Fluent Essays

Complete the documentation requirements. For specific details on what is required for the research paper, please read the  Research Paper Prompt . The point of the proposal is to give me the chance to give you early feedback on your topic.  It will also give you the opportunity to specify your topic (narrowing it if need be), pose your research question(s), and begin formulating an argument. I’ve chosen your main question for you:  How does systemic racism impact our society?  However, it’ll be up to you to ask more specific versions of that question.  Some possibilities: · How does the War on Drugs impact society? · How does negative media representation of people of color impact society? · How does mandatory sentencing impact society? The format of your proposal should be a minimum of two thoroughly developed paragraphs.  The first paragraph should explore the significance of the larger question (How does systemic racism impact our society?).  Your aim here is to answer why this is an important question. In the second paragraph, pose your specific research question(s) and explore the significance of each of them.  Your aim here is to answer why it matters how negative media representation (for example) impacts society. Lastly, if you can get a working thesis statement out of this, please include it in your proposal.  You can just include it below the final paragraph of your proposal under the heading of “Thesis Statement,” there’s no need to try to incorporate it into the proposal itself. PLEASE UNDERSTAND:  This proposal is not a contract, its just an exercise to get your mind working on what youll be writing about.  If you submit a proposal this week for systemic racism in education, and three weeks later you decide you really want to focus on systemic racism in healthcare, then no worries, you can absolutely change directions.  You dont have to notify me of this change in plan, but Im always happy to talk about it with you if youd like. Example of a Research Proposal: Today in America racism is a very important topic of conversation. Many people argued that racism no longer existed because of the election of Barack Obama, a black president, this is sadly untrue. We have seen this to be proven untrue in many ways but especially in the election of Donald Trump and the actions that have followed. Some people believe racism only affects a few targeted groups but that simply is not true. We see its effects in interracial dating, economics, tax distribution, and public prejudices, all of which affects our larger society. To get a complete look at how these factors affect our society, I will be looking at the process of the fight to decriminalize interracial relationships as well as the approval rates from then until now. I will also be looking at the personal experiences of other individuals who faced or still face discrimination because they choose to love someone outside their race. To examine the economic effects, I will be researching agriculture and other harsh labor jobs to see if the mass deportations has affected production and in turn the public access to goods. In the tax distributions I will examine how much money goes into funding prisons and how much it has increased with increasing prison populations. I will also look at where money has been cut from to be able to fund prisons like education and public assistance. Finally, I will be looking at public instances of prejudice. To research for this I will be looking at profiling in stores, restaurants, and other locations. Research Paper:  Systemic Racism’s Impact & Possible Solutions Assignment:  After numerous class discussions, viewing Ava DuVernay’s documentary, 13th, and reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and various class handouts, I’m asking you to discuss the following in no less than 2,000 words: 1. Provide a thorough description of systemic racism and how it works. 2. Explain 2-3 ways in which systemic racism impacts 3. Propose 2-3 possible solutions to combat systemic racism, and then choose one of them as your preferred solution. Please compare and contrast these solutions to demonstrate why your preferred solution is better than the other(s). Requirements:                           1. 2,000-2,500 words, plus a Title, Abstract, and References page (see handout for format). 2. No less than seven (7) academic sources, at least two of which MUST be chosen from the works mentioned above (Coates, Alexander, and Duvernay). Additional sources are optional but must be academic in nature. 3. Define systemic racism. 4. Discuss no less than two (2) ways systemic racism impacts society. 5. Propose no less than two (2) solutions to the problems you discuss. 6. Compare and contrast your chosen solutions and choose one of them as your preferred solution. 7. Present a clear, arguable thesis statement in the introduction that clearly states your chosen problems and your proposed solutions. 8. MUST be written in a formal, academic tone (third person). 9. Strict adherence to APA formatting (12 pt. Times New Roman font, 1-inch margins all around, double-spaced, etc.). The successful paper will do the following: · Focus on the topics provided with adequate examples/examination of these topics · Provide evidence (quotes) that demonstrate the topics you’re analyzing · Demonstrate critical thinking, reading, and writing skills by making sound claims and supporting them with evidence in an organized and logical manner · Have well organized paragraphs with clear topic sentences · Effectively use transitions between paragraphs and ideas · Support the thesis statement and other claims with textual evidence and examples · Come to a conclusion that moves beyond summary · Effectively synthesize textual material via quotations Please Do NOT: · Use more than one (1) block quote. · Write in the first or second person (unless you are directly quoting someone) · Use generalities or offensive language in any way By Michelle Alexander Opinion Columnist Nov. 8, 2018 In the midterms, Michigan became the first state in the Midwest to legalize marijuana, Florida restored the vote to over 1.4 million people with felony convictions, and Louisiana passed a constitutional amendment requiring unanimous jury verdicts in felony trials. These are the latest examples of the astonishing progress that has been made in the last several years on a wide range of criminal justice issues. Since 2010, when I published “The New Jim Crow” — which argued that a system of legal discrimination and segregation had been born again in this country because of the war on drugs and mass incarceration — there have been significant changes to drug policy, sentencing and re-entry, including “ban the box” initiatives aimed at eliminating barriers to employment for formerly incarcerated people. This progress is unquestionably good news, but there are warning signs blinking brightly. Many of the current reform efforts contain the seeds of the next generation of racial and social control, a system of “e-carceration” that may prove more dangerous and more difficult to challenge than the one we hope to leave behind. Bail reform is a case in point. Thanks in part to new laws and policies — as well as actions like the mass bailout of inmates in New York City jails that’s underway — the unconscionable practice of cash bail is finally coming to an end. In August, California became the first state to decide to get rid of its cash bail system; last year, New Jersey virtually eliminated the use of money bonds. But what’s taking the place of cash bail may prove even worse in the long run. In Opinion | The Newest Jim Crow - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/opinion/sunday/criminal-justice-re... 1 of 5 11/14/2018, 7:18 AM California, a presumption of detention will effectively replace eligibility for immediate release when the new law takes effect in October 2019. And increasingly, computer algorithms are helping to determine who should be caged and who should be set “free.” Freedom — even when it’s granted, it turns out — isn’t really free. Under new policies in California, New Jersey, New York and beyond, “risk assessment” algorithms recommend to judges whether a person who’s been arrested should be released. These advanced mathematical models — or “weapons of math destruction” as data scientist Cathy O’Neil calls them — appear colorblind on the surface but they are based on factors that are not only highly correlated with race and class, but are also significantly influenced by pervasive bias in the criminal justice system. As O’Neil explains, “It’s tempting to believe that computers will be neutral and objective, but algorithms are nothing more than opinions embedded in mathematics.” Challenging these biased algorithms may be more difficult than challenging discrimination by the police, prosecutors and judges. Many algorithms are fiercely guarded corporate secrets. Those that are transparent — you can actually read the code — lack a public audit so it’s impossible to know how much more often they fail for people of color. Even if you’re lucky enough to be set “free” from a brick-and-mortar jail thanks to a computer algorithm, an expensive monitoring device likely will be shackled to your ankle — a GPS tracking device provided by a private company that may charge you around $300 per month, an involuntary leasing fee. Your permitted zones of movement may make it difficult or impossible to get or keep a job, attend school, care for your kids or visit family members. You’re effectively sentenced to an open-air digital prison, one that may not extend beyond your house, your block or your neighborhood. One false step (or one malfunction of the GPS tracking device) will bring cops to your front door, your workplace, or wherever they find you and snatch you right back to jail. Who benefits from this? Private corporations. According to a report released last month by the Center for Media Justice, four large corporations — including the GEO Opinion | The Newest Jim Crow - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/opinion/sunday/criminal-justice-re... 2 of 5 11/14/2018, 7:18 AM Group, one of the largest private prison companies — have most of the private contracts to provide electronic monitoring for people on parole in some 30 states, giving them a combined annual revenue of more than $200 million just for e-monitoring. Companies that earned millions on contracts to run or serve prisons have, in an era of prison restructuring, begun to shift their business model to add electronic surveillance and monitoring of the same population. Even if old-fashioned prisons fade away, the profit margins of these companies will widen so long as growing numbers of people find themselves subject to perpetual criminalization, surveillance, monitoring and control. Who loses? Nearly everyone. A recent analysis by a Brookings Institution fellow found that “efforts to reduce recidivism through intensive supervision are not working.” Reducing the requirements and burdens of community supervision, so that people can more easily hold jobs, care for children and escape the stigma of criminality “would be a good first step toward breaking the vicious incarceration cycle,” the report said. Many reformers rightly point out that an ankle bracelet is preferable to a prison cell. Yet I find it difficult to call this progress. As I see it, digital prisons are to mass incarceration what Jim Crow was to slavery. If you asked slaves if they would rather live with their families and raise their own children, albeit subject to “whites only signs,” legal discrimination and Jim Crow segregation, they’d almost certainly say: I’ll take Jim Crow. By the same token, if you ask prisoners whether they’d rather live with their families and raise their children, albeit with nearly constant digital surveillance and monitoring, they’d almost certainly say: I’ll take the electronic monitor. I would too. But hopefully we can now see that Jim Crow was a less restrictive form of racial and social control, not a real alternative to racial caste systems. Similarly, if the goal is to end mass incarceration and mass criminalization, digital prisons are not an answer. They’re just another way of posing the question. Some insist that e-carceration is “a step in the right direction.” But where are we going with this? A growing number of scholars and activists predict that “e- gentrification” is where we’re headed as entire communities become trapped in digital Opinion | The Newest Jim Crow - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/opinion/sunday/criminal-justice-re... 