endangered

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

"at this moment the phrase 'police reform' has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. you may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. these are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. the truth is that the police reflect america in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. the abuses that have followed from these policies - the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects - are the product of democratic will. . . the problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs."

"i heard several people ask for forgiveness for the officer who'd shot prince jones down. i only vaguely recall my impressions of all this. but i know that i have always felt great distance from the grieving rituals of my people, and i must have felt it powerfully then. the need to forgive the officer would not have moved me, 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 have marked it from birth. . .

prince jones was the superlative of all my fears. and if he, good christian, scion of a striving class, patron saint of the twice as good, could be forever bound, who then could not? and the plunder was not just of prince alone. think of all the love poured into him. think of tuitions for montessori and music lessons. think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and little league. think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. think of world book and childcraft. think of checks written for family photos. think of credit cards charged for vacations. think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. and think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth."

"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, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket."

"my response was, in this moment, to write. i was lucky i had even that. most of us are forced to drink our travesties straight and smile about it. i wrote about the history of the prince george's county police. nothing had ever felt so essential to me. here is what i knew at the outset: the officer who killed prince jones was black. the politicians who empowered this officer to kill were black. many of the black politicians, many of them twice as good, seemed unconcerned. how could this be? it was like i was back at moorland again, called by great mysteries. but by then i didn't need any call slips; the internet had bloomed into an instrument of research. that must strike you as novel. for all your life, whenever you've had a question you have been able to type that question out on a keyboard, watch it appear in a rectangular space bordered by a corporate logo, and within seconds revel in the flood of potential answers. but i still remember when typewriters were useful, the dawn of the commodore 64, and days when a song you loved would have its moment on the radio and then disappear into the nothing. . . for a young man like me, the invention of the internet was the invention of space travel."

"according to this theory 'safety' was a higher value than justice, perhaps the highest value. . . and the lack of safety cannot help but constrain your sense of the galaxy. . . that was where i saw white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentrifying harlem boulevards in t-shirts and jogging shorts. or i saw them lost in conversation with each other, mother and father, 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 to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason. all my life i'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to 'be twice as good,' which is to say 'accept half as much.' those words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was 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 struck me that perhaps 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."