BOOK: Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates)

This is a book from my school's library that I never returned. Yes, it's that good. Finished 6/16/2020.

Between the World and Me is a deeply personal book written to the author's son Samori. He weaves his story of the streets of Baltimore to attending The Mecca (Howard) and living in New York. We follow his journey of knowledge trying to understand the world and the breach between him and the dreamers. He has the ability to address the largest questions of American history and the most intimate concerns of a father-son. It's this all-encapsulating narrative that makes the book, so unveiling and sincere. His words speak for themselves and I'd like to share my favorite quotes from his book.

"The dream rests on our back"

" 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."(A mother who lost her son speaking to samori)

"Good intention is a hall pass through history"

"Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus"

"The point of my education was to break the dream and see the humanity in all it's terribleness"

'All night forever for the slave"

“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."

"To do evil a human being must, first of all, believe that what he is doing is good or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law"

"I wanted you to claim the world"

“Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline.”

"Black is beautiful"

"Our bodies are precious"

“all Black people [are] kings in exile,”

"Just some good ole boys, never meanin no harm" (speaking about images of the confederacy in American culture)