3 Photos of annotations:
1. “For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was a mark of civilization. ‘The two great divisions in society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,’ said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. ‘And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals'” (Coates 104). How do you think this idea functions to establish race – and not class or wealth – as a key division in the mid-1800s in the country?
I think that this idea highlighted what was happening in the south around the mid 1800s. This was when the law gave White people all of the power, no matter if they were poor or rich. It was the rules and governing of the south that bonded this idea into a legal way in which some White people thought it was correct. They could control Black people in a way that no one should have been treated. In the book, Coates writes about “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,” (Coates 110). In what Coates is talking about, the whole system has been against Black people and POC. Even in this century they didn’t get the same opportunities as poor White people, due to the racist society. In this case, the “rules” still primarily benefitted White people, without regard to class, and I think this highlights how deep the idea of race being the key division in the country around the 1800s is.
2. Freebie. Find a quote, provide a 3-4 sentence comment on it, and ask a question that flows from the quote and/or comment?
“I realized that those changes, with all their agony, awkwardness, and confusion, were the defining fact of my life, and for the first time I knew not only that I really was alive, that I really was studying and observing, but that I had long been alive,” (Coates 122). Coates is discussing going out of the country for the first time. During this time, he gets lost, this quote is the realization that Coates has in that moment. Coates has no idea how to get to where he is supposed to go, and in a foreign area in which he does not speak the language well. In this case, why is this disconnect from Coates’s life make him realize that he is alive?
Work Cited:
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “Black and Blue.” Washington Monthly, 1 June 2001, https://washingtonmonthly.com/2001/06/01/black-and-blue/.
