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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6a2f5f4 | 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 | ||
| 63f10c6 | Our current politics tell you that should you fall victim to such an assault and lose your body, it somehow must be your fault. Trayvon | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 7d6bb7d | It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 79399fe | Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be? And | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8f189bb | today, when 8 percent of the world's prisoners are black men, our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white. Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 2781cd7 | It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 56e9969 | It has nothing to do with how you wear your pants or how you style your hair. The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows. The breach allows for the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers, the enslaved from the enslavers, sharecroppers | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8a1e684 | the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. 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, | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 7b85852 | rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 839a46b | All this time you were growing into words and feelings; my beautiful brown boy, who would soon come into the knowledge, who would soon comprehend the edicts of his galaxy, and all the extinction-level events that regarded you with a singular and discriminating interest. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 6bd5003 | You would be a man one day, and I could not save you from the unbridgeable distance between you and your future peers and colleagues, who might try to convince you that everything I know, all the things I'm sharing with you here, are an illusion, or a fact of a distant past that need not be discussed. And I could not save you from the police, from their flashlights, their hands, their nightsticks, their guns. Prince Jones, murdered by the m.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 5ab25d7 | 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.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 1b3f54b | 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.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 1877944 | sometimes fail to walk the air | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 208ebe6 | Think of your mother, who had no father. And your grandmother, who was abandoned by her father. And your grandfather, who was left behind by his father. And think of how Prince's daughter was now drafted into those solemn ranks and deprived of her birthright--that vessel which was her father, which brimmed with twenty-five years of love and was the investment of her grandparents and was to be her legacy. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 9256501 | And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing, Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me.... | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| da15943 | Black-on-black crime" is jargon, violence to 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. 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.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| f58ce08 | the old mantra--"Either I can beat him or the police." I understood it all--the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. 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.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8e38a18 | Hate gives identity. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| aeb9c4d | not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| cf73664 | One racist act. It's all it takes. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| ba889ea | Her disposition toward life was that of an elite athlete who knows the opponent is dirty and the refs are on the take, but also knows the championship is one game away. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| f0cdd3d | Would rather live white than live free. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| ef5fe1a | The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| f8969a1 | only | Instaread Summaries | ||
| ad3abd5 | this. To yell "black-on-black crime" is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| d537936 | 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 | ||
| 9fda4f4 | Seven years after I saw the pictures of those doors, I received my first adult passport. I wish I had come to it sooner. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 4a09c03 | Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| ec26192 | so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body's destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined--with Eric Garner's anger, with Trayvon Martin's mythical words ("You are gonna die tonight"), with Sean Bell's mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out." -- | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 4fdcf57 | 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. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 4a9d65c | There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been "black," and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separate.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 6e4c2e3 | Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| d1545bf | The violence that undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence of "Yeah, nigger, what's up now?" were not unrelated. And this violence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 1a4ee92 | What was required was a new story, a new history told through the lens of our struggle. I had always known this, had heard the need for a new history in Malcolm, had seen the need addressed in my father's books. It was in the promise behind their grand titles--Children of the Sun, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Kushite Empire, The African Origins of Civilization. Here was not just our history but the history of the world, weaponized to.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| cc43c69 | What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest humor to cope. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| eaa0510 | We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything--cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 14b439a | Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| d482c99 | You can no more be black like I am black than I could be black like your grandfather was. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 48672cb | It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait for it to abolish itself from below. | Alexander II of Russia | ||
| 9e6dc2f | The crews, the young men who'd transmuted their fear into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel any sense of security and power. They would break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies. And their wild reveling, their astonishing acts made their n.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| a8fc046 | To survive the neighborhoods and shield my body, I learned another language consisting of a basic complement of head nods and handshakes. I memorized a list of prohibited blocks. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 3877f56 | He was born-again, a state I did not share but respected. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e83f897 | When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done--he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. 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." | Ta-Nehisi Coates |