287 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2023
  2. betweentheworldandme1.wordpress.com betweentheworldandme1.wordpress.com
    Chapter 3
    35
    1. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      She alluded to 12 Years a Slave. “There he was,” she said, speaking of Solomon Northup. “He had means. He had a family. He was living like a human being. And one racist act took him back. And the same is true of me. I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It’s all it takes.”

      "12 Years a Slave" is a historical drama film based on the true story of Solomon Northup, a free African American man who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the pre-Civil War United States. The movie depicts his journey as he struggles to survive and maintain his dignity during 12 years of enslavement. It explores themes of brutality, resilience, and the enduring human spirit in the face of injustice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Years_a_Slave_(film)

    21. davide.palacino 20 Dec 2023
      Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And 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. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas.

      Here Coates draws a connection between racism and environmentalism, highlighting how the destructive impact of white supremacist industrial capitalism is actively contributing to the global degradation.

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  3. betweentheworldandme1.wordpress.com betweentheworldandme1.wordpress.com
    Chapter 2
    60
    1. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      Seven years after I saw the pictures of those doors, I received my first adult passport. I wish I had come to it sooner. I wish, when I was back in that French class, that I had connected the conjugations, verbs, and gendered nouns to something grander. I wish someone had told me what that class really was—a gate to some other blue world.

      Coates refers to the first chapter of the book, in which he could not understand why school made him study French; in fact, it is stated "All of it felt so distant to me. I remember sitting in my seventh-grade French class and not having any idea why I was there. I did not know any French people, and nothing around me suggested I ever would. France was a rock rotating in another galaxy, around another sun, in another sky that I would never cross. Why, precisely, was I sitting in this classroom?" Now, Coates defines what he believes to be the real aim of education, something he could not have done without traveling and maturing.

    2. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      Daisy Dukes

      very short trousers that end just below the hip, made from jeans that have been cut short. (Definition of daisy dukes from the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)

    4. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      My Caesar was geometric. My lineup was sharp as a sword.

      both of these sentences refer to a hairstyle. a Caesar or lineup (they're basically the same, or at least very similar, as far as I can tell) is a style where the hair is cut perfectly horizontal across the forehead, and then often cut perfectly vertically near the temples (the dimples/divots on the sides of the forehead, in front of the ears), making a square/rectangle shape that frames the top of the face. calling this haircut "sharp" means that the lines were straight and clean. I found this explanation here: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnglishLearning/comments/jxk1zx/my_caesar_was_geometric_my_lineup_was_sharp_as_a/

    6. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      “Black-on-black crime”

      it is "a phrase or a concept that at times, recently, has been used by some conservatives to ask why the same activists and community members calling for police reform seemingly, in their view, don't express the same outrage when someone who is Black is killed or injured by another Black person." https://abcnews.go.com/US/black-black-crime-loaded-controversial-phrase-heard-amid/story?id=72051613 You can read more about it by reading Bernard D. Headley's ""Black on Black" Crime: The Myth and the Reality" here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29766208

    7. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      But American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream. Historians conjured the Dream. Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories.

      Again, we see Richard T. Hughes' idea of myth of the innocent nation in Coates' writing.

    8. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      A society, almost necessarily, begins every success story with the chapter that most advantages itself, and in America, these precipitating chapters are almost always rendered as the singular action of exceptional individuals. “It only takes one person to make a change,” you are often told. This is also a myth.

      To know more about American exceptionalism, please look at this previous note: https://hyp.is/ktCZOIxxEe6ZfLf-VNUJpA/betweentheworldandme1.wordpress.com/2023/11/15/chapter-2/

    10. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      I would never consider any American citizen pure. I was out of sync with the city. I kept thinking about how southern Manhattan had always been Ground Zero for us. They auctioned our bodies down there, in that same devastated, and rightly named, financial district. And there was once a burial ground for the auctioned there. They built a department store over part of it and then tried to erect a government building over another part. Only a community of right-thinking black people stopped them. I had not formed any of this into a coherent theory. But I did know that Bin Laden was not the first man to bring terror to that section of the city. I never forgot that. Neither should you.

