Misc Stuff 2

Reading
I finished Ta-nehisi Coat’s Between the World and Me in a few days. It brought me back to late night conversations outside Butler library and Hartley lounge with black friends who were articulating a reality I didn’t understand at the time and still don’t. Lines I liked:
  • There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak.
  • I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me.
  • I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined.
  • My working theory then held all black people as kings in exile, a nation of original men severed from our original names and our majestic Nubian culture. Surely this was the message I took from gazing out on the Yard. Had any people, anywhere, ever been as sprawling and beautiful as us?
  • I shared with him a healthy skepticism and a deep belief that we could somehow read our way out
  • There was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning in black blood. Black blood wasn’t black; black skin wasn’t even black.
  • My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
  • I am black, and have been plundered and have lost my body. But perhaps I too had the capacity for plunder, maybe I would take another human’s body to confirm myself in a community.
  • Hate gives identity.
  • So much of my life was defined by not knowing.
  • And so there was, all about her, a knowledge of cosmic injustices, the same knowledge I’d glimpsed all those years ago watching my father reach for his belt, watching the suburban dispatches in my living room, watching the golden-haired boys with their toy trucks and football cards, and dimly perceiving the great barrier between the world and me.
  • Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
  • Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth.
  • History is not solely in our hands. And still you are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life.
  • To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.
  • And godless though I am, the fact of being human, the fact of possessing the gift of study, and thus being remarkable among all the matter floating through the cosmos, still awes me.
  • When I was a boy, no portion of my body suffered more than my eyes.
  • In America I was part of an equation—even if it wasn’t a part I relished.
  • And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.
  • She could not acknowledge any discomfort, and she did not speak of herself as remarkable, because it conceded too much, because it sanctified tribal expectations when the only expectation that mattered should be rooted in an assessment of Mable Jones.
  • 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.
Listening to
Links I liked

Leave a Reply