ta-nehisi-coates

...all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me...

I don__ so much hope that any reader __grees_ with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are.

One strain of African American thought holds that it is a violent black recklessness__he black gangster, the black rioter__hat strikes the ultimate terror in white America. Perhaps it does, in the most individual sense. But in the collective sense, what this country really fears is black respectability, Good Negro Government. It applauds, even celebrates, Good Negro Government in the unthreatening abstract__he Cosby Show, for instance. But when it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in any way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges.