Between the world and me Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Book: Between the World and Me
Quotes of Book: Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me
Racism-the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them-inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In
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Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me
I did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not want you forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness. I resolved to hide nothing from you.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me
I am speaking to you as I always have - as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life in struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your won dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me
Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor - it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this. I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible - that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings.The soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden. And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stovewood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me
I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me
When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure 'that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,' he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant 'government of the people' but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term 'people' to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America's problem is not its betrayal of 'government of the people,' but the means by which 'the people' acquired their names.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me
You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me
Black is beautiful
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Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me
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."
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Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me
Poetry aims for an economy of truth-loose and useless words must be discarded,
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Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me
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.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates _ Between the World and Me
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
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