Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
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"For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him -- most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear. What were they afraid of? In Tremble for My Country, Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings -- moments when he discovered some new truth show more about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield with a rogue historian, a journey to Chicago's South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America's 'long war on black people,' or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police. In his trademark style -- a mix of lyrical personal narrative, reimagined history, essayistic argument, and reportage -- Coates provides readers a thrillingly illuminating new framework for understanding race: its history, our contemporary dilemma, and where we go from here"-- show lessTags
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From reviews and other secondary accounts, I'd gathered one of Coates's key positions here is that the American Dream is in fact a charade, allowing whites to continue abusing blacks even as they believe the reason(s) for the black nation's current situation lie entirely with the choices made / lesser capabilities of / beliefs held by those black people. After reading, this is indeed a major statement: the Dream relies upon exploitation, specifically that variant maintained by White Supremacists.
And this particular Dream relies too upon complicity: depends upon those who benefit from it, allowing it to continue. "The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from show more the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one's eyes and forgetting the work of one's hands." [98]
Coates does not frame the point as the American Dream depending in principle upon racial terror in order to work, merely that it does so in fact. A key question for me, then: Is the American Dream feasible, workable for all people, without the underpinnings of racial terror or even racial inequality? (And: is racial inequality ever pragmatic without racial terror? They are separate, to be sure, but can the one effectively exist without the other, given human nature? To replace "racial inequality" with any other basis for inequality, remains substantially the same question.)
//
Rhetorically clever of Coates to address the essay to black people, and pointedly to his son. If economically successful, the book would be read by more white people than black, this would have been abundantly clear to Coates. I find myself on the margins of a conversation never addressed to me, yet just as clearly intended for me. The observations, criticisms, characterisations ... I can take offense, of course: readers always have open to them any reaction whatsoever. But a moment's reflection makes it clear, these barbs land only if I steer them toward myself. (A white body.) They were not thrown my way. It lends another layer of significance to any sufficiently self-aware reader.
//
Various quotes from Baldwin reinforce my intention to read his essays. "The people who believe they are white." [42, 133]
Title borrowed from a Richard Wright poem, and Coates uses the opening lines as epigraph. These were new to me, and an ugly shock. I imagine they are familiar to many black Americans.
Originally the idea was to create a review exclusively from selected quotations: my notes identify enough to do this, still would provide a worthwhile summary of the essay. show less
And this particular Dream relies too upon complicity: depends upon those who benefit from it, allowing it to continue. "The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from show more the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one's eyes and forgetting the work of one's hands." [98]
Coates does not frame the point as the American Dream depending in principle upon racial terror in order to work, merely that it does so in fact. A key question for me, then: Is the American Dream feasible, workable for all people, without the underpinnings of racial terror or even racial inequality? (And: is racial inequality ever pragmatic without racial terror? They are separate, to be sure, but can the one effectively exist without the other, given human nature? To replace "racial inequality" with any other basis for inequality, remains substantially the same question.)
//
Rhetorically clever of Coates to address the essay to black people, and pointedly to his son. If economically successful, the book would be read by more white people than black, this would have been abundantly clear to Coates. I find myself on the margins of a conversation never addressed to me, yet just as clearly intended for me. The observations, criticisms, characterisations ... I can take offense, of course: readers always have open to them any reaction whatsoever. But a moment's reflection makes it clear, these barbs land only if I steer them toward myself. (A white body.) They were not thrown my way. It lends another layer of significance to any sufficiently self-aware reader.
//
Various quotes from Baldwin reinforce my intention to read his essays. "The people who believe they are white." [42, 133]
Title borrowed from a Richard Wright poem, and Coates uses the opening lines as epigraph. These were new to me, and an ugly shock. I imagine they are familiar to many black Americans.
Originally the idea was to create a review exclusively from selected quotations: my notes identify enough to do this, still would provide a worthwhile summary of the essay. show less
Summary: In this open letter to his son, Coates discusses how black people in the US have lost their bodies – first to slavery and now to statistically disproportionate murder, imprisonment, and threats.
My Thoughts: This was a short work, but a powerful one. Coates makes the point that “race” is a false way of categorizing humans and that people who view themselves as “white” in the US have built their empire with the blood of people they view as “black.” It is a very personal account of how Coates feels that he and his friends have lost their bodies to this empire. I think it was the personal nature of his letter, combined with intelligent points, that has made this work touch the hearts of so many Americans. This is a show more must-read for everyone, no matter their race. show less
My Thoughts: This was a short work, but a powerful one. Coates makes the point that “race” is a false way of categorizing humans and that people who view themselves as “white” in the US have built their empire with the blood of people they view as “black.” It is a very personal account of how Coates feels that he and his friends have lost their bodies to this empire. I think it was the personal nature of his letter, combined with intelligent points, that has made this work touch the hearts of so many Americans. This is a show more must-read for everyone, no matter their race. show less
I chose this book to read in my quest to read more books by black authors. it is written as a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his son about the divide between the black and white worlds. Sadly, I think he has this right. This is a powerful and depressing book, leaving me in tears at the end, because the struggle continues.
This to me is a fascinating and eye-opening read. Over the years I have tried to understand the black culture in various ways, but I think Coates puts it all out there with the idea that no black man’s body is ever safe. I knew this partially, but his description of life as a child in west Baltimore, where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in what I considered a safe Jewish community, is nothing like the dangerous show more and violent black community in which he grew up during the 1980s. Oddly enough, we both ended up in Chocolate City, a name that used to be applied to Washington, DC. We are a generation apart. I felt a need to be part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but I was afraid of Malcolm X because of his rage. To Coates, Malcolm X was a hero because his rage was an outgrowth of his experience and his knowledge. I now feel a need to revisit Malcolm X’s world. Being that I am not black, I don’t anticipate being able to fully understand it, but I want to try. He did equate Martin Luther King with the Dream (or the white experience).
I love the part of this book that describes Howard University as a Mecca. It is such an amazing part of Washington, DC, and I enjoyed reading about the author’s experiences there.
The second part of the book in which Coates talks about experiences with his young son made me fear for all black parents of young children, especially those with sons. The author puts his personal terror into words which make the reader feel it. To those who never felt such terror, such as myself, it will be my duty going forward to understand it and act on it in a positive way.
I am hoping to be able to read The Beautiful Struggle, the memoirs of the author, in the future. show less
This to me is a fascinating and eye-opening read. Over the years I have tried to understand the black culture in various ways, but I think Coates puts it all out there with the idea that no black man’s body is ever safe. I knew this partially, but his description of life as a child in west Baltimore, where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in what I considered a safe Jewish community, is nothing like the dangerous show more and violent black community in which he grew up during the 1980s. Oddly enough, we both ended up in Chocolate City, a name that used to be applied to Washington, DC. We are a generation apart. I felt a need to be part of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but I was afraid of Malcolm X because of his rage. To Coates, Malcolm X was a hero because his rage was an outgrowth of his experience and his knowledge. I now feel a need to revisit Malcolm X’s world. Being that I am not black, I don’t anticipate being able to fully understand it, but I want to try. He did equate Martin Luther King with the Dream (or the white experience).
I love the part of this book that describes Howard University as a Mecca. It is such an amazing part of Washington, DC, and I enjoyed reading about the author’s experiences there.
The second part of the book in which Coates talks about experiences with his young son made me fear for all black parents of young children, especially those with sons. The author puts his personal terror into words which make the reader feel it. To those who never felt such terror, such as myself, it will be my duty going forward to understand it and act on it in a positive way.
I am hoping to be able to read The Beautiful Struggle, the memoirs of the author, in the future. show less
This is one of those books that opens your eyes to a different world. Mr. Coates manages to capture what growing up poor, black, and impoverished does to a person, while acknowledging both outside prejudices and internal beliefs. Its not an easy thing to do - write a book that manages to be angry, sad, and disappointed at the world, but does so eloquently and with passion and great clarity.
Its a book that should be required reading for everyone, including our current administration. This is a book that manages to make clear inequality in such an elegant and clear voice.
Its a book that should be required reading for everyone, including our current administration. This is a book that manages to make clear inequality in such an elegant and clear voice.
We have taken the one-drop rules of Dreamers and flipped them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.
I'm not sure this is really a review. I finished this book two weeks ago and I still haven’t fully processed everything I read and learned about the state of being black in 21st century America. It’s written as an open letter to the author’s teenage son and while Coates maintains the framing device consistently throughout the book it never becomes intrusive or detracts from the message.
The message itself was a sucker punch for me, even as I pride myself on having suitably enlightened views about equality and race relations. Coates does not give credit for trying; there is no A for effort in these pages for show more progressive whites because, as Coates so eloquently shows, none of us are doing enough to right the lasting effects of our collective historical sin, slavery. In graphic terms Coates demonstrates just how those aftereffects are still being felt, and the ways that “those who believe they are white” lie to themselves, each other, and people of color made me extremely uncomfortable. Which I suspect is at least partly his point:
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 tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free.
But I fear I am misrepresenting this book to you. It is not an unrelenting jeremiad enumerating all the ways that the majority class has subjugated and made life impossible for the minority. Coates isn’t afraid to turn his critical lens on himself, and he openly relates the ways in which his preconceived notions about race have been upended over time. The turning point for him was attending Howard University, a historically black college that he refers to as Mecca. There for the first time he realized the full spectrum of what it meant to be black:
I saw everything I knew of my black self multiplied out into seemingly endless variation. There were the scions of Nigerian aristocrats in their business suits giving dap to bald-headed Qs in purple windbreakers and tan Timbs. There were the high-yellow progeny of AME preachers debating the clerics of Ausar-Set. There were California girls turned Muslim, born anew, in hijab and long skirt. There were Ponzi schemers and Christian cultists, Tabernacle fanatics and mathematical geniuses. It was like listening to a hundred different renditions of “Redemption Song,” each in a different color and key.
The lessons Coates learned at Howard — few of which were absorbed in classrooms, he readily admits — as well as later insights gained from an extended trip to Paris and his eventual settling in New York to raise his family, helped shape him into the man and the extraordinary writer he is today. A man who can rage, rage, against the injustice that his people have been subjected to, without giving in to despair or acting out in anger. Above all, he is clear-eyed about the the way the world really is.
We are captured, brother, 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 that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to 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.
I marked so many more quotes in this books, all representing either moments where Coates caused me to see something in a completely new light, or made me rethink an assumption I hadn’t even realized I held until he shattered it. I’ll just leave you with this:
The power is not divinity but a deep knowledge of how fragile everything — even the Dream, especially the Dream — really is. show less
I'm not sure this is really a review. I finished this book two weeks ago and I still haven’t fully processed everything I read and learned about the state of being black in 21st century America. It’s written as an open letter to the author’s teenage son and while Coates maintains the framing device consistently throughout the book it never becomes intrusive or detracts from the message.
The message itself was a sucker punch for me, even as I pride myself on having suitably enlightened views about equality and race relations. Coates does not give credit for trying; there is no A for effort in these pages for show more progressive whites because, as Coates so eloquently shows, none of us are doing enough to right the lasting effects of our collective historical sin, slavery. In graphic terms Coates demonstrates just how those aftereffects are still being felt, and the ways that “those who believe they are white” lie to themselves, each other, and people of color made me extremely uncomfortable. Which I suspect is at least partly his point:
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 tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free.
But I fear I am misrepresenting this book to you. It is not an unrelenting jeremiad enumerating all the ways that the majority class has subjugated and made life impossible for the minority. Coates isn’t afraid to turn his critical lens on himself, and he openly relates the ways in which his preconceived notions about race have been upended over time. The turning point for him was attending Howard University, a historically black college that he refers to as Mecca. There for the first time he realized the full spectrum of what it meant to be black:
I saw everything I knew of my black self multiplied out into seemingly endless variation. There were the scions of Nigerian aristocrats in their business suits giving dap to bald-headed Qs in purple windbreakers and tan Timbs. There were the high-yellow progeny of AME preachers debating the clerics of Ausar-Set. There were California girls turned Muslim, born anew, in hijab and long skirt. There were Ponzi schemers and Christian cultists, Tabernacle fanatics and mathematical geniuses. It was like listening to a hundred different renditions of “Redemption Song,” each in a different color and key.
