25 quotes
Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas.
Between the World and Me (2015)
The hammer of criminal justice is the preferred tool of a society that has run out of ideas.
The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.
Between the World and Me (2015)
You actually can’t understand American history without understanding slavery.
Some part of us believes in nonviolence not as an ideal worth striving for, but as a fairy tale passed on to the politically weak.
Racism isn’t just morally wrong, it makes for poor story-telling.
There was a broad, broad consensus that African Americans, for no other reason besides blanket racism, could not be responsible homeowners.
We thought the corner was cool, but more than that we deeply believed that we could do no better, that this tiny parcel was all we deserved in this world of sin.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008)
We are the walking lowest rung, and all that stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008)
No other athlete in a major sport gives so much of his body and gets so little in return than the average player on a NFL team.
Any claim to ourselves, to the hands that secured us, the spine that braced us, and the head that directed us, was contestable.
Between the World and Me (2015)
I recoil at the idea of someone reading my book because they really should read a black author or two. I don't want to be an icebreaker at your corporation's Kwanzaa gathering.
I was young and could not see the weaponry my ancestors had left for me, the shield in the tall brown grass, the ax lying right next to the tree.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008)
I've never felt the pride that is supposed to come with righteous self-defense and justified violence. Whenever it was me on top of someone, whatever my rage in the moment, afterward I always felt sick at having been lowered to the crudest form of communication.
Between the World and Me (2015)
Weakness, misery, does not always elicit sympathy. Perhaps that is because the weakness reminds of what we we fear for ourselves. Or perhaps it reminds us of our own complicity in some broad crime, and more, our presumed helplessness for it to be any other way.
[James Baldwin is] probably the biggest influence on me from a literary perspective.
One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.
Between the World and Me (2015)
My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008)
There was the normal high that comes from the hormones of youth, that fresh sense of being unchained. But also there was the omnipresent feeling that It could go down. In those moments—which back then were all of our moments—your neurology was always code red.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (2008)
Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because ... America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist.
Between the World and Me (2015)