Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates wins the National Book Award

Ta-Nehisi Coates has won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction for his extended letter to his son, Between the World and Me. Coates' book is his deeply heartfelt and searing account of the African-American experience in the United States, told with passion and the keen ability to choose words and phrases that cut the reader to the core. Here are twelve words from Between the World and Me.
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. accolade
    a tangible symbol signifying approval or distinction
    And they had drawn these accolades by cleaning big houses and living in one-room Alabama shacks before moving to the city.
  2. respite
    a pause from doing something
    And they had done this despite the city, which was supposed to be a respite, revealing itself to simply be a more intricate specimen of plunder.
  3. plunder
    steal goods; take as spoils
    And they had done this despite the city, which was supposed to be a respite, revealing itself to simply be a more intricate specimen of plunder.
  4. contempt
    lack of respect accompanied by a feeling of intense dislike
    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 contempt...
  5. jargon
    technical terminology characteristic of a particular subject
    "Black-on-black crime" is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel.
  6. covenant
    a signed written agreement between two or more parties
    "Black-on-black crime" is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel.
  7. sentience
    a state of consciousness or awareness
    ...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.
  8. invariably
    without change, in every case
    ...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.
  9. visceral
    coming from deep inward feelings rather than from reasoning
    But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth...
  10. exoneration
    the condition of being relieved from blame or obligation
    The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
  11. contort
    twist and press out of shape
    So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues...
  12. veneer
    an ornamental coating to a building
    All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to “be twice as good,” which is to say “accept half as much.” 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. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile.
Created on Thu Nov 19 07:37:10 EST 2015 (updated Thu Nov 19 08:00:06 EST 2015)

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