Mastodawn

Alexa Thy Apr 15, 2024

""I could have you arrested," he said. Which is to say "One of your son's earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, tase, and break you." I had forgotten the rules... One must be without error out here... Make no mistakes. But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people you shouldn't... But the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so America might justify itself, the story of a black body's destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined - With Eric Garner's anger, with Trayvon Martin's mythical words, with Sean Bell's mistake of running with the wrong crowd... A society, almost necessarily, begins every success story with the chapter that most advantages itself, and in America, these precipitating chapters are almost always rendered as the singular action of exceptional individuals. "It only takes one person to make a change," you are often told. This is a myth. Perhaps one person can make a change but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen...I am ashamed I made an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more."

— Ta-Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me, pp. 95-97

Between the World and Me - BookWyrm

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward. -front flap