10 8 Ta- N e h i s i CoaT e s

One day, I was in Chicago, reporting a story about the his-

tory of segregation in the urban North and how it was
engineered by government policy. I was trailing some of-
ficers of the county sheriff as they made their rounds. That
day I saw a black man losing his home. I followed the
sheriff ’s officers inside the house, where a group of them
were talking to the man’s wife, who was also trying to tend
to her two children. She had clearly not been warned that
the sheriff would be coming, though something in her
husband’s demeanor told me he must have known. His
wife’s eyes registered, all at once, shock at the circumstance,
anger at the officers, and anger at her husband. The offi-
cers stood in the man’s living room, giving him orders as
to what would now happen. Outside there were men
who’d been hired to remove the family’s possessions. The
man was humiliated, and I imagined that he had probably
for some time carried, in his head, alone, all that was

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 B e T w e e N T h e wo r l d a N d M e 1 09

threatening his family but could not bring himself to admit

it to himself or his wife. So he now changed all that energy
into anger, directed at the officers. He cursed. He yelled.
He pointed wildly. This particular sheriff ’s department
was more progressive than most. They were concerned
about mass incarceration. They would often bring a social
worker to an eviction. But this had nothing to do with the
underlying and relentless logic of the world this man in-
habited, a logic built on laws built on history built on con-
tempt for this man and his family and their fate.
The man ranted on. When the officers turned away, he
ranted more to the group of black men assembled who’d
been hired to sit his family out on the street. His manner
was like all the powerless black people I’d ever known,
exaggerating their bodies to conceal a fundamental plun-
der that they could not prevent.
I had spent the week exploring this city, walking through
its vacant lots, watching the aimless boys, sitting in the
pews of the striving churches, reeling before the street mu-
rals to the dead. And I would, from time to time, sit in the
humble homes of black people in that city who were en-
tering their tenth decade of life. These people were pro-
found. Their homes were filled with the emblems of
honorable life—citizenship awards, portraits of husbands
and wives passed away, several generations of children in
cap and gown. And they had drawn these accolades by
cleaning big houses and living in one-room Alabama
shacks before moving to the city. And they had done this

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 11 0 Ta- N e h i s i CoaT e s

despite the city, which was supposed to be a respite, reveal-

ing itself to simply be a more intricate specimen of plun-
der. They had worked two and three jobs, put children
through high school and college, and become pillars of
their community. I admired them, but I knew the whole
time that I was merely encountering the survivors, the
ones who’d endured the banks and their stone-faced con-
tempt, the realtors and their fake sympathy—“I’m sorry,
that house just sold yesterday”—the realtors who steered
them back toward ghetto blocks, or blocks earmarked to
be ghettos soon, the lenders who found this captive class
and tried to strip them of everything they had. In those
homes I saw the best of us, but behind each of them I
knew that there were so many millions gone.
And I knew that there were children born into these
same caged neighborhoods on the Westside, these ghettos,
each of which was as planned as any subdivision. They are
an elegant act of racism, killing fields authored by federal
policies, where we are, all again, plundered of our dignity,
of our families, of our wealth, and of our lives. And there
is no difference between the killing of Prince Jones and
the murders attending these killing fields because both are
rooted in the assumed inhumanity of black people. A leg-
acy of plunder, a network of laws and traditions, a heritage,
a Dream, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black
people in North Lawndale with frightening regularity.
“Black-on-black crime” is jargon, violence to language,
which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants,

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 B e T w e e N T h e wo r l d a N d M e 111

who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built
the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should
not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into
this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history,
so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a
sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of
our days, we must invariably return.
The killing fields of Chicago, of Baltimore, of Detroit,
were created by the policy of Dreamers, but their weight,
their shame, rests solely upon those who are dying in
them. There is a great deception in this. To yell “black-
on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for
bleeding. And the premise that allows for these killing
fields—the reduction of the black body—is no different
than the premise that allowed for the murder of Prince
Jones. The Dream of acting white, of talking white, of
being white, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders
black people in Chicago with frightening regularity. Do
not accept the lie. Do not drink from poison. The same
hands that drew red lines around the life of Prince Jones
drew red lines around the ghetto.

From the Book BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Copyright © 2015 by
Ta-Nehisi Coates. Reprinted by arrangement with Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random
House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

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