Shortly before you were born, I was pulled over by the PG County police, the same police that all the D.C. The truth of us was that you were our ring. But your mother and I knew too many people who’d married and abondoned each other for less. Marriage was presented to us as a shield against other women, other men, or the corrosive monotony of dirty socks and dishwashing. With a whiff of fear, we were often asked if we planned to marry. We were both twenty-four years old when you were born, the normal age for most Americans, but among the class we soon found ourselves, we ranked as teenage parents. Nothing between us was ever planned-not even you. Did I think this a timeless category stretching into the deep past? Yes? Could it be supposed that simply because color was important to me, it had always been so? (53/54) Would those be the same black kings who birthed all of civilization? Were they then both deposed masters of the galaxy and gullible puppets all at once? And what did I mean by ‘black’? You know, black. What about the blacks who’d practiced slavery for millennia and sold slaves across the Sahara and then across the sea? Victims of a trick.

Did black skin really convey nobility? Always? Yes.

They had seen so many Malcomites before and were ready. Indeed, they felt it their duty to disabuse me of my weaponized history. My history professors thought nothing of telling me that my search for myth was doomed, that the stories I wanted to tell myself could not be matched to truths. I began to feel that something more than a national trophy case was needed if I was to be truly free, and for that I have the history department of Howard University to thank. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream. The point of this language of ‘intention’ and ‘personal responsibility’ is broad exoneration. But a great number of educators spoke of ‘personal responsibility’ in a country authored and sustained by a criminal responsibility.

No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth’ meant nothing to me. And so I had no sense that any just God was on my side.

We spurned the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be white. I could not retreat, as did so many, into church and its mysteries.

Tanasi coates between the world and me