“And if Michael Brown was not angelic, I was
practically demonic. I had my first drink when I was 11. I once brawled
in the cafeteria after getting hit in the head with a steel trash can.
In my junior year I failed five out of seven classes. By the time I
graduated from high school, I had been arrested for assaulting a teacher
and been kicked out of school (twice.) And yet no one who knew me
thought I had the least bit of thug in me. That is because I also read a
lot of books, loved my Commodore 64, and ghostwrote love notes for my
friends. In other words, I was a human being. A large number of American
teenagers live exactly like Michael Brown. Very few of them are shot in
the head and left to bake on the pavement.”
—
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
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