“To Coates, a defining feature of black life is that your body can be taken from you easily, and with little consequence.”
“To Coates, to be black in a white supremacist society is to live in constant fear of disembodiment. Even if your body is not stolen from you, the fear of losing your body steals your energy, your time, and your freedom.”
“Coates’ ongoing examination of institutional racism—as in his breathtaking Atlantic essay “The Case for Reparations”—is, in certain respects, the opposite of Twitter: it is dense, analytical writing about policy and history that shows us how systems operate.”
““You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heel,” he writes to his son. “And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.””