The lessons Coates learned at Howard — few of which were absorbed in classrooms, he readily admits — as well as later insights gained from an extended trip to Paris and his eventual settling in New York to raise his family, helped shape him into the man and the extraordinary writer he is today. A man who can rage, rage, against the injustice that his people have been subjected to, without giving in to despair or acting out in anger. Above all, he is clear-eyed about the the way the world really is.
We are captured, brother, 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 that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to 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.
I marked so many more quotes in this books, all representing either moments where Coates caused me to see something in a completely new light, or made me rethink an assumption I hadn’t even realized I held until he shattered it. I’ll just leave you with this:
The power is not divinity but a deep knowledge of how fragile everything — even the Dream, especially the Dream — really is. show less
Wow -- I found this collection of texts written for his son very powerful, illuminating, and terrifying. The discussion of racism as the foundation for the American Dream, the reminder that folks who identify as white need to realize that they only think they are white, but that this thinking allows for them to have the Dream without realizing what they and the institutions of this country have done to ensure racism stays at the foundation, and the daily physical encounters of this racism with the fear and powerlessness that goes hand in hand make this a must-read.
This book started off as though a Noam Chomsky-acolyte had written it, e.g.:
I found it very show more powerful, that the author negates and questions the muddled concept of "race"; the fact that he has written the book as though it were a letter to his teenage son does not make it any less magnificent:
It's as though this book is a breath of air that's been breathed too many times, but this exhale of sorts, is poetic; the author really wants to reader to react to sheer reason, to his anger and analyses:
I really liked Coates' way of self-criticising:
His way to look at youth culture, gangsta culture, rap á la Mobb Deep and OutKast, how the toughs are really scareds, is interesting:
Still, what strikes me as slightly flawed with this short book, is the lack of feminism; while Coates analyses the male perspective in detail, and goes far to acknowledge and attack centuries of white "plunder". Women have little part of this book.
The controlled anger is most of what's really exciting and beautiful about this book (to me):
A lot of this book related to my own experiences, mixing Chomsky with Chuck D, the brutalism of Conrad and CNN:
Coates is a very good and poetic author. I'm keen to read his other work. One of the quotes in this book that I like the most is this:
I'll let James Baldwin conclude the review:
This leads us to another equally important ideal, one that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—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 men.
I found it very show more powerful, that the author negates and questions the muddled concept of "race"; the fact that he has written the book as though it were a letter to his teenage son does not make it any less magnificent:
I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury. I think you know.
It's as though this book is a breath of air that's been breathed too many times, but this exhale of sorts, is poetic; the author really wants to reader to react to sheer reason, to his anger and analyses:
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 uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not 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 the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.
I really liked Coates' way of self-criticising:
Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing—myself.
His way to look at youth culture, gangsta culture, rap á la Mobb Deep and OutKast, how the toughs are really scareds, is interesting:
I was attracted to their guns, because the guns seemed honest. The guns seemed to address this country, which invented the streets that secured them with despotic police, in its primary language—violence. And I compared the Panthers to the heroes given to me by the schools, men and women who struck me as ridiculous and contrary to everything I knew.
Still, what strikes me as slightly flawed with this short book, is the lack of feminism; while Coates analyses the male perspective in detail, and goes far to acknowledge and attack centuries of white "plunder". Women have little part of this book.
The controlled anger is most of what's really exciting and beautiful about this book (to me):
Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better man for you. He would not be your morality. Malcolm spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the laws that proscribed our imagination.
[...]
“If you’re black, you were born in jail,” Malcolm said.
A lot of this book related to my own experiences, mixing Chomsky with Chuck D, the brutalism of Conrad and CNN:
Almost every day I played Ice Cube’s album Death Certificate: “Let me live my life, if we can no longer live our life, then let us give our life for the liberation and salvation of the black nation.” I kept the Black Power episodes of Eyes on the Prize in my weekly rotation. I was haunted by the shadow of my father’s generation, by Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. I was haunted by the bodily sacrifice of Malcolm, by Attica and Stokely. I was haunted because I believed that we had left ourselves back there, undone by COINTELPRO and black flight and drugs, and now in the crack era all we had were our fears.
