[quotes] Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates 2015

 

"But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible - 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."

"that this is your county, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it"

"the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker"

"Fear fueled everything around me, and I knew, as all black people do, that this fear was connected to the Dream out there, to the unworried boys, to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns nightly beamed into our television sets."

"Why are only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in special need of this morality."

"My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers - even the answers they themselves believed." 

"... some old power that made him speak as though his body were his own..."

"My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own." 

"They 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."

"Things I believed merely a week earlier, ideas I had taken from one book, could be smashed to splinters by another."

"... and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts."

"... and allow the citizens of this county to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them."

"The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs."

"No one told those little white children, with their tricycles, to be twice as good. I imagined their parents telling them to take twice as much."

"Perhaps one person can make a change, but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen."

"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."

"The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact."