Coming to feel you have nothing to lose
Beyond the Code of the Streets
By TA-NEHISI COATES, NYT
ONE evening last week, I joined some friends for recreational beverages after work. These friends were all natives of a certain tribe — black men raised in the crack-era inner cities, now thriving in some other America. They were all college graduates (except me) and upstanding citizens of virtuous reputation. And like me, they were haunted by codes that aided their rise in the old world but might stunt their growth in the new.
We were in Chicago. The warm spring night had drawn out the merrymakers. Nate Robinson, whose Bulls had just buried the Brooklyn Nets, had made everyone giddy. But I was on guard. Back in my native Baltimore we called this fighting weather; in those first warm days of spring, you kept your clique close, your book bag closer and your head on swivel. My friends and I were winding down the night on State Street, downtown, when two drunk dudes confronted us. They were barely coherent, but the message got through: fighting weather.
I have all the repressed rage of a kid who was bullied — except now I have some size to match. At that moment, violent fantasies, wholly unmentionable, were dancing in my head. Contributing to those fantasies was a simple maxim inherited from childhood: “Thou shalt never be found a punk.”
My friends, being like me, and doubtlessly pumped up by the presence of other males, felt the same. There were four of us and two of them. But against all our instincts, we let it pass.
(More here.)
ONE evening last week, I joined some friends for recreational beverages after work. These friends were all natives of a certain tribe — black men raised in the crack-era inner cities, now thriving in some other America. They were all college graduates (except me) and upstanding citizens of virtuous reputation. And like me, they were haunted by codes that aided their rise in the old world but might stunt their growth in the new.
We were in Chicago. The warm spring night had drawn out the merrymakers. Nate Robinson, whose Bulls had just buried the Brooklyn Nets, had made everyone giddy. But I was on guard. Back in my native Baltimore we called this fighting weather; in those first warm days of spring, you kept your clique close, your book bag closer and your head on swivel. My friends and I were winding down the night on State Street, downtown, when two drunk dudes confronted us. They were barely coherent, but the message got through: fighting weather.
I have all the repressed rage of a kid who was bullied — except now I have some size to match. At that moment, violent fantasies, wholly unmentionable, were dancing in my head. Contributing to those fantasies was a simple maxim inherited from childhood: “Thou shalt never be found a punk.”
My friends, being like me, and doubtlessly pumped up by the presence of other males, felt the same. There were four of us and two of them. But against all our instincts, we let it pass.
(More here.)
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