|
e7157d5
|
When it came to her son, Dr. Jones's country did what it does best--it forgot him. The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force ..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
b4ed812
|
I have missed seeing you like this, brother." "And how is that?" "At war."
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
d89bc8b
|
Nothing between us was ever planned--not even you. We were both 24 years old when you were born, the normal age for most Americans, but among the class we soon found ourselves, we ranked as teenage parents. With a whiff of fear, we were very often asked if we planned to marry. Marriage was presented to us as a shield against other women, other men, or the corrosive monotony of dirty socks and dishwashing. But your mother and I knew too many..
|
|
parenting
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
4e47fbf
|
Il mondo nero cresceva davanti ai miei occhi, e per la prima volta capivo che quel mondo non era solo il negativo di quello della gente che si crede bianca. L'"America Bianca" e un'organizzazione schierata a difesa del suo potere esclusivo per dominare e controllare i nostri corpi. Talvolta si tratta di un potere esercitato in modo diretto (con il linciaggio), altre in modo piu insidioso (con la discriminazione). Ma in qualunque forma si ma..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
ee1f588
|
my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of "race," imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods." --
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
67f086d
|
whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies--the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects--are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated f..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
7f8a9ca
|
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.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
8fef418
|
Hmm... 'our' country? I have not spoken in this manner in some years. But Wakanda is my home. Wakanda is our home.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
3ebf847
|
Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
6d755f7
|
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.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
6bec953
|
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..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
3f2754b
|
And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
95fbed8
|
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was "white," and so Tolstoy "mattered," like everything else that was white "mattered."
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
0272833
|
the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
b2817b0
|
As slaves we were this country's first windfall, the down payment on its freedom.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
8f93063
|
The changes have awarded me a rapture that comes only when you can no longer be lied to, when you have rejected the Dream.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
c0101d0
|
And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the s..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
3683e6c
|
The need to forgive the officer would not have moved me, because even then, in some inchoate form, I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth. At
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
0c144b7
|
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?
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
8b5867c
|
Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state.
|
|
1968
19th-century
20th-century
american-history
black-history
lynching
mississippi
mississippi-history
us-history
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
f5d45c4
|
In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
5854bc5
|
These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. 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 they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
e806310
|
The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
6f28151
|
Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains--whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains. You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters ..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
41449bc
|
He has lost best friend to treachery, a wife to allegiances... an uncle to betrayal, still more friends to sorcery... He kept up the regal mask. But he could not always do it. No one can. I remember my beloved... I remember him, weeping.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
0fd0fa2
|
An alliance with the haramu-ful has always been a perilous thing. Perilous for his mother and father. For his friends. For his wife. For his people. Perilous for you.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
1084439
|
We are all so injured, daughter-- all of us. Even him-- perhaps especially him. This name-- haramu-fal-- was made to mock him. But perhaps it mocks us all. Perhaps it speaks to all of our losses.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
5d8bce2
|
But perhaps the question is not whether you can stand with the king... but whether your king can stand with you.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
f5e25dc
|
And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of "race," imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
f43e174
|
I should never have left you. I was caught between fealty to my world and fealty to my blood. I chose wrong. I was a king. I held the knife. I acted as a king should. But I did not act as family should.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
c1e303f
|
The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws.
|
|
america
politics
racism
violence
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
cf37aad
|
I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else's chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky, nor weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the p..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
2167050
|
The guns seemed to address this country, which invented the streets that secured them with despotic police, in its primary language--violence.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
f543420
|
I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery,
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
858f7a3
|
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)."
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
bfccee0
|
Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
0e1542e
|
The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me,
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
857fabd
|
Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional. Disembodiment. The dragon that compelled the boys I knew, way back, into extravagant theater of ownership. Disembodiment. The demon that pushed the middle-class black survivors into aggressive passivity, our conversation restrained in public quarters, our best manners on display, our hands never o..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
47851e8
|
The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. 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 undesireables might include madams, boo..
|
|
black-history
discrimination
housing
housing-discrimination
housing-loans
institutionalized-racism
loans
mortgage
mortgages
property
real-estate
real-estate-history
redlining
segregation
us-history
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
63f4272
|
In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.
|
|
american-history
black-history
housing
housing-discrimination
lending
mortgage
us-history
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
b0bc700
|
I saw 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.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
ec2e391
|
The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible -- that is precisely why they are so precious.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
616ee22
|
Serious history was the West, and the West was white.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
477e1a9
|
love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism. And
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |