What a deeply moving letter. Especially moving when I stop and think
that this father felt the pressing need to write so much to his 15
year old son. In his own way, my father passed along much of these
concepts. But I never, never knew what it was like to be
disenfranchised in my own Land. Sure, I knew the shove of the bully
up the hill, and his mocking buddies who chased me home from time to
time. But I never feared for my life. I never thought that the local
cop would do anything other than protect me and chase those bullies
away. We are living in separate worlds, Ta-Nehisi Coates and me.
Different in ways that can never be bridged.
And while I weep for all those people who do not know, nor will ever
know what it is like to be a privileged person, walking and living
free and without fear, I also weep because I know without a doubt that
when that distant day comes when they are the free Souls, in charge of
their own Land, they will have learned nothing from the experiences
and from the sufferings of their ancestors. I see our Human History
strewn with the bodies of men, women and children, slain by the anger
and vengeance of those whose ancestors were once the abused. The
circle is unbroken. And while I will not give up hope, our Human
inability to learn from our past and alter our behavior presents for
us a very grim future.
Carl Jarvis
On 7/12/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This is very long, and it's difficult reading. I mean, the concepts that he
is communicating are difficult for most white people to understand. But
it's
a fantastic piece, if you have the time and patience.
Miriam
Coates writes: "This is your country, this is your world, this is your
body,
and you must find some way to live within the all of it."
Ta-Nehisi Coates. (photo: The Atlantic)
Letter to My Son
By Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
08 July 15
on,
Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose
my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated
in a remote studio on the Far West Side of Manhattan. A satellite closed
the
miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world
and
the world for which I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me
about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll
of words, written by me earlier that week.
The host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she
turned
to the subject of my body, although she did not mention it specifically.
But
by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of
my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the
host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the
progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on
looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness
well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers
themselves. The answer is American history.
There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans deify democracy in a
way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time,
stood
in defiance of their God. This defiance is not to be much dwelled upon.
Democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies—torture, theft,
enslavement—are specimens of sin, so common among individuals and nations
that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real
sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in
1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the
people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he
was not merely being aspirational. At the onset of the Civil War, the
United
States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world.
The
question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but
what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term
“people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your
grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. As for now, it must be said
that the elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through
wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of
life, liberty, labor, and land.
That Sunday, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could
within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a
widely shared picture of an 11-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white
police officer. Then she asked me about “hope.” And I knew then that I had
failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again
at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came
out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day.
Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants,
raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these
people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there
watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad.
When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me
to
awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my
life.
It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block
associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts.
And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country
over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the
Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing
this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I
was
sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my
country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.
That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go
free. The men who had left his body in the street would never be punished.
It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were
young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 p.m. that night, waiting
for
the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that
there was none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your room, and
I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and
I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I
did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it
would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me:
that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body,
and you must find some way to live within the all of it.
I write you in your 15th year. I am writing you because this was the year
you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you
know
now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was
shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in
uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, an 12-year-old child whom they were
oath-bound to protect. And you know now, if you did not before, that the
police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to
destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of
an
unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a
misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a
foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body
can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be
destroyed.
The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive
pensions.
There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment.
The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly
interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling
of black bodies. It is hard to face this. 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. You must never look away from this. You must
always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs,
the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager
survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have
asked this question all my life. I have sought the answer through my
reading
and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your
grandfather, with your mother. I have searched for answers in nationalist
myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The
question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward
of
this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my
country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.
Inner city cultural showing the support for the death. (photo: Eduardo
Munoz/Reuters)
And yet I am still afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave
me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I
was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were
powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of
me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore
neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats
and
full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their
world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold
Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped
in Russell sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear,
and
all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days
when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the
branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived
on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the
calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and
garments
enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of
everything they desired.
I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Philadelphia. You never
knew her. I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner, her
rough voice. And I knew that my father’s father was dead and that my Uncle
Oscar was dead and that my Uncle David was dead and that each of these
instances was unnatural. And I saw it in my own father, who loves you, who
counsels you, who slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very
afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied
with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might
steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us.
Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to
guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not
hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and
had
begun to turn their lives around. And now they were gone, and their legacy
was a great fear.
When I was 6, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze
and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for
me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done—he
reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at
the
distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad’s
voice—“Either I can beat him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it
didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a
fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and
love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. What I know is that
fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to
streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice.
And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save
these
girls from drug dealers twice their age.
To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the
elements
of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease.
The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an
excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the
assault on your body. But a society that protects some people through a
safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth
but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either
failed
at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.
I remember being 11 years old, standing out in the parking lot in front of
the 7-Eleven, watching a crew of older boys standing near the street. I
stood there, marveling at the older boys’ beautiful sense of fashion. They
all wore ski jackets, the kind that mothers put on layaway in September,
then piled up overtime hours so as to have the thing wrapped and ready for
Christmas. A light-skinned boy with a long head and small eyes was scowling
at another other boy, who was standing close to me. It was just before
three
in the afternoon. I was in sixth grade. School had just let out, and it was
not yet the fighting weather of early spring. What was the exact problem
here? Who could know?
The boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket and pulled out a
gun. I recall it in the slowest motion, as though in a dream. There the boy
stood, with the gun brandished, which he slowly untucked, tucked, then
untucked once more, and in his small eyes I saw a surging rage that could,
in an instant, erase my body. That was 1986. That year I felt myself to be
drowning in the news reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very
often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon great-aunts, PTA
mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful children—fell upon them random and
relentless, like great sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not
understand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood across from
me
holding my entire body in his small hands.
I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing
of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore,
where
I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that
the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a
world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid
belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for
their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television in my living
room. In the evenings I would sit before this television bearing witness to
the dispatches from this other world. There were little white boys with
complete collections of football cards, their only want was a popular
girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak. That other world was
suburban and endless, organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies,
fireworks, ice cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks
that were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and endless lawns.
Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native world, I came to
understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the
pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr.
Belvedere.
I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own.
I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved
by
a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was
not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but
did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I
felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an
abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity
of escape.
Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash
with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the
people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils
which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every
ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer
risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed.
When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I
was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the
number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and
who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the
streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.
The culture of the streets was essential—there was no alternative. I could
not retreat into the church and its mysteries. My parents rejected all
dogmas. We spurned the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be
white. We would not stand for their anthems. We would not kneel before
their
God. “The meek shall inherit the earth” meant nothing to me. The meek were
battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on
Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail. My understanding
of
the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then
concluded in a box. That was the message of the small-eyed boy, untucking
the piece—a child bearing the power to body and banish other children to
memory. Fear ruled everything around me, and I knew, as all black people
do,
that this fear was connected to the world out there, to the unworried boys,
to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns nightly beamed
into our television sets.
Every February my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual
review of the civil-rights movement. Our teachers urged us toward the
example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it
seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to
the glories of being beaten on camera. Why are they showing this to us? Why
were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these
freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against
children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding
extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs
saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I
knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under
slavery,
against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend
their
dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by
savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values
society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of
Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?
Some things were clear to me: The violence that undergirded the country, so
flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence
of the streets were not unrelated. And this violence was not magical, but
was of a piece and by design. But what exactly was the design? And why? I
must know. I must get out ... but into what? I saw the design in those in
the boys on the corner, in “the babies having babies.” The design explained
everything, from our cracked-out fathers to HIV to the bleached skin of
Michael Jackson. I felt this but I could not explain it. This was two years
before the Million Man March. Almost every day I played Ice Cube’s album
Death Certificate: “Let me live my life, if we can no longer live our life,
then let us give our life for the liberation and salvation of the black
nation.” I was haunted by the bodily sacrifice of Malcolm. I was haunted
because I believed that we had left ourselves back there, and now in the
crack era all we had was a great fear. Perhaps I must go back. That was
what
I heard in the rapper’s call to “keep it real.” Perhaps we should return to
ourselves, to our own primordial streets, to our own ruggedness, to our own
rude hair. Perhaps we should return to Mecca.
My only Mecca was, is, and shall always be Howard University. This Mecca,
My
Mecca—The Mecca—is a machine, crafted to capture and concentrate the dark
energy of all African peoples and inject it directly into the student body.
The Mecca derives its power from the heritage of Howard University, which
in
Jim Crow days enjoyed a near-monopoly on black talent. And whereas most
other historically black schools were scattered like forts in the great
wilderness of the old Confederacy, Howard was in Washington, D.C.—Chocolate
City—and thus in proximity to both federal power and black power. I first
witnessed this power out on the Yard, that communal green space in the
center of the campus where the students gathered and I saw everything I
knew
of my black self multiplied out into seemingly endless variations. There
were the scions of Nigerian aristocrats in their business suits giving dap
to bald-headed Qs in purple windbreakers and tan Timbs. There were the
high-yellow progeny of A.M.E. preachers debating the clerics of Ausar-Set.
There were California girls turned Muslim, born anew, in hijab and long
skirt. There were Ponzi schemers and Christian cultists, Tabernacle
fanatics
and mathematical geniuses. It was like listening to a hundred different
renditions of “Redemption Song,” each in a different color and key. And
overlaying all of this was the history of Howard itself. I knew that I was
literally walking in the footsteps of all the Toni Morrisons and Zora Neale
Hurstons, of all the Sterling Browns and Kenneth Clarks, who’d come before.
The Mecca—the vastness of black people across space-time—could be
experienced in a 20-minute walk across campus. I saw this vastness in the
students chopping it up in front of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall,
where Muhammad Ali had addressed their fathers and mothers in defiance of
the Vietnam War. I saw its epic sweep in the students next to Ira Aldridge
Theater, where Donny Hathaway had once sung, where Donald Byrd had once
assembled his flock. The students came out with their saxophones, trumpets,
and drums, played “My Favorite Things” or “Someday My Prince Will Come.”
Some of the other students were out on the grass in front of Alain Locke
Hall, in pink and green, chanting, singing, stomping, clapping, stepping.
Some of them came up from Tubman Quadrangle with their roommates and rope
for Double Dutch. Some of them came down from Drew Hall, with their caps
cocked and their backpacks slung through one arm, then fell into gorgeous
ciphers of beatbox and rhyme. Some of the girls sat by the flagpole with
bell hooks and Sonia Sanchez in their straw totes. Some of the boys, with
their new Yoruba names, beseeched these girls by citing Frantz Fanon. Some
of them studied Russian. Some of them worked in bone labs. They were
Panamanian. They were Bajan. And some of them were from places I had never
heard of. But all of them were hot and incredible, exotic even, though we
hailed from the same tribe.
Now, the heirs of slaveholders could never directly acknowledge our beauty
or reckon with its power. And so the beauty of the black body was never
celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a
child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white.
This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys
with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history
books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black
four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always
presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious
history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me
in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember
where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the
Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was “white,” I understood
him to say, and so Tolstoy “mattered,” like everything else that was white
“mattered.” And this view of things was connected to the fear that passed
through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black,
beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior
because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our
inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those
that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were
civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?
And so I came to Howard toting a new and different history, myth really,
which inverted all the stories of the people who believed themselves to be
white. I majored in history with all the motives of a man looking to fill a
trophy case. They had heroes, so we must have heroes too. But my history
professors thought nothing of telling me that my search for myth was
doomed,
that the stories I wanted to tell myself could not be matched to truths.
Indeed, they felt it their duty to disabuse me of my weaponized history.
Their method was rough and direct. Did black skin really convey nobility?
Always? Yes. What about the blacks who’d practiced slavery for millennia
and
sold slaves across the Sahara and then across the sea? Victims of a trick.
Would those be the same black kings who birthed all of civilization? Were
they then both deposed masters of the galaxy and gullible puppets all at
once? And what did I mean by “black”? You know, black. Did I think this a
timeless category stretching into the deep past? Yes? Could it be supposed
that simply because color was important to me, it had always been so?
This heap of realizations was a weight. I found them physically painful and
exhausting. True, I was coming to enjoy the dizziness, the vertigo that
must
come with any odyssey. But in those early moments, the unceasing
contradictions sent me into a gloom. There was nothing holy or particular
in
my skin; I was black because of history and heritage. There was no nobility
in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent
meaning in black blood. Black blood wasn’t black; black skin wasn’t even
black. And now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to
live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an
escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of
the
universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their
standards of civilization and humanity.
But not all of us. It must have been around that time that I discovered an
essay by Ralph Wiley in which he responded to Bellow’s quip. “Tolstoy is
the
Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing
off
universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there
it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to
Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I
chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not
that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact
of
dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
And still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on
one
hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there
on
the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector,
borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a
delegate to the great world party. I remember those days like an OutKast
song, painted in lust and joy. The black world was expanding before me, and
I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of
the
people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed
to
protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes
this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining).
But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to
the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to
exist for want of reasons. There will surely always be people with straight
hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these
straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to
the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our
fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with
enslaving
as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down
here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had
taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made
ourselves into a people.
And what did that mean for the Dreamers I’d seen as a child? Could I ever
want to get into the world they made? No. I was born among a people,
Samori,
and in that realization I knew that I was out of something. It was the
psychosis of questioning myself, of constantly wondering if I could measure
up. But the whole theory was wrong, their whole notion of race was wrong.
And apprehending that, I felt my first measure of freedom.
This realization was important but intellectual. It could not save my body.
Indeed, it made me understand what the loss of all our black bodies really
meant. No one of us were “black people.” We were individuals, a one of one,
and when we died there was nothing. Always remember that Trayvon Martin was
a boy, that Tamir Rice was a particular boy, that Jordan Davis was a boy,
like you. When you hear these names think of all the wealth poured into
them. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to
football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the
time
spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the
day
care, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of checks written for
family photos. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets,
racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private
jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and
capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And
think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its
holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back
to
the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori,
because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further.
You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by
the Dream of living white.
I remember that summer that you may well remember when I loaded you and
your
cousin Christopher into the back seat of a rented car and pushed out to see
what remained of Petersburg, Shirley Plantation, and the Wilderness. I was
obsessed with the Civil War because six hundred thousand people had died in
it. And yet it had been glossed over in my education, and in popular
culture, representations of the war and its reasons seemed obscured. And
yet
I knew that in 1859 we were enslaved and in 1865 we were not, and what
happened to us in those years struck me as having some amount of import.
But
whenever I visited any of the battlefields, I felt like I was greeted as if
I were a nosy accountant conducting an audit and someone was trying to hide
the books.
I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg
Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a
tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in
the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most
interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot,
and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this
engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were
only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this
meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence,
where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise
their
burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what
it always was.
At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth $4 billion,
more
than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and
factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen
bodies—cotton—was America’s primary export. The richest men in America
lived
in the Mississippi River Valley, and they made their riches off our stolen
bodies. Our bodies were held in bondage by the early presidents. Our bodies
were traded from the White House by James K. Polk. Our bodies built the
Capitol and the National Mall. The first shot of the Civil War was fired in
South Carolina, where our bodies constituted the majority of human bodies
in
the state. Here is the motive for the great war. It’s not a secret. But we
can do better and find the bandit confessing his crime. “Our position is
thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” declared
Mississippi
as it left the Union, “the greatest material interest of the world.”
But American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made
enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass
slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that
both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie
of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream. Historians conjured
the Dream. Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels
and
adventure stories. John Carter flees the broken Confederacy for Mars. We
are
not supposed to ask what, precisely, he was running from. I, like every kid
I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think
more
about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must
necessarily
be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra
for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither
important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the
officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you
need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the
American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate
that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate
number of them will be black.
Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to
destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the
antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to
commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement
must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains
blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so
regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this. I have
no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the
body and brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so
precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on
gospel wings. The soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit
was
the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of
the
American garden. And the fruits were secured through the bashing of
children
with stovewood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn.
It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the
crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman
“chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday
again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron
pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break
the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation.
The
bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies
were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife,
or a summer home in the mountains. 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 the mark of civilization. “The two great divisions of
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.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the
meaning
of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has
always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain
is
not a mountain if there is nothing below.
You and I, my son, are that “below.” That was true in 1776. It is true
today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you
they
must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble
out
of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their
suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails
toward
something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy
independent
of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when
the
people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and
begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of
such
a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of
America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible
truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.
But still you must struggle. The Struggle is in your name, Samori—you were
named for Samori Touré, who struggled against French colonizers for the
right to his own black body. He died in captivity, but the profits of that
struggle and others like it are ours, even when the object of our struggle,
as is so often true, escapes our grasp.
I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in
someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must
all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the
key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet,
fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number,
strength,
or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or
ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control.
What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies
of
our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction
of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our
walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and
of itself, has meaning.
That wisdom is not unique to our people, but I think it has special meaning
to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were carried off and
divided up into policies and stocks. I have raised you to respect every
human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the
past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular,
specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range
of
feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one
particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in
a
nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her
sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels
at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and
capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly
proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential
texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold
her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this
woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can
hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when
she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends.
For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the
never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history.
Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been
free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into
chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but
chains.
You must struggle to truly remember this past. You must resist the common
urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that
imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your
road,
and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were
people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not
destined
to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how
improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the
posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can
never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps
struggle is all we have. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no
natural promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at
all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself:
verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.
The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know,
each
day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise. I am not a
cynic.
I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I
discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your
body
in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for
the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be
assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the
powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find
his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the
chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and
how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and
gold.
Perhaps you remember that time we went to see Howl’s Moving Castle on the
Upper West Side. You were almost 5 years old. The theater was crowded, and
when we came out we rode a set of escalators down to the ground floor. As
we
came off, you were moving at the dawdling speed of a small child. A white
woman pushed you and said, “Come on!” Many things now happened at once.
There was the reaction of any parent when a stranger puts a hand on the
body
of their child. And there was my own insecurity in my ability to protect
your black body. And more: There was my sense that this woman was pulling
rank. I knew, for instance, that she would not have pushed a black child
out
on my part of Flatbush, because she would be afraid there and would sense,
if not know, that there would be a penalty for such an action. But I was
not
out on my part of Flatbush. And I was not in West Baltimore. I forgot all
of
that. I was only aware that someone had invoked their right over the body
of
my son. I turned and spoke to this woman, and my words were hot with all of
the moment and all of my history. She shrank back, shocked. A white man
standing nearby spoke up in her defense. I experienced this as his attempt
to rescue the damsel from the beast. He had made no such attempt on behalf
of my son. And he was now supported by other white people in the assembling
crowd. The man came closer. He grew louder. I pushed him away. He said, “I
could have you arrested!” I did not care. I told him this, and the desire
to
do much more was hot in my throat. This desire was only controllable
because
I remembered someone standing off to the side there, bearing witness to
more
fury than he had ever seen from me—you.
I came home shook. It was a mix of shame for having gone back to the law of
the streets, and rage—“I could have you arrested!” Which is to say: “I
could
take your body.”
I have told this story many times, not out of bravado, but out of a need
for
absolution. But more than any shame I felt, my greatest regret was that in
seeking to defend you I was, in fact, endangering you.
“I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s
earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and
choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the
rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the
West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single
file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.
But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will
yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people whom you
shouldn’t. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson—not even Jackie
Robinson was always Jackie Robinson. But the price of error is higher for
you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify
itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his
or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon
Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s
mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the
small-eyed boy pulling out.
You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because
it assures you an honorable and sane life. I am ashamed of how I acted that
day, ashamed of endangering your body. I am ashamed that I made an error,
knowing that our errors always cost us more.
