between the world and me quotations (race)

ta-nehisi coates - between the world and me

"Fully 60% of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail." (27)

re: Queen Nzinga, "who ruled in central Africa in the 16th century, resisting the Portuguese... When the Dutch ambassador tried to humiliate her by refusing her a seat, Nzinga had shown her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body." (45)

"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." (70)

"You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured out very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold." (71)

"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." (79)

"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.'" (90-91)

"I am ashamed I made an error, knowing that our errors always cost us more." (97)

"Destroying a black body was permissible--but it would be better to do it efficiently." (112)

"She compared America to Rome. She said she thought the glory days of this country had long ago passed, and even those glory days were sullied: They had been built on the bodies of others. 'And we can't get the message,' she said. 'We don't understand that we are embracing out deaths.'" (144)