3 of 5 11/14/2018, 7:18 AM prisons that keep them locked out of neighborhoods where jobs and opportunity can be found. If that scenario sounds far-fetched, keep in mind that mass incarceration itself was unimaginable just 40 years ago and that it was born partly out of well-intentioned reforms — chief among them mandatory sentencing laws that liberal proponents predicted would reduce racial disparities in sentencing. While those laws may have looked good on paper, they were passed within a political climate that was overwhelmingly hostile and punitive toward poor people and people of color, resulting in a prison-building boom, an increase in racial and class disparities in sentencing, and a quintupling of the incarcerated population. Fortunately, a growing number of advocates are organizing to ensure that important reforms, such as ending cash bail, are not replaced with systems that view poor people and people of color as little more than commodities to be bought, sold, evaluated and managed for profit. In July, more than 100 civil rights, faith, labor, legal and data science groups released a shared statement of concerns regarding the use of pretrial risk assessment instruments; numerous bail reform groups, such as Chicago Community Bond Fund, actively oppose the expansion of e-carceration. If our goal is not a better system of mass criminalization, but instead the creation of safe, caring, thriving communities, then we ought to be heavily investing in quality schools, job creation, drug treatment and mental health care in the least advantaged communities rather than pouring billions into their high-tech management and control. Fifty years ago, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned that “when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” We failed to heed his warning back then. Will we make a different choice today? Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. Michelle Alexander became a New York Times columnist in 2018. She is a civil rights lawyer and advocate, legal scholar and author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” Opinion | The Newest Jim Crow - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/opinion/sunday/criminal-justice-re... 4 of 5 11/14/2018, 7:18 AM A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline: The Newest Jim Crow Opinion | The Newest Jim Crow - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/opinion/sunday/criminal-justice-re... 5 of 5 11/14/2018, 7:18 AM BY TA-NEHISI COATES Between the World and Me The Beautiful Struggle Between the World and Me Between the World and Me I, Ta-N ehisi Coates SPIEGEL & GRAU NEW YORK --- ----------- ------- ---------· . ~--.,;•.· ! Between tlze World and Me is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed. Copyright© 2015 byTa-Nehisi Coates All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Spi~gel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. SPIEGEL & GRAU and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. The title of this work is drawn from the poem Between the World and Me by Richard Wright, from Wliite Man Listen! copyright© 1957 by Richard Wright. Used by permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate ofRichardWright. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Chris Calhoun Agency: Excerpt from Ka Ba by Amiri Baraka, copyright© Estate of Amiri Baraka. Reprinted by permission of the Chris Calhoun Agency. John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate ofRichardWright: Excerpt from Between the World and Me from Mite Man Listen! by Richard Wright, copyright© 1957 by Richard Wright. Reprinted by permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate of Richard Wright. Sonia Sanchez: Excerpt from Malcolm from Shake Loose My Skin by Sonia Sanchez (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), copyright © 1999 by Sonia Sanchez. Reprinted by permission of Sonia Sanchez. ISBN 978-0-8129-9354-7 eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64598-6 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper randomhousebooks.com spiegelandgrau.com 19 18 17 16 15 14 Book design by Caroline Cunningham For David and Kenyatta, who believed https://spiegelandgrau.com https://randomhousebooks.com https://spiegelandgrau.com https://randomhousebooks.com And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing, Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me . ... -RICHARD WRIGHT Between the World and Me I. Do not speak to me of martyrdom, of men who die to be remembered on some parish day. I dont believe in dying though, I too shall die. And violets like castanets will echo me. SONIA SANCHEZ Son, Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote stu­ dio on the far west side of Manhattan. A satellite closed the miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week. The host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she turned to the subject of my body, al­ though she did not mention it specifically. But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt 6 7 TA-NEHISJ COATES that white Americas progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this ques­ tion is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history. There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and Amer­ icas heresies-torture, theft, enslavement-are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare them­ selves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln de­ clared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth, he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant government of the people but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term peo­ ple to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus Americas problem is not its betrayal of government of the people, but the means by which the people ac­ quired their names. This leads us to another equally important ideal, one BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of race as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism-the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them­ inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as be­ yond the handiwork of men. But 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. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the pre­ eminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible-this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hope­ lessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white. These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the m;chinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white-Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish-and if all our na­ tional hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I can- 8 9 TA-NEHISI COATES not call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tast­ ings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging oflife, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the de­ struction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of chil­ dren; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies. The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to dis­ cover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and no­ blest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing be­ tween 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 countrymens claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I pro­ pose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral stan­ dard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innoc~nce at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ig- BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME nore the great evil ·done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury. I think you know. I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you be­ cause this was the year you saw 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-b,;und to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someones grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be de­ stroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And de­ struction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held re­ sponsible. 11 10 TA-NEHISI COATES There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men en­ forcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. 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 dis­ lodges 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 regres­ sions all land, with great violence, upon the body. That Sunday, with that host, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of an eleven-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about hope. And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indis­ tinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. 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, know­ ing 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. That was the week you learned that the killers of Mi­ chael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 P.M. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indict­ ment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, Ive got to go, and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didnt hug you, and I didnt comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country; that this is your 12 TA-NEHISJ COATES world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately an­ swers itself. This must seem strange to you. We live in a goal­ oriented era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preor­ dained American glory. In accepting both the chaos of his­ tory and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live-specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as Gods handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I have asked the question through my read­ ing and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother, your aunt Janai, your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in nationalist 1nyth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant inter­ rogation, of confrontation with the brutality 9£ my coun­ try, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment. .. • ifi.. : .. t L i I f 14 TA-NEHISI COATES And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were power:fully, ada­ mantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young life, though I had not always recognized it as such. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood,.in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a cata­ log of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired. I saw it in their customs of war. I was no older than five, sitting out on the front steps of my home on Woodbrook Avenue, watching two shirtless boys circle each other close and buck shoulders. From then on, I knew that there was a ritual to a street fight, bylaws and codes that, in their very BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 15 need, attested to all the vulnerability of the black teenage bodies. I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. Keep my name out your mouth; they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vas­ elined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other. I felt the fear in the visits to my Nanas home in Phila­ delphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I knew that my fathers father was dead and that my uncle Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who slipped me money to care for you. 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 someo~e might steal me away, because that is https://neighborhood,.in 16 TA-NEHISI COATES exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear. Have they told you this story?When your grandmother was sixteen years old a young man knocked on her door. The young man was your Nana Jos boyfriend. No one else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother got there first. She asked the young man to leave. Then she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so that she might remember how easily she could lose her body. Ma never forgot. I remember her clutching my small hand tightly as we crossed the street. She would tell me that ifl ever let go and were killed by an onrushing car, she would beat me back to life. When I was six, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for _me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done--he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dads voice--Either I can beat him, or the police: Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didnt. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 17 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. What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest humor to cope. We stood in the alley where we shot bas­ ketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything--cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our par­ ents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge. 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 nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the cor­ rect and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has be­ come 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, 18 TA-NEHISI COATES 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 suc­ ceeded at something much darker. However you call it, the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of the world. It does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black-what matters is our condition, what mat­ ters is the system that makes your body breakable. The revelation of these forces, a series of great changes, has unfolded over the course of my life. The changes are still unfolding and will likely continue until I die. I was eleven years old, standing out in the parking lot in front of the 7 -Eleven, watching a crew of older boys standing near the street. They yelled and gestured at ... who? ... another boy, young, like me, who stood there, almost smiling, gamely throwing up his hands. He had already learned the lesson he would teach me that day: that his body was in constant jeopardy. Who knows what brought him to that knowledge? The projects, a drunken stepfather, an older brother concussed by police, a cousin pinned in the city jail. That he was outnumbered did not matter because the whole world had outnumbered him long ago, and what do numbers matter? This was a war for the possession of his body and that would be the war of his whole life. I stood there for some seconds, marveling at the older boys beautiful sense of fashion. They all wore ski jackets, the kind which, in my day, mothers put on layaway in Sep- BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 19 tember, then piled up overtime hours so as to have the thing wrapped and ready for Christmas. I focused in on a light-skinned boy with a long head and small eyes. He was scowling at another boy, who was standing close to me. It was just before three in the afternoon. I was in sixth grade. School had just let out, and it was not yet the fighting weather of early spring. What was the exact problem here? Who could know? The boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket and ptilled out a gun. I recall it in the slowest motion, as though in a dream. There the boy stood, with the gun brandished, which he slowly untucked, tucked, then un­ tucked once more, and in his small eyes I saw a surging rage that could, in an instant, erase my body. That was 1986. That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful children-fell upon them random and relentless, like great sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not under­ stand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood across from me holding my entire body in his small hands. The boy did not shoot. His friends ptilled him back. He did not need to shoot. He had affirmed my place in the order of things. He had let it be known how easily I could be selected. I took the subway home that day, processing the episode all alone. I did not tell my parents. I did not tell 20 TA-NEHISI COATES my teachers, and if! told my friends I would have done so with all the excitement needed to obscure the fear that came over me in that moment. I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there be­ yond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large televi­ sion resting in my living room. In the evenings I would sit before this television bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world. There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak. That other world was suburban and endless, organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sun­ daes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and glens. Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the Ameri­ can galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 21 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 be­ tween that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, ir­ repressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape. Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very different from my own. The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you. And you have no need of dispatches because you have seen so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants­ their homes, their hobbies-up close. I dont know what it means to grow up with a black president, social networks, omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their natural hair. What I know is that when they loosed the killer of Michael Brown, you said, Ive got to go. And that cut me because, for all our differing worlds, at your age my feeling was exactly the same. And I recall that even then I had not yet begun to imagine the perils that tangle us. You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us. Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt it- 22 TA-NEHISI COATES self. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat­ down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives un­ scathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrill­ ing. This is what the rappers mean when they pronounce themselves addicted to the streets or in love with the game:• I imagine they feel something akin to parachutists, rock climbers, BASE jumpers, and others who choose to live on the edge. Of course we chose nothing. And I have never believed the brothers who claim to run, much less own, the city. We did not design the streets. We do not fund them. We do not preserve them. But I was there, nevertheless, charged like all the others with the protec­ tion of my body. The crews, the young men whod 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. They would break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies. And their wild reveling, their astonishing acts made their names ring out. Reps were made, …