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856e4a0
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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains--whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains. You
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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f37282a
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It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against the world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats, I think back on those boys now and all I see i..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d64c2af
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Once when I was a tree, African sun woke me up green at dawn. African wind combed the branches of my hair. African rain washed my limbs. Once when I was a tree, flesh came and worshipped my roots. Flesh came to preserve my voice. Flesh came honoring my limbs. Now flesh comes with metal teeth, with chomping sticks and fire launchers. And flesh cuts me down and enslaves my limbs to make forts, ships, pews for other gods. Now flesh laughs at m..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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477f84c
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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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08bebc4
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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..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a3a82d5
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In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy.
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black-history
jim-crow
jim-crow-laws
kleptocracy
mississippi
mississippi-history
segregation
us-history
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e5bbd8e
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America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional mor..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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7ed50fe
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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..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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26f5a6c
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Later, I would hear it in Dad's voice--"Either I can beat him, or the police." Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn't. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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45da61b
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In those days I would come out of the house, turn onto Flatbush Avenue, and my face would tighten like a Mexican wrestler's mask, my eyes would dart from corner to corner, my arms loose, limber, and ready. This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence. It contributed to the fast breakdown of our bodies. So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to prot..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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35083c7
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Unfit for the schools, and in good measure wanting to be unfit for them, and lacking the savvy I needed to master the streets, I felt there could be no escape for me or, honestly, anyone else. The fearless boys and girls who would knuckle up, call on cousins and crews, and if it came to it, pull guns seemed to have mastered the streets. But their knowledge peaked at seventeen, when they ventured out of their parents' homes and discovered th..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5a13f53
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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 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..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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96bb723
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Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body.
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schools
slipping
streets
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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812885b
|
The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life--love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire-hoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviole..
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nonviolence
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0632139
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Whenever a woman smiled his way, she'd already begun dividing her life into trimesters.
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funny
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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8c93d82
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Where others saw America in lovely columns, marvels of engineering, and refined democrats, Dad saw only masks concealing the heralds of woe.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2306a7d
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There was nothing holy or particular in my skin; I was black because of history and heritage. There was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning in black blood. Black blood wasn't black; black skin wasn't even black. And now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again - fear ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a1d35c4
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It must have been around that time that I discovered an essay by Ralph Wiley in which he responded to Bellow's quip. "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus," wrote Wiley. "Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership." And there it was. I had accepted Bellow's premise."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1e87036
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Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America's progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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02b7835
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I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear fo..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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30b5d93
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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..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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551f715
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The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9304d50
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The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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5f42f6c
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The universe was playing with loaded dice, which insured an excess of cowards in our ranks.
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fear
injustice
oppression
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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906fc0a
|
I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save you - but not that sorry. 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. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real - when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto sho..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e491d89
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The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. "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..
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blacks
power
race-relations
racism
whites
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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3ee22e2
|
I am tied to old ways, which I learned in a hard house. It was a loving house even as it was besieged by its country, but it was hard. Even in Paris, I could not shake the old ways, the instinct to watch my back at every pass, and always be ready to go. A few weeks into our stay, I made a friend who wanted to improve his English as much as I wanted to improve my French. We met one day in the crowd in front of Notre Dame. We walked to the L..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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15806a0
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And my eyes--my beautiful, precious eyes--were growing stronger each day. And 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. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happen..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c67e470
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If I could have chosen a flag back then, it would have been embroidered with a portrait of Malcolm X, dressed in a business suit, his tie dangling, one hand parting a window shade, the other holding a rifle. The portrait communicated everything I wanted to be--controlled, intelligent, and beyond the fear. I would buy tapes of Malcolm's speeches--"Message to the Grassroots," "The Ballot or the Bullet"--down at Everyone's Place, a black books..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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fd5a9ce
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Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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17944a6
|
The Struggle is in your name, Samori--you were named for Samori Toure, who struggled against French colonizers for the right to his own black body.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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120f98f
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To yell "black-on-black crime" is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding. And"
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d268e1e
|
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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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61f1443
|
On our life map, he drew a bright circle around twelve through eighteen. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers.
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race
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ff25a23
|
You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid to be you.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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817fdc6
|
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."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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89d36d6
|
You preserved your life because your life, your body, was as good as anyone's, because your blood was as precious as jewels, and it should never be sold for magic, for spirituals inspired by the unknowable hereafter. You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs nor to the insidious gravity of the streets. Black is beautiful--which is to say that the black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded aga..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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044f3f5
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I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible--that is precisely why they are so precious.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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00b8f4b
|
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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29a9385
|
I could have you arrested!" Which is to say: "I could take your body."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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93fea16
|
We have made something down here. We have taken the one-drop rules of Dreamers and flipped them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people. Here
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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2761d28
|
I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us--Christians, Muslims, atheists--lived in this fear of this truth.
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race-and-racism-in-america
religion
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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bebbb2f
|
I devoured the books because they were the rays of light peeking out from the doorframe, and perhaps past that door there was another world,
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1f0148c
|
The warlords of history are still kicking our heads in, and no one, not our fathers, not our Gods, is coming to save us.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |