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ca4f551
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It's a cruel thing to do to children, to raise them as though they are siblings, and then set them against each other so that one shall be queen and the other shall be a footstool.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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9ec7790
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When presidential candidate Barack Obama presented himself to the black community, he was not to be believed. It strained credulity to think that a man sporting the same rigorously managed haircut as Jay-Z, a man who was a hard-core pickup basketball player, and who was married to a dark-skinned black woman from the South Side, could coax large numbers of white voters into the booth. Obama's blackness quotient is often a subject of debate. ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4ca1599
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Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protecti..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6ea4692
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But the Levittowns were, with Levitt's willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests and a burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill Myers was "probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him, I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ec19335
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Whatever Obama's other triumphs, arguably his greatest has been an expansion of the black imagination to encompass this: the idea that a man can be culturally black and many other things also--biracial, Ivy League, intellectual, cosmopolitan, temperamentally conservative, presidential.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e15532b
|
There were distinct advantages to black atheism, to a disbelief in dreams and moral appeal. First, it removed the weight of believing that "white people," en masse, were interested listeners. "White people," en masse, are not. They are--like any other people--mostly self-interested, which is why mass appeals to conscience, minus some compelling, existential threat, generally end in disappointment."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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027d34c
|
Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a5cc47f
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It was the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant-a clause in the deed forbidding sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d4cf0dd
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We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren't any," writes Solzhenitsyn. "To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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26fea1b
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When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible.
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franklin-roosevelt
institutionalized-racism
racism-in-america
roosevelt
social-security
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0ea171e
|
Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy--in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America's rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy.
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history
slavery
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b36784c
|
Even the Dreamers, lost in their great reverie, feel it, for it's Billie they reach for in sadness, and Isley they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha the last sound they hear before dying.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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36ae417
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I took a seat. The garden was bursting with people, again in all their alien ways. At that moment a strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was that I had not spoken a single word of English that entire day. Perhaps it was that I had never sat in a public garden before, had not even known it to be something that I'd want to do. And all around me there were people who did this regularly. It occurred to me that I really was in someone else's..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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0c9f83c
|
You have seen all the wonderful life up above the tree-line, yet you understand that there is no real distance between you and Trayvon Martin, and thus Trayvon Martin must terrify you in a way that he could never terrify me. You have seen so much more of all that is lost when they destroy your body.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ded5850
|
America's indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values.
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racism
racism-in-america
slavery
working-class
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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a629d52
|
I did not know then that this is what life is--just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you're swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ce1af68
|
Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very different from my own. The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you. And you have no need of dispatches because you have seen so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants--their homes, their hobbies--up close. I don't know what it means to grow up with a black president, social networks, omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their..
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racism-in-america
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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1a5ff65
|
it was slavery that allowed American democracy to exist in the first place. It was slavery that gifted much of the South with a working class that lived outside of all protections and could be driven, beaten, and traded into generational perpetuity. Profits pulled from these workers, repression of the normal angst of labor, and the ability to employ this labor on abundant land stolen from Native Americans formed a foundation for democratic ..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4c12aea
|
The Civil War is a story for white people--acted out by white people, on white people's terms--in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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282ce43
|
But my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic -- an orc, troll, or gorgon...This was the attempt to commit a shameful act while escaping all sanction, and I raise it to show you that there was no golden era when evildoers did their busine..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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71e8248
|
the way the Civil War was presented in the popular culture, as a violent misunderstanding, an honorable duel between wayward brothers, instead of what it was--a spectacular chapter in a long war that was declared when the first Africans were brought chained to American shores.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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ea83cd6
|
To understand that the most costly war in this country's history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that this war was the product of centuries of enslavement, which is to see an even longer, more total war, is to alter the accepted conception of America as a beacon of freedom. How does one face this truth or forge a national identity out of it?
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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611ac59
|
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. But the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body's destruction must always begin with his or her error,..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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748c5d0
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And I felt, even in this time, a century later, that I too would gather my words and scream into the roaring waves, because to scream was to defy the story, and that defiance had meaning, no matter that the waves kept coming, would come, maybe, forever.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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c68e408
|
perhaps being named "black" was just someone's name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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240a38b
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And it became clear that this was not just for the dreams concocted by Americans to justify themselves but also for the dreams that I had conjured to replace them. I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself. I had forgotten my own self-interrogations pushed upon me by my mother, or rather I had not yet app..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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842b7e2
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The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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6970ade
|
These were notes on how to write, and thus notes on how to think.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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caf0ef4
|
The belief that the Civil War wasn't for us was the result of the country's long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other, one that avoided what professional historians now know to be true: that one group of Americans attempted to raise a country wholly premised on property in Negroes, and that another group of Americans, including many Negroes, stopped them. In the popular mind, that demonstrable truth has b..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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e15f42d
|
Bored whites were barbarian whites. While they played at aristocrats, we were their well-appointed and stoic attendants. But when they tired of dignity, the bottom fell out. New games were anointed and we were but pieces on the board. It was terrifying. There was no limit to what they might do at this end of the tether, nor what my father would allow them to do.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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430b7e5
|
But I was a boy, seeing in him what boys can't help but see in their fathers--a mold in which their own manhood might be cast.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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bd49a4f
|
Time would come when gold would outweigh blood. But this was still Virginia of old, where a dubious God held that those who would offer a man for sale were somehow more honorable than those who effected that sale.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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39c2aec
|
The masters could not bring water to boil, harness to horse or strap their own drawers without us. We were better than them. We had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them it was the whole ambition of their lives.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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b8ce434
|
It pained me. I was of the age when it was natural to seek out a wife, but by then I had seen tasking women promised to tasking men, and then seen how such "promises" were kept. I remember how these young couples would hold one another, each morning before going to their separate tasks, how they would clasp hands at night, sitting on the steps of their quarters, how they would fight and draw knives, kill each other, before being without eac..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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70acbf4
|
That I really was the wretch they made me out to be, and deserved no more than the abuses I received.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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63304fe
|
The scope of Trump's commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular intellectual disbelief in it. We are now being told that support for Trump's "Muslim ban," his scapegoating of immigrants, his defenses of police brutality are somehow the natural outgrowth of the cultural and economic gap between Lena Dunham's America and Jeff Foxworthy's. The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandone..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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64781b7
|
That was 1986. That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful children--fell upon them random and relentless, like great sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not understand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood across from me holding my entire body..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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4430946
|
you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. 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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bf9a315
|
You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. That
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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52961f9
|
There was more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in the schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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18b3252
|
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..
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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68b2639
|
It did not occur to me that 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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8ace5be
|
race" itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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d0782c7
|
The four million enslaved bodies, at the start of the Civil War, represented an inconceivable financial interest--$75 billion in today's dollars--and the cotton that passed through their hands represented 60 percent of the country's exports. In 1860, the largest concentration of multimillionaires in the country could be found in the Mississippi River Valley, where the estates of large planters loomed.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates |