Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

4/5 rating. 

Book #137 of 2019. Read December 1, 2019.

This book needs to be a required read for everyone in America. It is heart wrenching to hear Ta-Nehisi describe his world to his son. You can feel his utter fear, hopelessness, and sense of inequality throughout the entire book.

I hope that anyone who reads this book gets a view into the world of so many non-whites in America. It is so easy for me to go around not realizing the advantages (which are neither earned, nor awardable) that have been bestowed upon me purely because I am a white male in America. I am not looked at twice when I walk into a store; I am not afraid when walking anywhere that I will be harassed; I do not fear as Ta-Nehisi repeatedly states, of run-ins with the police, or that I have to be “twice as good” merely to get out alive in day-to-day life.

Not really able to see this other world, I hope that Ta-Nehisi’s pessimism is not completely warranted. I hope that those of us with privileges in this world are able to lift up those that the system has left behind – either inadvertently or not. I hope not so much for a “color-blind” world – as I don’t want to lose the differences that make each of us, us – but a world that treats all of us equally, regardless of nationality, race, sex, gender, or any other label.

This book is certainly a necessary read, but I hope more than anything in this world to make Ta-Nehisi regret his aversions that America can’t change. This will only happen through our continued push in every interaction that we have among one another. We must require that the system changes, that people be held accountable, and that we look inside ourselves to see where we come up short. This is not a passive exercise, as Ta-Nehisi says:

“‘Good intention’ is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.” Let us push for a new and brighter tomorrow. Martin Luther King’s Dreams have only been partially realized. As he so eloquently says:

“No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” 

Quotes:

“But the belief in 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.”

“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 dislodged 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 your body.”

“But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice had either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.” 

“I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.”

“Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not, and while I couldn’t crunch the numbers or plumb the history back then, I sensed that the feat that marked West Baltimore could not be explained by the schools.”

“‘The meek shall inherit the earth’ meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail.”

“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. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?”  

“But this girl with the long dreads revealed something else – that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.”

“But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful – the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements.”

“‘The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,’ said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. ‘And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.’ And there it is – the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.”

“Then the mother of the murdered boy rose, turned to you, and said, ‘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. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid to be you.’”

“I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It’s all it takes.” – [Mother talking about her mother killed by police]

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