Between the World and Me Quotes About Family
Between the World and Me | Quotes
1.
But race is the child of racism, not the begetter.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chapter i
Coates suggests that the concept of race is bogus, non biological. However, the exercise of racism—of putting 1 grouping down so that another can savor a higher status—requires race to be. In this fashion, racism leads to, or "fathers," the conventionalities in race.
ii.
Just all our phrasing ... serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chapter i
Coates reminds his son that the reality of racism is non simply conceptual. It has a very existent, physical, and oft violent manifestation in the globe. Racism is non only an idea. It is the death and beating of people. It is abject poverty and lives filled with misery and fear.
3.
The Dream smells similar peppermint just tastes like strawberry shortcake.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chapter 1
Coates believes that "the Dream" is a destructive force in American social club. The Dream is made up of "perfect houses with prissy lawns ... block associations, and driveways." This Dream necessitates an entire supporting narrative and the ignoring of certain facts. To believe in the Dream, people must believe that American guild is just and moral. Therefore, people must look away from any bear witness that contradicts this presupposition.
This means that to believe in the Dream, people must exist blind to the systemic racism in America and the violence that undergirds the formation of American society.
iv.
All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like fume from a burn down.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chapter i
Coates does not spare his ain family or community from criticism and analysis, although he considers the harsh treatment African American children suffer from their parents equally the product of fear. This fright forth with the vehement love African American parents feel toward their children results in the parents' resorting to harsh discipline to make sure their children behave appropriately in the eyes of lodge.
5.
I obsessed over the altitude between that other sector of space and my own.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chapter 1
As a child, Coates would run into children on goggle box living very different lives than his ain. Children on television were non worried about dying or being beaten; rather, they worried nearly whether or non they would get a popular girlfriend or win the Piddling League game. He wondered about the difference between what he saw on tv set and what he lived. Even as he observed the differences between his ain experience and "the Dream" experience he saw on television, he realized they were connected.
6.
The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chapter ane
Not only does Coates believe that belief in the Dream of an idealized America is harmful, but he believes it dampens an individual's chapters to create art, call up clearly, and write honestly. He is constantly on baby-sit confronting the temptation to create his own myth and believe in information technology.
seven.
I knew that we were ... on 1 hand, invented, and on the other, no less real.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chapter i
Coates grapples with the notion that race is not a biological category only a social ane. He notes that although existence white or African American is an artificial category based on criteria established by a group of people who use these categories to institute their own dominance, these categories known as "race" are withal existent and powerful. They involve shared experiences and a similar relationship to society.
8.
You cannot forget how ... they transfigured our very bodies into saccharide, tobacco, cotton, and gold.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chapter 1
Coates returns to America's history of enslaving African Americans, exploring how those who enslaved them viewed them in the same way they would view gold or whatsoever other commodity. The image of black bodies being transfigured into "sugar, tobacco, cotton wool, and gold" illustrates this idea in concrete terms.
9.
I believed, and still do ... that my spirit is my flesh.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Affiliate ii
Throughout the essay, Coates explains that since he is not a religious person, he is not comforted past ideas of the spirit or the afterlife. To him, a human being is merely a concrete self. The spirit is the mankind, and the soul is the electric impulse that powers the nervous system. The body is more valuable when it is all someone has.
10.
This officer, given maximum power, diameter minimum responsibility.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Affiliate 2
When Coates's friend Prince Jones was killed, the officeholder who shot him was not punished. This shows the immorality of a system that privileges the powerful and allows them to bear the least responsibility for their actions while the powerless suffer for the errors of those in potency.
11.
As terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chapter ii
In New York Urban center, Coates sees white parents chatting outside without a care in the world while their children accept upwardly the entire sidewalk with their bikes. The image stays with Coates every bit an analogy of the difference between white children in Manhattan and the African American children he grew up with in Baltimore. He sees that people'southward attitude toward the world is shaped by their earliest experiences.
12.
People who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chapter ii
Coates describes white people equally "people who believe themselves to be white." This thought underscores his signal that "race" is non a biological classification just a belief. When a person believes he or she is classified as white, the facts of slavery, systemic racism, and racial inequality threaten their view of themselves as a adept person. Therefore, those who see themselves equally white constantly try to show that they personally are non responsible for the suffering of African American people.
13.
I am convinced that the Dreamers ... of today, would rather live white than live free.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chapter 3
Coates calls those who are invested in the Dream of the arcadian version of America "Dreamers." He details their impulse to look away from the ugliness of the country'due south by and forget the evidence of its ongoing atrocities. He suggests that their belief in their own "whiteness" is more important to them than actual freedom, which can come from only facing the truth.
14.
They made u.s.a. into a race. We made ourselves into a people.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chapter 3
Coates marvels at the beauty, passion, joy, and humanity that African American people have created out of their oppression. Their civilization was stolen from them, so they made their own. They were defined and classified as a "race" for the purposes of subjugation, just they fabricated themselves into a "people."
15.
The ability is not divinity but a deep knowledge of how fragile everything ... really is.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chapter 3
At the end of the essay, Coates exhorts his son to keep struggling for wisdom and truth. But then will he take the true power that comes from understanding just how frail the world and its people really are.
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