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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0273b98 | Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood. | chicago institutionalized-racism reparations | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 6d7188f | The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise. The world needs saving precisely because of the actions of these same men and women. I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 00b9278 | I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their name.. | fear systemic-racism | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 3515de2 | all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me... | race-and-racism-in-america ta-nehisi-coates | James Baldwin | |
| 4cf300f | My parents were two-faced. To me, they showed no mercy. They preached from theBook of Fallen Children - Commandment 1: The Child Is Always Ungrateful. At eighteen, the free ride would stop, and I'd be dumped into the mess of the world. But in their private moments, they were soft, cowed by love. They critiqued their own parenting skills and thought of all the ways the could help their kids get ahead. | parenting-children parents parents-and-children two-faced | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 3b341ac | I thank my mother (Ma, you're only second cause you got the dedication), who used to make me write essays whenever I got into trouble, explaining exactly what I'd done and why I'd done it. | mothers mothers-and-sons parenting | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 59bc928 | Dylan's voice was awful, an aged quaver that sounded nothing like the deep-throated or silky R&B that Dad took as gospel. But the lyrics wore him down, until he played Dylan in that addicted manner of college kids who cordon off portions of their lives to decipher the prophecies of their favorite band. Dad heard poetry, but more than that an angle that confirmed what a latent part of him already suspected. This was was bullshit. | vietnam-war | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 11e1a5f | The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e1ea79e | The idea of race as an indelible attribute "is a new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white." These people are a "modern invention" whose whiteness "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 h.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 7c615aa | The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant "government of the people" but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term "people" to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America's problem is not its betrayal of "government of the people," but the means by which "the people" acquired their names. This" | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| cb9f7b7 | I was peace pipes and treaties. My style was to talk and duck. It was an animal tactic, playing dead in hopes that the predators would move to an actual fight. | fights pacifism predators prey puberty | Ta-Nehisi Coates | |
| 80bd18c | I was raised on the struggle of elders - iron collars, severed feet, the rifle of dirty Harriet, and down through the years, the Muslims and regal Malcolm. But mostly what I saw around me was rank dishonor: cable and Atari plugged into every room, juvenile parenting, niggers sporting kicks with price tags that looked like mortgage bills. The Conscious among us knew the whole race was going down, that we'd freed ourselves from slavery and Ji.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 08adfdc | And today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; 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 | ||
| 50d2dcd | What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| ca7d8a4 | I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself. This | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 3bd4c65 | What any institution, or its agents, "intend" for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense--ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that" | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 0e18acd | I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same unifor.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| f46c8b2 | Why - for us and only us - is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault on our bodies? | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| b991ec6 | 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 | ||
| 76b8d70 | Some days I would take the train into Manhattan. There was so much money everywhere, money flowing out of bistros and cafes, money pushing the people at incredible speeds, up the wide avenues, money drawing intergalactic traffic through Times Square, money in the limestones and brownstones, money out on West Broadway where white people spilled out of wine bars with sloshing glasses and without police. I would see these people at the club, d.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| b0fa8d5 | The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible - that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings. The soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden. And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stove wood, through hot iron peel.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 7d0d286 | I have spent much of my studies searching for the right question by which I might fully understand the breach between the world and me. I have not spent my time studying the problem of 'race' - 'race' itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time to time when some dullard - usually believing himself white - proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all be.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| b2c756c | Your route will be different. It must be. You knew things at eleven that I did not know when I was twenty-five. When I was eleven my highest priority was the simple security of my body. My life was the immediate negotiation of violence - within my house and without. But already you have expectations, I see that in you. Survival and safety are not enough. Your hopes - your dreams, if you will - leave me with an array of warring emotions. I a.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 872f2ca | As she talked of the church, I thought of your grandfather, the one you know, and how his first intellectual adventures were found in the recitation of Bible passages. I thought of your mother, who did the same. And I thought of my own distance from an institution that has, so often, been the only support for our people. I often wonder if in that distance I've missed something, some notions of cosmic hope, some wisdom beyond my mean physica.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 9e24f11 | The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e8ef27f | I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. 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 .. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 5d07bb8 | It is a lie- one that makes your life of philosophy possible. We studied a lot together. And yet in all our time we never studied a single nation founded on truth and candor. My teachers were imaginative and visionary. But they dug no wells, built no walls, fed no children. The best of them were only men of theory." "But we were Wakanda. We were the Golden City. We were supposed to be exceptional." "We still are are Wakanda. And we will alw.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| ce90dea | 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.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 046e9a1 | I was not in any slave ship. Or perhaps I was, because so much of what I'd felt in Baltimore, the sharp hatred, the immortal wish, and the timeless will, I saw in Hayden's work. And that was what I heard in Malcolm, but never like this - quiet, pure, and unadorned. I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago - the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetr.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e03b6b4 | What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body. Perhaps | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 4a709ae | And she could not lean on her country for help. 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 .. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| c801f82 | Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality. Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and "Yeah, nigger, what's up now?" I judged them against the country I knew, which had a.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 97ebc5b | A society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 6f62c2c | The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| fd7d597 | You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| f2ee62a | 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, or conversation restrained in public quarters, our best manners on display, our hands never ou.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 7f48174 | I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 66d3a62 | The next day I got up early and walked through the city. I visited the Musee Rodin. I stopped in a bistro, and with all the fear of a boy approaching a beautiful girl at a party, I ordered two beers and then a burger. I walked to Le Jardin du Luxembourg. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. I took a seat. The garden was busting with people, again in all their alien ways. At that moment a strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was t.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 83c6b01 | This is the foundation of the Dream--its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8efed5f | You must never look away from this. 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. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 84b0af3 | We are not blind to recent events, Tetu. Nor are we blind to Damisa-Sakri's allies. But we are, as you say, a new country, a new nation. Prudence is required." "Even in your allies." " Especially our allies." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 4554a3a | We know who you are. We know of your battles with the king. We think you may well prove to be a true friend of our cause. But right now all we share are kind words and a common enemy. That is not yet enough. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 227b27b | I do not think your problem is an old philosopher. I do not think your problem is the renegade Dora Milaje. Your problem, T'Challa... is the people. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 5b27ddd | For my people I have battled world-breakers, death cultists, and men who would make themselves gods. For my people, I lost the only woman I ever truly loved. There is nothing left, Mother. I have given it all." "No, T'Challa. Let us not mince words here-- you have never given willingly. You feel the weight of the crown, but you have never felt the great honor of being king. Your people are a burden to you, and you have never let them forget.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates |