Such a beautiful and powerful book. His writing is almost like poetry.
4/24/16
- Race
- Race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.
- 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.
- They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.
- America / Society
- American exceptionalism: One cannot, atone, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error.
- It is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and ignore the great even done in all of our names.
- A society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.
- Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King as excluding nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.
- 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. It’s 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.
- Her disposition toward life was that of an elite athlete who knows the opponent is dirty and the refs are on the take, but also knows the championship is one game away.
- Plunder had matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline.
- This revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. it has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky.
- Growing up
- My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us.
- None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. we could not control our enemies’ number, strength, nor weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends.
- Education
- I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity.
- When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing.
- Black history month: It seemed that the month could not mass without a series of films dedicated to the calories of being beaten on camera… Why are they showing this to us?
- I have spent much of my studies searching for the right question by which i might fully understand the breach between the world and me.
- I was always translating
- “politically conscious” – as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.
- The Dream
- It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own special Dream but would break all the dreams, all the the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.
- My great error was not that i had accepted someone else’s dream but that i had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
- “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus”
- Slavery
- never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. never forget that for 250 yeays black people were born into chains – whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
- The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned into fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance – no matter how improved – as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children.
- southern Manhattan had always been Ground Zero for us. They auctioned our bodies down there… Bin Laden was not the first man to bring terror to that section of the city. I never forgot that.
- Police
- You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity, training, and body cameras. these are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them.
- should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner?
- Conclusion
- I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggles for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, and same habit that sees our bodies sowed away in prisons and ghettos.