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#his teen son. and I've cut some stuff directed toward him that doesn't make sense out of context. but I wanted to capture this quote in its
ravencromwell · 3 years
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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 America’s heresies—torture, theft, enslavement—are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln declared, 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 “people” to actually mean. ...
Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of “government of the people,” but the means by which “the people” acquired their names.
This leads us to another equally important ideal, one 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 beyond 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 preeminence 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 hopelessly, 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 machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national 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.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me
#Ta-Nehisi Coates#book babbling#lit geekery#this is one of those books that is constantly coming up as an act of political reading; the sort of thing I was constantly reminding myself#to get round too. and feeling rather guilty because I knew it was a vital part of the convo I was missing. And then I heard Ta-Nehisi on#Chris Hayse's podcast and was just. floored. not only by the clarity of his thoughts but at how readily he stepped onto the fourth rails of#discussion in our modern era: his utter. deserved saltiness about American exceptionalism; the way in which he just brutally eviscerated#the idea of the events of the Trump presidency being some aboration rather than the newest itteration in a long. long pattern of American#minoritarian rule. but mostly. honestly. the exceptionalism thing. I've rarely heard thinkers link up the intersections of the overblown#American myth abroad to racism at home. So I went yep. it's time I pick this up; the entire conceit of the book is that it's a letter to#his teen son. and I've cut some stuff directed toward him that doesn't make sense out of context. but I wanted to capture this quote in its#entirety. the idea of deifying! democracy holy shit; to the extent that we forgive our own barbarism I'd never seen that metaphor employed#like that and now it's jangling about in my head sparking off all sorts of ideas. and the racism as mother nature discussion and how#that allows the excusing of the inexcusable. this man's thinking is just pure knife-sharp clarity and I'm in awe#politics
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