Between the World and Me Quotes

“To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world.” (Chapter 1)

– Ta-Nehisi Coates

Analysis: Coates expands on this assertion by listing “guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease” as some of the elements that assail Black victims. He asserts that such vulnerability is not accidental; instead, it is the product of an intentional policy of forcing people to live under fear.

“The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beatdown, a shooting, or a pregnancy.” (Chapter 1)

– Ta-Nehisi Coates

Analysis: In the street world, alarm and fear are everywhere. Nothing is reliably predicable. This is why surviving the neighborhoods largely boils down to an issue of shielding one’s body. Coates repeatedly stresses the protection of the body as a Black individual’s highest imperative.

“If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left.” (Chapter 1)

– Ta-Nehisi Coates

Analysis: Although Coates’ attitude may seem paradoxical, he firmly asserts that the schools of his youth were as damaging as the neighborhood streets. The schools were little interested in students’ critical thinking or curiosity. Instead, they insisted on compliance with regulations and routines, an expectation also held of Black men in the streets.

“If you’re black, you were born in jail.” (Chapter 1)

– Malcolm X

Analysis: Coates quotes with approval this bleak, pithy saying by Malcolm X. In contrast to the bravado of the streets and the moralistic facade of the schools, Malcolm X, in Coates’ eyes, was authentic and truthful. Like Malcolm X, Coates says he accomplished “reclamation” of his body through books and study.

“I was made for the library, not the classroom.” (Chapter 1)

– Ta-Nehisi Coates

Analysis: Here Coates candidly confesses that, following Malcolm X’s example, he discovered his freedom in books and reading, rather than in the “jail” of the classroom. It was the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University that opened Coates’ horizons.

“[The enslaved] were people turned to fuel for the American machine.” (Chapter 1)

– Ta-Nehisi Coates

Analysis: For Coates, slavery is never to be romanticized or glossed over as “the peculiar institution.” Slavery is an unimaginably cruel and heartless confiscation of other individuals’ bodies for economic profit. Readers will note how the author’s metaphors dehumanize both the enslaved (said to be “fuel”) and the slaveholders (“the American machine”).

“Black people love their children with a kind of obsession.” (Chapter 2)

– Ta-Nehisi Coates

Analysis: Coates’ comment on Black parent-child relationships underscores his sensitive appreciation of the obligations of protection and nurturance. Such obligation underlies the very creation of his book, meant as a guide and inspiration for Samori, his son and only child. Coates’ book is an attempt to teach Samori what Coates’ father tried to teach him with beatings.

“And still you are called to struggle… because it assures you an honorable and sane life.” (Chapter 2)

– Ta-Nehisi Coates

Analysis: In this exhortation, Coates directly addresses his son. Coates points out that history is complex, exhibiting many unexpected interrelationships. Struggle, however, is the inescapable challenge for Black people, who are called upon from their earliest youth to challenge systems of oppression and inequality. It is only through such resistance that Black people can reclaim their autonomy and agency.

“It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country.” (Chapter 2)

– Ta-Nehisi Coates

Analysis: By the word “below,” Coates means “lowest class” or “most inferior rank.” Ever since 1776, or even before, Americans needed to construct the existence of an underclass, the members of which they could oppress. Black people, who so often were enslaved in America’s early centuries, fulfilled this need.

“Black power is the dungeon-side view of Monticello—which is to say, the view taken in struggle.” (Chapter 3)

– Ta-Nehisi Coates

Analysis: This quotation contains an allusion—the reference to Monticello, the mountaintop home of Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) in northern Virginia. Jefferson was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, as well as the third president of the United States (1801–09). He was also a slaveholder and father of several illegitimate children by his slave Sally Hemings (c. 1773–1835). The dungeon-side view—that of slavery—became a source of Black power because It “illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors,” Coates elaborates.