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maynags 's review for:
Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
quotes:
And the process of naming "the people" has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.
this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.
America understands itself as God's handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.
The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear.
It does not matter that the "intentions" of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, "intend" for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense-ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body.
that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.
"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.
There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound.
And she was the kind of black girl who'd been told as a child that she had better be smart because her looks wouldn't save her, and then told as a young woman that she was really pretty for a dark-skinned girl.
The world needs saving precisely because of the actions of these same men and women.
The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.
You need to know that I was loved, that whatever my lack of religious feeling, I have always loved my people and that broad love is directly related to the specific love I feel for you.
Whenever it was me on top of someone, whatever my rage in the moment, afterward I always felt sick at having been lowered to the crudest form of communication.
And in that exchange there was so much of the private rapport that can only exist between two particular strangers of this tribe that we call black. In other words, I was part of a world. And looking out, I had friends who too were part of other worlds—the world of Jews or New Yorkers, the world of Southerners or gay men, of immigrants, of Californians, of Native Americans, or a combination of any of these, worlds stitched into worlds like tapestry.
And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.
And the process of naming "the people" has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.
this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.
America understands itself as God's handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.
The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear.
It does not matter that the "intentions" of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, "intend" for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense-ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body.
that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.
"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.
There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound.
And she was the kind of black girl who'd been told as a child that she had better be smart because her looks wouldn't save her, and then told as a young woman that she was really pretty for a dark-skinned girl.
The world needs saving precisely because of the actions of these same men and women.
The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.
You need to know that I was loved, that whatever my lack of religious feeling, I have always loved my people and that broad love is directly related to the specific love I feel for you.
Whenever it was me on top of someone, whatever my rage in the moment, afterward I always felt sick at having been lowered to the crudest form of communication.
And in that exchange there was so much of the private rapport that can only exist between two particular strangers of this tribe that we call black. In other words, I was part of a world. And looking out, I had friends who too were part of other worlds—the world of Jews or New Yorkers, the world of Southerners or gay men, of immigrants, of Californians, of Native Americans, or a combination of any of these, worlds stitched into worlds like tapestry.
And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.