Ta-Nehisi Coates Quote
We were laughing but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge… The law did not protect us and now, in your time, the law has become 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, 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 succeeded at something much darker. However you call it, the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of the world.
We were laughing but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge… The law did not protect us and now, in your time, the law has become 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, 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 succeeded at something much darker. However you call it, the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of the world.
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About Ta-Nehisi Coates
In 2015, Coates received a MacArthur Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation.
His work has been published in numerous periodicals. He has published four nonfiction books: The Beautiful Struggle (2008), Between the World and Me (2015), We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017), and The Message (2024). Between the World and Me won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He has also written a Black Panther series and a Captain America series for Marvel Comics. His first novel, The Water Dancer, was published in 2019.