I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save
you—but
not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you
closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe
oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams,
their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes
real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should
enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children,
when
nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages
of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and
bred to understand cause and effect can never be. And I would not have you
live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always
at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying
degrees
this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the
privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
I am speaking to you as I always have—treating you as the sober and serious
man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human
feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his
beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is
that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people
comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to
be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack
every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who
must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not
have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious
citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
Ta-Nehisi Coates. (photo: The Atlantic)
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisi-coates-between-
the-world-and-me/397619/http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/
tanehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me/397619/
Letter to My Son
By Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
08 July 15
on,
Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose
my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated
in a remote studio on the Far West Side of Manhattan. A satellite closed
the
miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world
and
the world for which I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me
about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll
of words, written by me earlier that week.
The host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she
turned
to the subject of my body, although she did not mention it specifically.
But
by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of
my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the
host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the
progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on
looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness
well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers
themselves. The answer is American history.
There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans deify democracy in a
way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time,
stood
in defiance of their God. This defiance is not to be much dwelled upon.
Democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies—torture, theft,
enslavement—are specimens of sin, so common among individuals and nations
that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real
sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in
1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the
people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he
was not merely being aspirational. At the onset of the Civil War, the
United
States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world.
The
question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but
what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term
“people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your
grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. As for now, it must be said
that the elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through
wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of
life, liberty, labor, and land.
That Sunday, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could
within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a
widely shared picture of an 11-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white
police officer. Then she asked me about “hope.” And I knew then that I had
failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again
at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came
out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day.
Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants,
raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these
people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there
watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad.
When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me
to
awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my
life.
It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block
associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts.
And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country
over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the
Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing
this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I
was
sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my
country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.
That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go
free. The men who had left his body in the street would never be punished.
It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were
young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 p.m. that night, waiting
for
the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that
there was none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your room, and
I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and
I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I
did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it
would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me:
that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body,
and you must find some way to live within the all of it.
I write you in your 15th year. I am writing you because this was the year
you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you
know
now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was
shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in
uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, an 12-year-old child whom they were
oath-bound to protect. And you know now, if you did not before, that the
police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to
destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of
an
unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a
misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a
foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body
can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be
destroyed.
The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive
pensions.
There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment.
The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly
interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling
of black bodies. It is hard to face this. 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. You must never look away from this. You must
always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs,
the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager
survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have
asked this question all my life. I have sought the answer through my
reading
and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your
grandfather, with your mother. I have searched for answers in nationalist
myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The
question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward
of
this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my
country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.
Inner city cultural showing the support for the death. (photo: Eduardo
Munoz/Reuters)
And yet I am still afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave
me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I
was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were
powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of
me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore
neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats
and
full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their
world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold
Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped
in Russell sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear,
and
all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days
when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the
branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived
on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the
calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and
garments
enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of
everything they desired.
I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Philadelphia. You never
knew her. I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner, her
rough voice. And I knew that my father’s father was dead and that my Uncle
Oscar was dead and that my Uncle David was dead and that each of these
instances was unnatural. And I saw it in my own father, who loves you, who
counsels you, who slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very
afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied
with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might
steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us.
Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to
guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not
hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and
had
begun to turn their lives around. And now they were gone, and their legacy
was a great fear.
When I was 6, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze
and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for
me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done—he
reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at
the
distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad’s
voice—“Either I can beat him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it
didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a
fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and
love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. What I know is that
fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to
streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice.
And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save
these
girls from drug dealers twice their age.
To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the
elements
of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease.
The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an
excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the
assault on your body. But a society that protects some people through a
safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth
but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either
failed
at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.
