Between the World and Me

Hailed by Toni Morrison as required reading, a bold and personal literary exploration of America s racial history by the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States (The New York Observer) #1 NEW YORK TIMES

Characters

Ta-Nehisi Coates (7)

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.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates, amazon.com

Education Books Learning

Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson–not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates, amazon.com

Life

The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates, amazon.com

Police The Problem with Police

White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and wi…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates, amazon.com

White America Lynching racism

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.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates, amazon.com

Moral Standards American Exceptionalism

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…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates, amazon.com

Race racism

There exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates, amazon.com

Media Control Don't Question

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