Between the World and Me

I found this book hauntingly profound and disturbingly honest.

It left a deep sadness in my chest,

 for I share the author's beliefs.

In 1962, James Baldwin wrote a similar letter to his nephew.
So little has changed.
What will take for equality to exist in this country?

"The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,”

said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun.

And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class,

and are respected and treated as equals."

And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality.

And that right has always given them meaning,

has always meant that there was someone down in the valley

because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.

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. 

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.

Ta-Nehisi Coates