      According to Richard T. Hughes, Coates places upon Ground Zero, the Manhattan area ravaged by the events of 9/11, an interpretation that differs greatly from the generally accepted viewpoint, basing his claim on the premise that "Coates found this habit of forgetting in virtually every nook and corner of American history" and that he "understood that the American claim to innocence is deeply rooted in the claim the Dreamers make that the United States transcends the constraints of history". As we will see when talking about the Civil War, 9/11 is but one example of this concept. HUGHES, RICHARD T., et al. “The Myth of the Innocent Nation: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” Myths America Lives By: White Supremacy and the Stories That Give Us Meaning, University of Illinois Press, 2018, pp. 198–238. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5406/j.ctv65sz08.12. Accessed 26 Dec. 2023.

    14. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      We arrived two months before September 11, 2001. I suppose everyone who was in New York that day has a story. Here is mine:

      The September 11 attacks are a "series of airline hijackings and suicide attacks committed in 2001 by 19 militants associated with the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda against targets in the United States, the deadliest terrorist attacks on American soil in U.S. history." https://www.britannica.com/event/September-11-attacks

    17. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket. It was only after you that I understood this love, that I understood the grip of my mother’s hand.

      Coates adds to what he said in chapter one (https://hyp.is/5OK20ox4Ee6ywbNiaYBeIQ/betweentheworldandme1.wordpress.com/2023/11/15/chapter-2/) with his son being born, he now understands the struggles his parents had to overcome in order to raise him.

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  4. betweentheworldandme1.wordpress.com betweentheworldandme1.wordpress.com
    Chapter 1
    104
    2. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.

      A very powerful and metaphorical expression that reflects on the historical exploitation of African people during the aforementioned era of slavery in America, that perfectly aligns with the idea of body the author thoroughly explained in the first chapter. To know more: https://www.history.com/news/slavery-profitable-southern-economy

    4. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      Son

      The whole book takes the form of a letter from the author to his son. It mimics Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time." If you want to know more, take a look at Kelly Walter Carney's “Brother Outsider: James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Exile Literature.” CLA Journal, vol. 60, no. 4, 2017, pp. 448–57. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26557005. It explores the comparison between James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" and Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Between the World and Me.". In addition to that, it delves into the writers' connections with the Black community, their confrontation with the white community, and their experiences of exile and return, particularly in France. <br /> Also, among many other interesting lines of thoughts. Simon Abramowitsch talks about the general displacement of Coates's son in the text as a whole by noting how after directing addressing him as "son" in the first line, one has to wait roughly five pages before he starts readdressing him intimately ("I write you in your fifteenth year."). In Addition to that, he notices that what fills the void between these two lines are Whiteness and the deeds of white supremacy. To read more refer to: Abramowitsch, Simon. “Addressing Blackness, Dreaming Whiteness: Negotiating 21st-Century Race and Readership in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.” CLA Journal, vol. 60, no. 4, 2017, pp. 458–78. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26557006. Accessed 26 Dec. 2023.

    8. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      Chancellor Williams’s Destruction of Black Civilization

      A very important book that offers a new approach to the research and study of African history, because it shifts the main focus from the history of Arabs and Europeans in Africa to the Africans themselves. It significantly contributed to the comprehension of the current position of the Black community in terms of time and space. His work explores "how we got here and what history and circumstance demand of us to be done to get us to another place, to a higher level of survival". Killens, John Oliver (1975) "Book Review:The Destruction of Black Civilization," New Directions: Vol. 2: Iss. 2, Article 10. Available at: https://dh.howard.edu/newdirections/vol2/iss2/10

    12. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      Black is beautiful—which is to say that the black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin must be guarded against bleach, that our noses and mouths must be protected against modern surgery. We are all our beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before barbarians, must never submit our original self, our one of one, to defiling and plunder.

      The author refers to the fact that African Americans —especially women — have, at times, faced pressure to conform to societal norms and expectations that may have involved covering or downplaying certain aspects of their racial identity. This is due to various factors, including systemic racism, discriminatory practices, and societal expectations. To know more, read: Robinette, Sabrina E., "The Imposition of White Beauty Standards on Black Women" (2019). Student Publications. 847. https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/student_scholarship/847

    13. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality.

      Coates challenges a preconception that dates back to the Civil Rights Movement. Grand people like Martin Luther King and his followers were non-violent and were revered for doing so. On the other hand, aggressive activists were considered deviants. Having said that, Coates wonders why it is always the oppressed that have to maintain this kind of holy aura of morality around them, while tyrants get to do whatever they want. He considers criticizing acts of violence used to protest against unfairness hypocritical in a country such as America, which is built on violence. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Luther-King-Jr/The-Montgomery-bus-boycott

    14. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      Every February my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual review of the Civil Rights Movement. Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera.