[...]
Your mother, who knew so much more of the world than me, fell in love with New York through culture, through Crossing Delancey, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Working Girl, Nas, and Wu-Tang.
[...]
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. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
Coates is a very good and poetic author. I'm keen to read his other work. One of the quotes in this book that I like the most is this:
“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.”
I'll let James Baldwin conclude the review:
"And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white."show less
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Between the World and Me is, in important ways, a book written toward white Americans, and I say this as one them. White Americans may need to read this book more urgently and carefully than anyone, and their own sons and daughters need to read it as well. This is not to say this is a book about white people, but rather that it is a terrible mistake for anyone to assume that this is just a show more book about nonwhite people. In the broadest terms Between the World and Me is about the cautious, tortured, but finally optimistic belief that something beyond these categories persists. Implicit in this book’s existence is a conviction that people are fundamentally reachable, perhaps not all of them but enough, that recognition and empathy are within grasp, that words and language are capable of changing people, even if—especially if—those words are not ones people prefer to hear. show less
added by elenchus
In the scant space of barely 160 pages, Atlantic national correspondent Coates (The Beautiful Struggle) has composed an immense, multifaceted work. This is a poet's book, revealing the sensibility of a writer to whom words—exact words—matter....It's also a journalist's book, not only because it speaks so forcefully to issues of grave interest today, but because of its close attention to show more fact...As a meditation on race in America, haunted by the bodies of black men, women, and children, Coates's compelling, indeed stunning, work is rare in its power to make you want to slow down and read every word. This is a book that will be hailed as a classic of our time. show less
added by theaelizabet
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Author Information
139+ Works 22,560 Members
Ta-Nehisi Coates was born in Baltimore, Maryland on September 30, 1975. He attended Howard University. He is a correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. He is the author of The Beautiful Struggle and Between the World and Me, which won a National Book Award for nonfiction in 2015 and the 2016 show more PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He was included on Time magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Tussen de wereld en mij
- Original title
- Between the World and Me
- Original publication date
- 2015-07-14
- People/Characters
- Malcolm X; Prince Jones; Mike Brown; Saul Bellow; Trayvon Martin; Gary Hopkins, Jr.
- Important places
- New York, New York, USA; Paris, France; Baltimore County, Maryland, USA; Uman, Ukraine; Berlin, Germany; Stockholm, Sweden (show all 9); Dushanbe, Tajikistan; Chicago, Illinois, USA; Howard University, Washington, D.C., USA
- Epigraph
- 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 betwee... (show all)n the world and me...
—Richard Wright - Dedication
- For David and Kenyatta,
who believed - First words
- Son,
Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. - Quotations
- Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
At that point in American history, no police department fired its guns more than that of Prince George's County.
Shortly before you were born, I was pulled over by the PG County cops...I sat there in terror...He handed back my license. He gave no explanation for the stop.
The need to forgive the officer would not have moved me, back because even then, in some inchoate form, I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that ha... (show all)ve marked it from birth.
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, likely to the end of ... (show all)our days, we must invariably return.
Then the mother of the murdered boy rose, turned to you and said, “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... (show all) no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid to be you.
She appeared to be somewhere in that range between forty and seventy years, when it becomes difficult to precisely ascertain a black person’s precise age.
I thought back on the sit-ins, the protestors with their stoic faces...Perhaps they so willingly parted with the security and sanctity of the black body because neither security nor sanctity existed in the first place. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets.
- Blurbers
- Morrison, Toni
- Original language
- English US; English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 305.800973
- Canonical LCC
- E185.615 .C6335
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
- Genres
- General Nonfiction, Biography & Memoir, Nonfiction, History
- DDC/MDS
- 305.800973 — Society, government, & culture Social sciences, sociology & anthropology Social group - Age, Gender, Ethnicity Ethnic and national groups standard subdivisions / Ethnic and national groups with ethnic origins from more than one continent, of European descent standard subdivisions Biography And History North America United States
- LCC
- E185.615 .C6335 — History of the United States United States
- BISAC
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- UPCs
- 1
- ASINs
- 14