on language, which vanishes 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.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
5834207
|
When it comes to the Civil War, all of our popular understanding, our popular history and culture, our great films, the subtext of our arguments are in defiance of its painful truths. It is not a mistake that is one of the most read works of American literature or that is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a need for palliatives and painkillers, an escape from the truth of those five short years in which ..
|
|
racism
slavery
history
civil-war
race
myths
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
e2b6592
|
Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body--it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor--it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so reg..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
c26daf5
|
Whatever appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics - except the politics of white people, the politics of the blood heirloom.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
743dd15
|
We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
1e7e436
|
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 plucked me from the sea.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
87b40f7
|
The meek shall inherit the earth" meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail. My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box."
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
eb43fb0
|
White America" is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). 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. There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
1f0b434
|
The killing fields of Chicago, of Baltimore, of Detroit, were created by the policy of Dreamers, but their weight, their shame, rests solely upon those who are dying in them. There is a great deception in this. To yell "black-on-black crime" is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding."
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
f56ed89
|
It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing--race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy--serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the r..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
f4fecf1
|
The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrilling.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
d586b9d
|
We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past--at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black n..
|
|
racism
history
america
reparations
white-supremacy
race
democracy
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
524e307
|
What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
3552aef
|
They were utterly fearless. I did not understand it until I looked out on the street. That was where I saw white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem boulevards in T-shirts and jogging shorts. Or I saw them lost in conversation with each other, mother and father, while their sons commanded entire sidewalks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw master..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
9e4e161
|
I kept thinking about how southern Manhattan had always been Ground Zero for us. They auctioned our bodies down there, in that same devastated, and rightly named, financial district. And there was once a burial ground for the auctioned there. They built a department store over part of it and then tried to erect a government building over another part.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
9b628d2
|
If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government," wrote Du Bois, "it was good Negro government."
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
2a28aaa
|
Considering segregationist senator Strom Thurmond, Richard Nixon concluded, "Strom is no racist." There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. In the era of mass lynching, it was so difficult to find who, specifically, served as executioner that such deaths were often reported by the press as having happened "at the hands of persons unknown."
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
9a45016
|
We could not get out. The ground we walked was trip-wired. The air we breathed was toxic. The water stunted our growth. We could not get out. A year after I watched the boy with the small eyes pull out a gun, my father beat me for letting another boy steal from me. Two years later, he beat me for threatening my ninth-grade teacher. Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
68c9ccf
|
One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra number 2 pencil. Make no mistakes. But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people you shouldn't. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson--not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
f42458f
|
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."
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
29fdcd1
|
Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I'd ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better man for you. He would not be your mor..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
156660f
|
The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
121c45a
|
Good intention" is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream."
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
72c2222
|
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.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
9788e62
|
And godless though I am, the fact of being human, the fact of possessing the gift of study, and thus being remarkable among all the matter floating through the cosmos, still awes me.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
44b0e68
|
I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as "just some good ole boys, never meanin' no harm"--a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one "means" is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to dest..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
b3d1931
|
I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life in struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
d6a4fe8
|
I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. 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.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
4fcad2e
|
But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
263c1c0
|
The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise. The world needs saving precisely because of the actions of these same men and women. I am not a cynic. 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 mus..
|
|
responsibility
race
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
ec92555
|
The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
bee49a2
|
As slaves we were this country's first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies became this country's second mortgage. In the New Deal we were their guestroom, their finished basement. And today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and a lucrative..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
1066898
|
It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.
|
|
racism
learning
education
blacks
discomfort
race-relations
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
4132ff5
|
Considering segregationist senator Strom Thurmond, Richard Nixon concluded, "Strom is no racist." There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. In the era of mass lynching, it was so difficult to find who, specifically, served as executioner that such deaths were often reported by the press as having happened "at the hands of persons unknown." In 1957, the white residents of Levittow..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
9a71847
|
At this moment the phrase "police reform" has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones a..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
d3d334d
|
Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and t..
|
|
racism
social-justice
social-activism
foreign-policy
american-history
patriotism
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
f9cd6f1
|
Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance--no matter how improved--as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
f275130
|
I had not been prepared for the simple charm of watching someone you love grow.
|
|
life
love
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
3cec0d0
|
You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
7826162
|
You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. 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,..
|
|
racism
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
8e65de6
|
I have not spent my time studying the problem of "race"--"race" itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time to time when some dullard--usually believing himself white--proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all beige and thus the same "race." But a great number of "black" people already are beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead..
|
|
race
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
bc09da6
|
the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
6d773cd
|
Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. "Good intention" is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream."
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
d5da3e4
|
The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant "government of the people" but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term "people" to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America's problem is not its betrayal of "government of the people," but the means by which "the people" acquired their names."
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |