The Language of Composition: "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

These shooters were investigated, exonerated, and promptly returned to the streets, where, so emboldened, they shot again.

What I remember is all the people who spoke of Prince's religious zeal, his abiding belief that Jesus was with him.

The need to forgive the officer would not have moved me, because even then, in some inchoate form, I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth.

At this moment the phrase “police reform" has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian.

I sat there feeling myself a heretic, believing only in this one-shot life and the body.

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?

Now I personally understood my father and the old mantra—"Either I can beat him or the police."

And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of “race,” imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods.

I knew that these were theories, even in the mouths of black people, that justified the jails springing up around me, that argued for ghettos and projects, that viewed the destruction of the black body as incidental to the preservation of order. According to this theory “safety” was a higher value than justice, perhaps the highest value.

In the days after, I watched the ridiculous pageantry of flags, the machismo of firemen, the overwrought slogans.

All this time you were growing into words and feelings; my beautiful brown boy, who would soon come into the knowledge, who would soon comprehend the edicts of his galaxy, and all the extinction-level events that regarded you with a singular and discriminating interest.

These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket.

She did not rage at the killer but wondered aloud if the rules she'd imparted had been enough.

You see this from time to time when some dullard—usually believing himself white—proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all beige and thus the same "race."

The changes have awarded me a rapture that comes only when you can no longer be lied to, when you have rejected the Dream.

But even more, the changes have taught me how to best exploit that singular gift of study, to question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.

Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner?

As slaves we were this country's first windfall, the down payment on its freedom.

After the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption for the unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies became this country's second mortgage.

And today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; today, when 8 percent of the world's prisoners are black men, our bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white.