Between the World and Me

What I appreciated the most in this book was the glimpse of a perspective of an urban black young man in America. The best books affect one's world view and Ta-Nehisi managed to do that for me, subtly. The concepts he weaves through the book - The Dream, “the people who think they are white,” the violation of the body - are interesting to ponder and useful to apply later. The book is not about solutions and that's okay. The illustration of problems, done in an emotional, personal, honest tone, is its strength. But it's not without flaws. Ta-Nehisi is weakest when he makes sweeping generalizations (e.g., why lump firefighters with police?) and overstates his claim (e.g., that suburbia is primarily a result of white flight).

The quotes that stood out to me, for one reason or another, are:

“Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds were children did not regularly fear for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television resting in my living room. In the evenings I would sit before this television bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world. There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and they're only want was a popular girlfriend and they're only worry was poison oak.”

“We could not get out. The ground we walked was trip-wired. The air we breathed was toxic. The water stunted our growth. We could not get out.”

“I was learning the craft of poetry which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me years ago – the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth – loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts... Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.”

“The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its wheel and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.”

“Malcolm made sense to me not out of a love of violence but because nothing in my life prepared me to understand tear gas as deliverance, as those Black History Month martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement did.”

“You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this is essential fact.”

“Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.”

“The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons in ghettos.”