I recently read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisis Coates. It was by far one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read, offering an eye-opening view of racism and race in America.
I won’t do it the injustice of offering a summary or notes, you simply need to read it. I will, however, provide some quotes of passages that brought me to a halt with the beauty of their dark truth.
Like this quote on how Slavery can’t be generalized to one blob of humanity:
“Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as 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 dressmaking 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 text, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold he mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she can see if the enslaved.”
Or these on the insane material interest America had in Slavery:
“At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies-cotton-was America’s primary export.”
This literal quote from Mississippi during the civil war:
“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world.”
And this, on how racism translated into nearly every experience of his life, including a luxurious vacation to Paris:
“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.”
Read it. Go to your library and borrow a copy. Life hack: You can read e-books from almost any public library by creating an account with that library online, even if you don’t live in that city. Just read it.