9 - destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations.
29 - Your grandmother taught me to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation. When I was in trouble at school (which was quite often) she would make me write about it. The writing had to answer a series of questions: Why did I feel the need to talk at the same time as my teacher? Why did I not believe that my teacher was entitled to respect? How would I want someone to behave while I was talking? What would I do the next time I felt the urge to talk to my friends during a lesson? I have given you these same assignments. I gave them to you not because I thought they would curb your behavior -- they certainly did not curb mine -- but because these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness. Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject the elicted the most sympathy and rationalizing -- myself. Here was the lesson: I was not an innocent. My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And feeling that I was as human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. If I was not innocent, then tey were not innocent. Could this mix of motivations also affect the stories they tell? The cities they built? The country they claimed as given to them by God?
34 An unceasing interrogation of the stories told to us by the schools now felt essential. It felt wrong not to ask why, and then to ask it again.... I don't know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being "politically conscious" -- as much a series of actions as a state of bein, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.
51 I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago -- the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth -- loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions -- beautiful writing rarely is.
55 I took a survey of Europe post-1800. I saw black people, rendered through 'white' eyes, unlike any I'd seen before -- the black people looked regal and human. I rememer the soft face of Alessandro de' Medici, the royal bearing of Bosch's black magi. These images, cast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were contrasted with those created after enslavement, the Sambo caricatures I had always knonw. What was the difference? In my suvey course of America, I'd seen portraits of the Irish drawn in the same ravenous, lustful, simian way.
60 Hate gives identity... We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe... She taught me how to love in new ways.
67 Dan Ryan... State Street corridor. The housing occurred to me as a moral disaster not just for the people living there but for the entire region, the metropolis of commuters who drove by, each day, and with their quiet acquiescence tolerated such a thing.
81 And if he, good Christian, scion of a striving class, patron saint of the twice as good, could be forever bound, who then could not? And the plunder was not just of Prince [Jones] alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitoions for Monessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise parties, the daycare, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge adn capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, adn all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth.
116 The Dream seemed to be the pinnacle, then -- to grow rich and live in one of those disconnected houses out in the country, in one of those small communities, one of those cul-de-sacs with its gently curving ways, where they staged teen movies and children built treehouses, and in that last lost year before college, teenagers made love in cars parked at the lake. The Dream seemed to be the end of the world for me, the height of American ambition. What more could possibly exist beyond the dispatches, beyond the suburbs?
143 I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free.
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