      The terms "Freedom Marchers," "Freedom Riders," and "Freedom Summer" refer to different aspects of the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1960s. Each of them represents a specific form of activism aimed at promoting civil rights for African Americans. To know more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Riders#CITEREFArsenault2006 https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis66.htm

      https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim64b.htm

    16. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      The boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket and pulled out a gun

      The ease of obtaining guns in America is influenced by a combination of historical, legal, and cultural factors, such as the Second Amendment of the constitution, varied state laws and the "gun show loophole". The issue of gun access is VERY complex, and there are ongoing debates about the balance between individual rights (given by the constitution) and public safety. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts-about-americans-and-guns/

    19. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      the killers of Michael Brown would go free.

      The killing of Michael Brown took place on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, USA. Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African American, was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a white police officer. The incident sparked widespread protests and became a focal point in the national conversation about police violence and systemic racism. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/michael-brown-killed-by-police-ferguson-mo

    20. davide.palacino 26 Dec 2023
      The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.

      "The Dream" is a very important concept in the book. What he means by it is his own design of the American Dream, which usually refers to the idea that equality and freedom stand as the foundations of the American's nation, and therefore anyone can prosper in the U.S. as long as they work hard for it. The author argues that the foundations are not quality and freedom, but rather the exploitation of Black People. Additionally, he believes that the dream cannot exist without racist injustice, and is therefore incompatible with African American's empowerment.

    21. davide.palacino 24 Dec 2023
      Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock,

      A list of unjust killing of African Americans done by the police without real motives. Those cases started the Black Lives Matter social movement, which promotes anti-racism and tries to highlight acts of racism, racial inequality and discrimination suffered by black people. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Black-Lives-Matter

    23. davide.palacino 24 Dec 2023
      body

      As we will see, the author really stresses on the concept of body. It is a recurring theme during the first part of the novel. To him, racism is not merely a concept, rather, as he will explain later on, a "visceral experience, [...] 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. For an in-depth analysis of the concept of body in Ta-Nehisi Coates's phenomenology of the body, please look at James B. Haile's "Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Phenomenology of the Body". The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 31(3), 493–503. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jspecphil.31.3.0493. The essay explores Ta-Nehisi Coates's book "Between the World and Me" as a materialist cosmology of the body. It delves into Coates's emphasis on the body, particularly the black body, as a key element in understanding race and race relations in America.

    29. davide.palacino 24 Dec 2023
      Prince Jones

      Prince Jones was a young African American man whose tragic death occurred on September 1, 2000, in Fairfax County, Virginia. His death gained attention because it involved a police officer, and it raised questions about the use of deadly force and the circumstances surrounding the incident. He is particularly important figure for the author that will be further analysed in the next chapters. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2000/10/24/decision-on-officer-angers-family/edc1626f-fa4c-4a06-8d92-333f21341c9d/

    48. davide.palacino 24 Dec 2023
      “the Black Aesthetic”

      According to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, the "Black Aesthetic", or "Black Arts Movement", was "a Black nationalism movement that focused on music, literature, drama, and the visual arts made up of Black artists and intellectuals. This was the cultural section of the Black Power movement, in that its participants shared many of the ideologies of Black self-determination, political beliefs, and African American culture". https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/black-power/arts

    55. davide.palacino 24 Dec 2023
      o bald-headed Qs in purple windbreakers and tan Timbs

      As i had troubles understating this description here's the explanation of a user on reddit that surely knows more about African culture: A Q (sometimes spelled Que) is a member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity. Omega Psi Phi was the first black fraternity to be formed at a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) and is a member of the "Divine 9", a group of historically black fraternities and sororities. Their colors are purple and gold, hence the purple windbreakers. https://www.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/j8gyvw/on_a_book_of_tanehisi_coates/

    56. davide.palacino 24 Dec 2023
      There were the high-yellow progeny of AME preachers debating the clerics of Ausar-Set. There were California girls turned Muslim, born anew, in hijab and long skirt. There were Ponzi schemers and Christian cultists, Tabernacle fanatics and mathematical geniuses. It was like listening to a hundred different renditions of “Redemption Song,” each in a different color and key.

      A description of the people of The Yard.

    62. davide.palacino 24 Dec 2023
      My only Mecca was, is, and shall always be Howard University.

      Of course, Coates is not talking about religion here. Instead, he is referring to "a place regarded as a center for a specified group, activity, or interest" (“Mecca.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mecca. Accessed 24 Dec. 2023.). Howard, according to Coates, symbolizes Mecca. HE sees it as a place of pilgrimage for all black people where they can find acceptance and be themselves. This concept is very important, as it is the key to understand the whole following passage. To Coates, Howard is not merely a place of education, rather a safe haven for the Black community.

    67. davide.palacino 24 Dec 2023
      natural as Prometheus hating the birds.

      Prometheus, in Greek mythology is a Titan, a divine being of great strength and intelligence. He is best known for his role in creating humanity and for his defiance of Zeus, the king of the gods. He not only created humans out of clay, be he also granted them knowledge, by stealing fire from Gods. Coates affirms that he hated the birds, and this is because not only because they had gifts from the gods that men did not, but also because his punishment for defying Gods was given by a eagle that would devour his ever regenerating flesh on a daily basis. https://www.greekmythology.com/Titans/Prometheus/prometheus.html

    69. davide.palacino 24 Dec 2023
      Seeds planted in the 1960s, forgotten by so many, sprung up from the ground and bore fruit. Malcolm X, who’d been dead for twenty-five years, exploded out of the small gatherings of his surviving apostles and returned to the world

      Malcolm X was a prominent African American Muslim minister and civil rights activist. He was born on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, and he became a leading figure in the struggle for the rights and empowerment of African Americans. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Malcolm-X

    78. davide.palacino 24 Dec 2023
      We would not kneel before their God. And so I had no sense that any just God was on my side. “The meek shall inherit the earth” meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail. My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.

      "Two-thirds of Black Americans are Protestant, like about four-in-ten Americans overall. The relationship between Black Americans and Protestantism is unusual due to the history of slavery and segregation, which spawned the creation of several Black-led denominations that allowed Black Americans to worship freely. Mostly founded prior to 1900, these historically Black Protestant denominations also supported colleges and helped Black communities in other ways. At the same time, Protestantism alone does not define the Black religious experience in the United States. Before enslaved people in America began converting to Protestantism in sizable numbers during the 1700s, they commonly followed traditional West African religions or Islam. Catholicism, too, has long had a presence among Black Americans, including in Maryland, Kentucky and Louisiana during the slavery era. And in the early 1900s, Islam began attracting thousands of Black Americans with the message that Christianity, like America writ large, had failed to offer them equality. to further delve into the the topic here's the source: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/02/16/a-brief-overview-of-black-religious-history-in-the-u-s/

    81. davide.palacino 24 Dec 2023
      Ecstasy, coke, you say it’s love, it is poison Schools where I learn they should be burned, it is poison

      It comes from "What Goes Around" in the album Stillmatic by Nas. according to Genius: Ecstasy and cocaine are sometimes called love-drugs because of the effect they have on an intoxicated person – they make you laugh and experience emotional high that can be mistaken with love, infatuation etc. In fact, that’s just temporary feelings triggered by the chemicals. Once the drug wears off it all comes back to normal. Or worse – you might feel depressed because you miss the sort of happiness you experience after taking coke or ecstasy, and the only way to feel that is to take another pill of that poison. He pairs those thoughts with school. Nas, in a later album, actually wishes he didn't dropout of high school. You can read more here: https://genius.com/Nas-what-goes-around-lyrics

    103. davide.palacino 24 Dec 2023
      race

      It is important to note that the concept of race, according to modern science, is merely a social construct. When the author talks about race, he means a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society. Here's a more detailed definition of the term: Sense 1a of this entry describes the word race as it is most frequently used: to refer to the various groups that humans are often divided into based on physical traits, these traits being regarded as common among people of a shared ancestry. This use of race dates to the late 18th century, and was for many years applied in scientific fields such as physical anthropology, with race differentiation being based on such qualities as skin color, hair form, head shape, and particular sets of cranial dimensions. Advances in the field of genetics in the late 20th century determined no biological basis for races in this sense of the word, as all humans alive today share 99.99% of their genetic material. For this reason, the concept of distinct human races today has little scientific standing, and is instead understood as primarily a sociological designation, identifying a group sharing some outward physical characteristics and some commonalities of culture and history. “Race.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/race. Accessed 24 Dec. 2023.

    104. davide.palacino 24 Dec 2023
      “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,

      A quote by U.S. president Abraham Lincoln. It was delivered during the American Civil War and goes by the name of "Gettysburg Address"

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    Front matter
    1
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