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feature: ta-nehisi coates explores america’s racial divide with new book addressed to his son, ‘between the world and me’

July 13, 2015

Check out the new book from acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, ‘Between The World And Me’ – The Atlantic correspondent’s exploration of America’s racial divide and the history behind it. Addressed to his teenage son, Coates “shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder.” Read some extracts below and watch this interview with the author here.

By Alexander Aplerku, AFROPUNK Contributor

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“Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”

“There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

“To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can protect you only with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or succeeded at something much darker.”

Available here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25147754-between-the-world-and-me 

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