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."
rápidas manos frías/ retiran una a una/las vendas de la sombra/abro los ojos/ todavía/ estoy vivo/en el centro/ de una herida todavía fresca ~*madrugada* por octavio paz
Showing posts with label ta-nehisi coates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ta-nehisi coates. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 22, 2016
Saturday, June 4, 2016
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."
"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."
Sunday, April 3, 2016
to live in the disquiet
all quotes from between the world and me by ta-nehisi coates
"my mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers - even the answers they themselves believed. i don't know that i have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. but every time i ask it, the question is refined. that is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being 'politically conscious' - as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty."
"you preserved your life because your life, your body, was as good as anyone's, because your blood was as precious as jewels, and it should never be sold for magic, for spirituals inspired by the unknowable hereafter. you do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of birmingham sheriffs nor to the insidious gravity of the streets."
"'white america' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). but however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, 'white people' would cease to exist for want of reasons."
"your grandparents... were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental 'firsts' - first black five-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor - always presented in the bemused manner of a category of trivial pursuit."
"i did not find a coherent tradition marching lockstep but instead factions, and factions within factions. . . things i believed merely a week earlier, ideas i had taken from one book, could be smashed to splinters by another. . . by my second year, it was natural for me to spend a typical day mediating between frederick douglass's interrogration into america and martin delany's escape into nationalism. perhaps they were somehow both right. i had come looking for a parade, for a military review of champions marching in ranks. instead i was left with a brawl of ancestors, a herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as often marching away from each other. . . 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 only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger - i didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble."
"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. poetry aims for an economy of truth - loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. poetry was not simply the transcription of notions - beautiful writing rarely is. i wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own rationalizations. poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justifications fell away and i was left with the cold steel truths of life."
"i began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as i kind of power. i was learning to live in the disquiet i felt in moorland-springarn, in the mess of my mind. the gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm, it was a beacon. it began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort. . ."
"this heap of realizations was a weight. i found them physically painful and exhausting. true, i was coming to enjoy the dizziness, the vertigo that must come with any odyssey. but in those early moments, the unceasing contradictions sent me into a gloom. there was nothing holy or particular in my skin; i was black because of history and heritage. there was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning in black blood. black blood wasn't black; black skin wasn't even black."
"i grew up in a house drawn between love and fear. there was no room for softness. but this girl with the long dreads revealed something else - that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism."
"the same softness that once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories."
"my mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers - even the answers they themselves believed. i don't know that i have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. but every time i ask it, the question is refined. that is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being 'politically conscious' - as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty."
"you preserved your life because your life, your body, was as good as anyone's, because your blood was as precious as jewels, and it should never be sold for magic, for spirituals inspired by the unknowable hereafter. you do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of birmingham sheriffs nor to the insidious gravity of the streets."
"'white america' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). but however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, 'white people' would cease to exist for want of reasons."
"your grandparents... were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental 'firsts' - first black five-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor - always presented in the bemused manner of a category of trivial pursuit."
"i did not find a coherent tradition marching lockstep but instead factions, and factions within factions. . . things i believed merely a week earlier, ideas i had taken from one book, could be smashed to splinters by another. . . by my second year, it was natural for me to spend a typical day mediating between frederick douglass's interrogration into america and martin delany's escape into nationalism. perhaps they were somehow both right. i had come looking for a parade, for a military review of champions marching in ranks. instead i was left with a brawl of ancestors, a herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as often marching away from each other. . . 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 only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger - i didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble."
"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. poetry aims for an economy of truth - loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. poetry was not simply the transcription of notions - beautiful writing rarely is. i wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately, still, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my own innocence, my own rationalizations. poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justifications fell away and i was left with the cold steel truths of life."
"i began to see discord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as i kind of power. i was learning to live in the disquiet i felt in moorland-springarn, in the mess of my mind. the gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm, it was a beacon. it began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort. . ."
"this heap of realizations was a weight. i found them physically painful and exhausting. true, i was coming to enjoy the dizziness, the vertigo that must come with any odyssey. but in those early moments, the unceasing contradictions sent me into a gloom. there was nothing holy or particular in my skin; i was black because of history and heritage. there was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning in black blood. black blood wasn't black; black skin wasn't even black."
"i grew up in a house drawn between love and fear. there was no room for softness. but this girl with the long dreads revealed something else - that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism."
"the same softness that once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories."
Monday, March 28, 2016
a visceral experience
quotes from between the world and me by ta-nehisi coates
"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. . . destruction is merely the superlative form a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. all of this is common to black people."
"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. it is hard to face this. but all our phrasing -- race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy -- serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. 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."
"to be black in the baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. the nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. the nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. the law did not protect us. and now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body. but 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. . . it does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black -- what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable."
"not being violent enough could cost me my body. being too violent could cost me my body. we could not get out. i was a capable boy, intelligent, well-liked, but powerfully afraid. and i felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injustice."
"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. here was the lesson: i was not an innocent. my impulses were not filled with unfailing virture. and feeling that i was as human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. if i was not innocent, then they were not innocent. could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? the cities they built? the country they claimed as given to them by god?"
"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. . . destruction is merely the superlative form a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. all of this is common to black people."
"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. it is hard to face this. but all our phrasing -- race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy -- serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. 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."
"to be black in the baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. the nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. the nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. the law did not protect us. and now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body. but 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. . . it does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black -- what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable."
"not being violent enough could cost me my body. being too violent could cost me my body. we could not get out. i was a capable boy, intelligent, well-liked, but powerfully afraid. and i felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced to live in fear was a great injustice."
"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. here was the lesson: i was not an innocent. my impulses were not filled with unfailing virture. and feeling that i was as human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. if i was not innocent, then they were not innocent. could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? the cities they built? the country they claimed as given to them by god?"
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