287 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2023
  2. betweentheworldandme1.wordpress.com betweentheworldandme1.wordpress.com
    Chapter 2
    57
    55. davide.palacino 19 Dec 2023
      sensitivity training

      training in a small interacting group that is designed to increase each individual's awareness of his or her own feelings and the feelings of others and to enhance interpersonal relations through the exploration of the behavior, needs, and responses of the individuals making up the group. “Sensitivity training.” Merriam-Webster.com Medical Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/sensitivity%20training. Accessed 19 Dec. 2023.

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  3. Nov 2023
  4. betweentheworldandme1.wordpress.com betweentheworldandme1.wordpress.com
    Chapter 1
    29
    1. davide.palacino 27 Nov 2023
      The girl from Chicago understood this too, and she understood something more—that all are not equally robbed of their bodies, that the bodies of women are set out for pillage in ways I could never truly know. And she was the kind of black girl who’d been told as a child that she had better be smart because her looks wouldn’t save her, and then told as a young woman that she was really pretty for a dark-skinned girl.

      A further development of the concept of body. As the author matures and meets new people, he realises that the appropriation of Black bodies is not equal, and that there are certain groups that are in greater danger than others.

    2. davide.palacino 27 Nov 2023
      I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more.

      The final point Coates makes to make his child understand that racism is not a mere concept, but rather a very tangible thing that needs to be dealt with case by case, and that heavily wounds the flesh.

    3. davide.palacino 27 Nov 2023
      And now here they were, The Cabal, The Coven, The Others, The Monsters, The Outsiders, The Faggots, The Dykes, dressed in all their human clothes. I am black, and have been plundered and have lost my body. But perhaps I too had the capacity for plunder, maybe I would take another human’s body to confirm myself in a community. Perhaps I already had. Hate gives identity.

      I found this to be a very lucid, intimate and possibly unexpected thought from someone who has been discriminated all his life. Coates realizes that being being discriminated does not necessarily means being pure, and that there is a very high risk of discriminating others just for the sake of validating oneself.

    5. davide.palacino 27 Nov 2023
      I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself.

      At Howard, Coates goes through his intellectual evolution. This is the moment in which he uncovers from the veil that blinded him and realises that The Dream he always yearned for is flawed and false, because it rests on African Americans' backs. He suggests that African Americans must not try to "live the American Dream" and aspire to live as whites, but rather that they have to find their own way of living (thus mirroring the differences between the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power advocates that came later).

    6. davide.palacino 27 Nov 2023
      The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.

      This a further analysis of the author idea's of education in school. He once again brands school as a tool of reproduction of ideas and prefers the library, as there the reader has agency over his readings and can decide by himself what he deems necessary.

    7. davide.palacino 27 Nov 2023
      I was left with a brawl of ancestors, a herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as often marching away from each other.

      Again, the author reiterates the idea of the complexity of history. One cannot expect to study it and find an absolute truth, but rather a series of different ideas and arguments.

    11. davide.palacino 27 Nov 2023
      tapes of Malcolm’s speeches—” Message to the Grassroots,” “The Ballot or the Bullet”

      They are both public speeches delivered by Malcolm X. The former was delivered on 1963, whereas the latter on 1964.

    13. davide.palacino 27 Nov 2023
      The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. How could the schools?

      He feels that school is a mere tool of reproduction of concepts that seem very distant to his reality, and that it can in no way help him.

    14. davide.palacino 27 Nov 2023
      The streets were not my only problem. If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left.

      In this quote, Coates describes a concept that may not be so obvious. He argues that schools were a dangerous place as well, because errors made in school had consequences just as if you messed up in the streets. The difference was only the delayed time of punishment to the body.

    15. davide.palacino 26 Nov 2023
      I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me.

      The author further works on the metaphor of a barrier separating two worlds.

    19. davide.palacino 26 Nov 2023
      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 especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all 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.

      This passage is really important, because it describes the process of learning. In fact, it leads to more question, opinions and theories. Coates understands that he will not be able to find an official explanation of Black History, but rather as an intricate mass of authors arguing with each other. His previous views of Africans as nobility shatters, and he puts everything into perspective. He realizes that no "race" can be defined as wholly "good", and that the point of education is about being able to see the world in its complexity.

    20. davide.palacino 26 Nov 2023
      violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit.

      Coates makes a very interesting point about the education given to African Americans. They did not only experience violence in their life outside of home, but they also had to deal with their parents' violence, that educated their sons very harshly because of fear.

    21. davide.palacino 26 Nov 2023
      America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men

      Another reference to the myth of American exceptionalism, specifically its religious dimension.

    25. davide.palacino 26 Nov 2023
      The crews, the young men who’d transmuted their fear into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel any sense of security and power.

      Coates' lucid description shatters a prejudice about young men in the streets that wear jewellery, play loud music and sell drugs. They are, according to the author, merely humans whose marginalized existence led them to a certain lifestyle that aims to self-protection.

    26. davide.palacino 26 Nov 2023
      America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.

      American exceptionalism in one of American's myths described by Heike Paul in her book "The myths that made America.". In the words of Byron E. Shafer, American exceptionalism is "the notion that the United States was created differently, - essentially on its own terms and within its own context. It derives from three different dimensions: 1: The religious dimension: as described by Deborah Madsen, American exceptionalism "is used frequently to describe the development of American cultural identity from Puritan origins to the present". The puritan rhetoric of the Promised land can be in fact considered to be the origin of the phenomenon. 2: The political dimension: in the discourses of America's founding fathers, one can see the creation of a mythology that describes a shared sense of a secularized doctrine of US-American predestination. 3: The economic dimension: it is often seen as a precondition for individual success, which is mostly understood in economic terms. It valorises self-interest as legitimate and necessary for the well-being of the body politic.

    29. davide.palacino 26 Nov 2023
      The trouble came almost immediately. I did not find a coherent tradition marching lockstep but instead factions, and factions within factions. Hurston battled Hughes, Du Bois warred with Garvey, Harold Cruse fought everyone. I felt myself at the bridge of a great ship that I could not control because C.L.R. James was a great wave and Basil Davidson was a swirling eddy, tossing me about.

      Coates realized the extent of investigation that has been done before him. He struggles to put together a coherent narrative. As we will read in a later passage, he will be able to overcome this struggle by defining what education really is.

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    Front matter
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