|
1dc055b
|
I should not mistake her calm probing for the absence of anger.
|
|
emotion
discipleship
self-discipline
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
6c17b24
|
Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
7615cc7
|
But now I understand the gravity of what I was proposing--that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you submit to a loss of time. And now when I measure this fear against the boldness that the masters of the galaxy imparted to their own children, I am ashamed.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
0686581
|
But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming 'the people' has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the belief that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes , which are indelible--this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have bee..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
1c57427
|
Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are--and I say this with big pride--the progeny of slaves. If there's any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we've traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby's, and much of black America's, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America..
|
|
race-and-racism-in-america
political-philosophy
culture
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
ff8f833
|
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, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
09d3caa
|
The "rising tide" theory rested on a notion of separate but equal class ladders. And so there was a class of black poor and an equivalent class of white poor, a black middle class and a white middle class, a black elite and a white elite. From this angle, the race problem was merely the result of too many blacks being found at the bottom of their ladder--too many who were poor and too few who were able to make their way to the next rung. If..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
c46c2da
|
Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.
|
|
fatherhood
parenting
parents
father
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
8f31d98
|
This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
9d877fc
|
Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and America's heresies--torture, theft, enslavement--are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune.
|
|
hypocrisy
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
9b80a46
|
And the plunder was not just of Prince alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of all the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. ..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
9e908ea
|
To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this. But that is your work. It must be, if only to preserve the sanctity of your mind.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
7af98b7
|
Through the windshield I saw the mark of these ghettos--the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and crumbling housing--and I felt the old fear. Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
9e29d4c
|
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.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
bcc0145
|
This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. No one told those little white children, with their tricycles, to be twice as good. I imagined their parents telling them to take twice as much. It seemed to me that our own rules redoubled plunder. 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,..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
fb115bb
|
But a great number of educators spoke of "personal responsibility" in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of "intention" and "personal responsibility" is broad exoneration. 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 |
|
d675c72
|
But that is the point of white supremacy--to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (and particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification.
|
|
racism
white-people
white-supremacy
race
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
b558a4c
|
Fuck what you have heard or what you have seen in your son. He may lie about homework and laugh when the teacher calls home. He may curse his teacher, propose arson for the whole public system. But inside is the same sense that was in me. None of us ever want to fail. None of us want to be unworthy, to not measure up.
|
|
race-relations
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
e631657
|
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.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
88c038a
|
I am ashamed of how I acted that day, ashamed of endangering your body. But I am not ashamed because I am a bad father, a bad individual or ill mannered. I am ashamed that I made an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
a239c63
|
I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next. I think of your grandmother calling me and noting how you were growing tall and would one day try to "test me." And I said to her that I would regard that day, should it come, as the total failure of fatherhood because if all I had over you were my hands, then I really had nothing at all. But, forgive me, son, I knew what she meant and wh..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
d739161
|
West Broadway. It was all that I'd felt looking at those Parisian doors. And at that moment I realized that those changes, with all their agony, awkwardness, and confusion, were the defining fact of my life, and for the first time I knew not only that I really was alive, that I really was studying and observing, but that I had long been alive--even back in Baltimore. I had always been alive. I was always translating. I arrived in Paris. I c..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
062172f
|
I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder, that I had marveled at tri-folded science projects, encyclopedias, and road atlases. I left much of that wonder somewhere back in Baltimore. Now I had the privilege of welcoming it back like a long-lost friend, though our reunion was laced with grief; I mourned over all the years that were lost. The mourning continues. Even today, from time to time, I find myself on beaches watch..
|
|
mourning
mortality
wonder
meaning
wasted-time
inertia
purpose
regret
knowledge
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
55774a6
|
I know that "gentrification" is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off of that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime."
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
88a6770
|
The precise ancestry of a black drug dealer or cop killer is irrelevant. His blackness predicts and explains his crime. He reinforces the racist presumption. It is only when that presumption is questioned that a fine analysis of ancestry is invoked. Frederick Douglass was an ordinary nigger while working the fields. But as a famed abolitionist, it was often said that his genius must derive from his white half.
|
|
racism
mixed-ancestry
white-supremacy
frederick-douglass
obama
ancestry
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
3a750d1
|
It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.
|
|
racism
america
learning
united-states-of-america
blacks
usa
united-states
race-relations
knowledge
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
4961b56
|
You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
a259e16
|
But I was grounded and domesticated by the plain fact that should I now go down, I would not go down alone.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
5812b29
|
love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism. And I could no longer predict where I would find my heroes.
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
e33367e
|
I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories.
|
|
rapport
listening
vulnerability
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
5e4ee1d
|
To be a black male is to be always at war, and no flight to the county can save us, because even there we are met by the assupmtion of violence, by the specter of who we might turn on next.
|
|
race-relations
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
88e851f
|
When our elders presented school to use, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and personal 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 marked West Baltimore could not be explained by the school..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
e117700
|
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
e7221dd
|
Educated children walked in single file on the right side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory, and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated children never offered excuses--certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra, Biology, and English were not subjects so much as opportunities to better discipline the body,
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
c2b1214
|
Faggot" was a word I had employed all my life. And now here they were, The Cabal, The Coven, The Others, The Monsters, The Outsiders, The Faggots, The Dykes, dressed in all their human clothes. I am black, and have been plundered and have lost my body. But perhaps I too had the capacity for plunder, maybe I would take another human's body to confirm myself in a community. Perhaps I already had. Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the ..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
3ac4e78
|
Through The Mecca I saw that we were, in our own segregated body politic, cosmopolitans. The black diaspora was not just our own world but, in so many ways, the Western world itself. Now, the heirs of those Virginia planters could never directly acknowledge this legacy or reckon with its power. And so that beauty that Malcolm pledged us to protect, black beauty, was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I'd seen as..
|
|
racism
history
howard-university
malcolm-x
blacks
whites
race-relations
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
bda7a6c
|
In such revisions of history lay the roots of the noble Lost Cause--the belief that the South didn't lose, so much as it was simply overwhelmed by superior numbers; that General Robert E. Lee was a contemporary King Arthur; that slavery, to be sure a benevolent institution, was never central to the South's true designs. Historical lies aside, the Lost Cause presented to the North an attractive compromise. Having preserved the Union and save..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
c667f96
|
They knew our names and they knew our parents. But they did not know us, because not knowing was essential to their power. To sell a child right from under his mother, you must know that mother only in the thinnest way possible. To strip a man down, condemn him to be beaten, flayed alive, then anointed with salt water, you cannot feel him the way you feel your own. You cannot see yourself in him, lest your hand be stayed, and your hand must..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
4db9edf
|
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, 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 Ameri..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
a0c5518
|
She had wanted her son to stand for what he believed and to be respectful. And he had died for believing his friends had a right to play their music loud, to be American teenagers.
|
|
prejudice
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
9bcd85a
|
I have raised you to respect every human being as singular. And you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feelings 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 eddys in the nearby stream, who loves her mother in ..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
033f7da
|
As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, f..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |
|
0eaac11
|
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 |
|
835f775
|
That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 P.M. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none..
|
|
|
Ta-Nehisi Coates |