Top Quotes: “Between The World and Me” — Ta-Nehisi Coates
Background: Coates is a writer and journalist who pens this book as a letter to his teenage son attempting to explain the insidious power of white supremacy in the U.S., the differences between his son’s stable upbringing and his own past growing up on the streets, and yet the way in which his son will often be treated no differently by society than he was when he was his age. It’s an amazing glimpse into what it’s like to grow up in a neighborhood plagued by gangs and what it means to be a black man in the U.S.
Intro
“Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of man.”
“The belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society, and that they signify deeper indelible attributes — this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up tragically, deceitfully to believe that they are white.”
“These new people are a modern invention. But their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white — Catholic, Welsh, Jewish — and if all of our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again.”
“The process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings or ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissident; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant to deny people of color the right to secure and govern our own beliefs.”
“The new people were not original in this — no great power’s elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of human bodies. But this banality of violence can never excuse America because America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error.”
“You knew now, if you did not know before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is a result of an unfortunate overreaction, a misunderstanding, a foolish policy. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and it can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include frisking, detaining, beating, and humiliation.”
“There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers, or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men — enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy.”
The Streets
“My father beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns.”
“I knew that West Baltimore, where I 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 for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large TV resting in my living room.”
“The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beating, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrilling. This is what rappers mean when they pronounce themselves ‘addicted to the streets’ or ‘in love with the game.’ I imagine they feel something akin to parachutists, rock climbers, and others who choose to live on the edge. Of course we chose nothing. And I have never believed the brothers who claim to ‘run,’ much less ‘own’ the city. We did not design the streets. We do not fund them. But I was there, nonetheless, charged like all the others with the protection of my body.”
“The crews, the young men who’d transmuted their fear into rage, were the greatest danger. It was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel any sense of security or power. Their mission was to prove the inviolability of their block, of their bodies, through their power to crack knees, ribs, and arms.”
“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. I learned the smell and feel of fighting weather. I recall learning these laws clearer than learning my colors and shapes, because these laws were essential to the security of my body.”
“If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. 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. I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.”
“When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning, but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing. Fully 60% of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them.”
“We could not get out. The ground we walked was trip-wired. The air we breathed was toxic. The water stunted our growth. We could not get out.”
“Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out.”
“Fear ruled everything around me, and I knew, as all black people do, that this fear was connected to the Dream out there, to the unworried boys, to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns nightly beamed into our TV sets.”
“I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast. Those who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets. The society could say ‘He should have stayed in school,’ and then wash its hands of him.”
“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.”
“The n-word, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe.”
Beyond The Streets
“She had never known her father, which put her in the company of the greatest number of everyone I’d known. I felt then that these men — these ‘fathers’ — were the greatest of cowards. But I also felt that the galaxy was playing with loaded dice, which ensured an excess of cowards in our ranks.”
“The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in our redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it’s wrong to claim our present circumstance — no matter how improved — as the redemption for lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.”
“You have to make peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transformed our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.”
“The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend over under indictment. They sent the killer back to his [police] work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.”
“I would see these people at the club, drunken, laughing, challenging breakdancers to battles. They would be destroyed and humiliated in these battles. But afterward they would clap, laugh, order more beers. They were utterly fearless. I did not understand it until I looked out onto the street. This was where I saw white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem boulevards. Or lost in conversation with each other, while their sons commanded entire sidewalks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.”
“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 protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again as to not give police a reason. Being told to be ‘twice as good’ evidenced the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. It seemed to me that our own rules redoubled plunder. It seemed to me that the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered.”
“There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. In the era of mass lynching, it was so difficult to find who, specifically, served as executioners that such deaths were often reported as having happened ‘at the hands of persons unknown.’ There was no golden era when evildoers did their business and loudly proclaimed it as such.”
“At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth $4 billion, more than all of American industry, more than all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies — cotton — was America’s primary export.”
“In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”
“The ghettos are an elegant act of racism, killing fields authored by federal policies, where we are, all again, plundered of our dignity, of our families, of our wealth, and of our lives. ‘Black on black crime’ is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the locks, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. To yell ‘black on black crime’ is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.”
“Some part of me was still back in that 7th grade French class, thinking only of the immediate security of my body, regarding France as one might regard Jupiter.”
“I walked outside and melted into the city, like butter in a stew.”
“I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next. I am tied to old ways, which I learned in a hard house.”
“I did not die in my aimless youth. I was not jailed. I had proven to myself that there was another way beyond the schools and the streets. I felt myself to be among the survivors of some great natural disaster, some plague, some avalanche, some earthquake.”
“The [white people] are exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.”
“As slaves, we were this country’s down payment on its freedom. After the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the unrepentant South, and our bodies became the country’s second mortgage. In the New Deal, we were their guest room, their finished basement. And today with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for [white people], our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white.”
“You have deduced that you are privileged and yet still different from other privileged children, because you are the bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country.”
“Dr. Mable Jones integrated the high school in her town. At the beginning, she fought the white children who insulted her. At the end, they voted her class president. At football games, the other students would cheer the star black running back, and then when a black player on the other team got the ball, they’d yell ‘kill that n-word.’ as though she really were not there. 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.”
“They were the children of the Jackie Robinson elite, whose parents rose up out of the ghettos, and the sharecropping fields, went out into the suburbs, only to find that they carried the mark with them and could not escape. Even when they succeeded, as so many of them did, they were singled out, made examples of, transfigured into parables of diversity. They were symbols and markers, never children or young adults. And so they come to [HBCUs] to be normal — and even more, to see how broad the black normal really is.”
“She compared America to Rome. She thought the glory days of this country had long ago passed, and even those glory days were sullied: they had been built on the bodies of others.”
“We are captured, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America and this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps this was, is, the hope of our movement: to awaken [white people], to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be 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.”
“Black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors. Even [white people] — lost in their grand reverie — feel it, for tis Billie they reach for in sadness, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha is the last sound they hear before dying. We have made something down here. We have taken the one-drop rule of [white people] and flipped them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.”
“The damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed [white people] to plunder not just the bodies of humans, but the body of the Earth itself. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, [white people] themselves.”
“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.”
