coates2015

@Book{ coates2015,
    author = {Ta-Nehisi Coates},
    title = {Between the World and Me},
    address = {New York},
    publisher = {Spiegel and Grau},
    year = 2015,
}

p. 10: “specious hope” (Coates isn’t anti-hope, the way some of his most critical white reviewers have claimed; he’s anti-specious-hope

p. 21: repeated mention of Coates’s son saying, “I’ve got to go”—reminds me of Luther Adams’ closing comments at 20150508 - Stephanie Camp Conference.

p. 44: history “weaponized” …

p. 47: “I went into this investigation imagining history to be a unified narrative …”

p. 53: “I began to feel that something more than a national trophy case was needed if I was to be truly free, and for that I have the history department of Howard University to thank”

p. 69:

Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress-making and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for no more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. 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.

p. 96:

A society, almost necessarily, begins every success story with the chapter that most advantages itself, and in America, these precipitating chapters are almost rendered as the singular action of exceptional individuals. “It only takes one person to make a change,” you are often told. This is also a myth. Perhaps one person can make a change, but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen.

p. 97: “people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration”

p. 115: the purpose of racecraft: “the organization of people beneath, and beyond, the umbrella of rights”