disembodiment

quotes from between the world and me by ta nehisi-coates

"and you are still called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life."

"my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration."

"'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.' [Solzhenitsyn] 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. there is some passing acknowledgment of the bad old days, which, by the way, were not so bad as to have any ongoing effect on our present. the mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from 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. to acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declared itself and turning toward something murkier and unknown. it is still too difficult for most americans to do this. but that is your work. it must be, if only to preserve the sanctity of your mind."

"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 out of pockets, our whole manner ordered as if to say, 'i make no sudden moves.' disembodiment. the serpent of the school years, demanding i be twice as good, though i was but a boy."

"if my life ended today, i would tell you it was a happy life - that i drew great joy from the study, from the struggle toward which i now urge you. you have seen in this conversation that the struggle has ruptured and remade me several times over - in baltimore, at the mecca, in fatherhood, in new york. the changes have awarded me a rapture that comes only when you can no longer be lied to, when you have rejected the dream. but even more, the changes have taught me how to best exploit that singular gift of study, to question what i see, then to question what i see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers."