2015 BetweenTheWorldAndMe
- (Coates, 2015) ⇒ Ta-Nehisi Coates. (2015). “Between The World And Me.”
Subject Headings: Black American, Black American History, American Racism Against Blacks, Racial Identity, Systemic Racism, The American Dream, Fear and Survival, [[Historical Context], Resistance and Empowerment
Notes
- http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me/397619/
Cited By
2023
- chat
- “Between the World and Me” is a powerful book written as a Letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his Teenage Son, Samori, exploring the experience of being Black in America. Coates discusses the complexities of race, identity, and the struggle for equity in the United States, addressing various concepts throughout the book.
- Racial Identity: Coates delves into the intricacies of Racial Identity, detailing how the Black Experience is shaped by the legacy of slavery and ongoing discrimination. He encourages his son to understand and embrace his identity while remaining aware of the challenges he may face.
- Systemic Racism: The book examines the impact of Systemic Racism on Black Lives, from police violence to economic and educational disparities. Coates explains how these structural inequalities are deeply rooted in American history and continue to perpetuate injustice.
- The American Dream: Coates critiques the notion of the American Dream, arguing that it often relies on the exploitation and exclusion of Black people. He shares his perspective on the myth's inaccessibility for many African Americans due to historical and ongoing oppression.
- Fear and Survival: Coates emphasizes the constant fear experienced by Black People in America, which results from both physical threats and psychological trauma. He urges his son to remain vigilant and protect his body, which is vulnerable to harm in a racist society.
- Historical Context: The book connects the present-day struggles of African Americans to the nation's history of slavery, segregation, and racial injustice. Coates highlights the importance of understanding this historical context to make sense of contemporary racial issues.
- Resistance and Empowerment: Coates explores the resilience and strength of African Americans, despite the challenges they face. He encourages his son to find inspiration in the stories of resistance and survival that have defined the Black experience in America.
2016
- (Wikipedia, 2016) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_World_and_Me Retrieved:2016-11-1.
- Between the World and Me is a 2015 book written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It is written as a letter to the author's teenaged son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being black in the United States. Coates recapitulates the American history and explains to his son the "racist violence that has been woven into American culture". A common theme is his fear of bodily harm. Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore. The work takes inspiration from James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time. Like Baldwin, Coates does not share in traditional black Christian rhetoric of uplift, and more bleakly believes that no major change in racial justice is likely to come.
Novelist Toni Morrison wrote that Coates filled an intellectual lacuna in succession to James Baldwin. Editors of The New York Times and The New Yorker described the book as exceptional. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times felt that Coates overgeneralized at times and did not consistently acknowledge racial progress over the course of centuries. The book won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
- Between the World and Me is a 2015 book written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It is written as a letter to the author's teenaged son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being black in the United States. Coates recapitulates the American history and explains to his son the "racist violence that has been woven into American culture". A common theme is his fear of bodily harm. Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore. The work takes inspiration from James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time. Like Baldwin, Coates does not share in traditional black Christian rhetoric of uplift, and more bleakly believes that no major change in racial justice is likely to come.
2015
- http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/10/10/reading-coates-thinking-obama/
- QUOTE: … The result is a defense of depression, a plea for pessimism, and an argument against hope. He warns his son over and over that America has malicious plans for his body, for his life, that all his bourgeois privilege can vanish in the time it takes an all-too-typical cop to unholster a weapon. No one could argue with the sad necessity of that warning, but Between the World and Me goes so much further. It attacks the intellectual tradition from which Obama gets his inspiration, that of non-violence and Dr. King. Coates is a black nationalist, and these pages, along with his earlier memoir, make clear that his model is much more Malcolm X than King.
2015
- http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/teachers-guide/220290/between-the-world-and-me/
- QUOTE: Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s painful racial history and our current civil rights crisis. Americans have built an entire society on the idea of “race,” a false construct whose ramifications damage us, but fall 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 to their number in the population. 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? - See more at: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/teachers-guide/220290/between-the-world-and-me/#sthash.2ald4ORB.dpuf
Quotes
Chapter 1
…
... But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history.
…
... Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism — the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them — inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.
But race is the child of racism, not the father. … …
... The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing. …
... The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. …
... The Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. …
The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return. …
The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. …
But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. 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.” …
You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.” …
I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world. …
I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. …
But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. 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. …
You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. …
The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream. …
One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. …
But race is the child of racism, not the father. …
Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. …
To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding. …
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. …
So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason. All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to “be twice as good,” which is to say “accept half as much.” These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. …
Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe. …
It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.” …
You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs. …
The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. …
I believed, and still do, that our bodies are our selves, that my soul is the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and that my spirit is my flesh. …
So 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. …
The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans. …
References
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| Author | volume | Date Value | title | type | journal | titleUrl | doi | note | year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 BetweenTheWorldAndMe | Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975-) | Between The World And Me | 2015 |