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Between the World and Me QUOTES

Between the World and Me QUOTES

41 " The fact of history is that black people have not -- probably no people have ever -- liberated themselves strictly through their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we see the hand of events that were beyond our individual control, events that were not unalloyed goods. You cannot disconnect our emancipation in the Northern colonies from the blood spilled in the Revolutionary War, any more than you can disconnect our emancipation from slavery in the South from the charnel houses of the Civil War, any more than you can disconnect our emancipation from Jim Crow from the genocides of the Second World War. History is not solely in our hands. And still you are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

42 " race” itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

43 " I was growing, and if I could not name my anguish precisely I still knew there was nothing noble in it. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

44 " That was 1986. That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful children—fell upon them random and relentless, like great sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not understand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood across from me holding my entire body in his small hands. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

45 " you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

46 " 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. That "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

47 " There was more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in the schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

48 " 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. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

49 " This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one’s eyes and forgetting the work of one’s hands. To "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

50 " The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own. I "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

51 " Now at night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our American generations, took me. Now I personally understood my father and the old mantra - 'Either I can beat him or the police.' I understood it all - the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. 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. This 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. It was only after you that I understood this love, that I understood the grip of my mother's hand. She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one wold be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of 'race,' imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

52 " You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

53 " Americans who think they are white regard us—something sexual and obscene. We were not enslaved in France. We are not their particular “problem,” nor their national guilt. We are not their niggers. If there is any comfort in this, it is not the kind that I would encourage you to indulge. Remember your name. Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that. Remember that this consciousness can never ultimately be racial; it must be cosmic. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

54 " That he was outnumbered did not matter because the whole world had outnumbered him long ago, and what do numbers matter? "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

55 " My wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

56 " There will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that separated the “white” from the “black,” even if it meant that their own blue-eyed sons would live under the lash. The result is a people, black people, who embody all physical varieties and whose life stories mirror this physical range. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

57 " ours. By then I’d read Chancellor Williams, J. A. Rogers, and John Jackson—writers central to the canon of our new noble history. From them I knew that Mansa Musa of Mali was black, and Shabaka of Egypt was black, and Yaa Asantewaa of Ashanti was black—and “the black race” was a thing I supposed existed from time immemorial, a thing that was real and mattered. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

58 " The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

59 " But rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

60 " 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. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me