I remember being 11 years old, standing out in the parking lot in front of
the 7-Eleven, watching a crew of older boys standing near the street. I
stood there, marveling at the older boys’ beautiful sense of fashion. They
all wore ski jackets, the kind that mothers put on layaway in September,
then piled up overtime hours so as to have the thing wrapped and ready for
Christmas. A light-skinned boy with a long head and small eyes was scowling
at another other boy, who was standing close to me. It was just before
three
in the afternoon. I was in sixth grade. School had just let out, and it was
not yet the fighting weather of early spring. What was the exact problem
here? Who could know?
The boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket and pulled out a
gun. I recall it in the slowest motion, as though in a dream. There the boy
stood, with the gun brandished, which he slowly untucked, tucked, then
untucked once more, and in his small eyes I saw a surging rage that could,
in an instant, erase my body. That was 1986. That year I felt myself to be
drowning in the news reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very
often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon great-aunts, PTA
mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful children—fell upon them random and
relentless, like great sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not
understand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood across from
me
holding my entire body in his small hands.
I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing
of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore,
where
I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that
the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a
world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid
belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for
their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television in my living
room. In the evenings I would sit before this television bearing witness to
the dispatches from this other world. There were little white boys with
complete collections of football cards, their only want was a popular
girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak. That other world was
suburban and endless, organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies,
fireworks, ice cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks
that were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and endless lawns.
Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native world, I came to
understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the
pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr.
Belvedere.
I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own.
I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved
by
a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was
not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but
did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I
felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an
abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity
of escape.
Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash
with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the
people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils
which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every
ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer
risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed.
When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I
was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the
number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and
who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the
streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.
The culture of the streets was essential—there was no alternative. I could
not retreat into the church and its mysteries. My parents rejected all
dogmas. We spurned the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be
white. We would not stand for their anthems. We would not kneel before
their
God. “The meek shall inherit the earth” meant nothing to me. The meek were
battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on
Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail. My understanding
of
the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then
concluded in a box. That was the message of the small-eyed boy, untucking
the piece—a child bearing the power to body and banish other children to
memory. Fear ruled everything around me, and I knew, as all black people
do,
that this fear was connected to the world out there, to the unworried boys,
to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns nightly beamed
into our television sets.
Every February my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual
review of the civil-rights movement. Our teachers urged us toward the
example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it
seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to
the glories of being beaten on camera. Why are they showing this to us? Why
were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these
freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against
children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding
extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs
saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I
knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under
slavery,
against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend
their
dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by
savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values
society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of
Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?
Some things were clear to me: The violence that undergirded the country, so
flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence
of the streets were not unrelated. And this violence was not magical, but
was of a piece and by design. But what exactly was the design? And why? I
must know. I must get out ... but into what? I saw the design in those in
the boys on the corner, in “the babies having babies.” The design explained
everything, from our cracked-out fathers to HIV to the bleached skin of
Michael Jackson. I felt this but I could not explain it. This was two years
before the Million Man March. Almost every day I played Ice Cube’s album
Death Certificate: “Let me live my life, if we can no longer live our life,
then let us give our life for the liberation and salvation of the black
nation.” I was haunted by the bodily sacrifice of Malcolm. I was haunted
because I believed that we had left ourselves back there, and now in the
crack era all we had was a great fear. Perhaps I must go back. That was
what
I heard in the rapper’s call to “keep it real.” Perhaps we should return to
ourselves, to our own primordial streets, to our own ruggedness, to our own
rude hair. Perhaps we should return to Mecca.
My only Mecca was, is, and shall always be Howard University. This Mecca,
My
Mecca—The Mecca—is a machine, crafted to capture and concentrate the dark
energy of all African peoples and inject it directly into the student body.
The Mecca derives its power from the heritage of Howard University, which
in
Jim Crow days enjoyed a near-monopoly on black talent. And whereas most
other historically black schools were scattered like forts in the great
wilderness of the old Confederacy, Howard was in Washington, D.C.—Chocolate
City—and thus in proximity to both federal power and black power. I first
witnessed this power out on the Yard, that communal green space in the
center of the campus where the students gathered and I saw everything I
knew
of my black self multiplied out into seemingly endless variations. There
were the scions of Nigerian aristocrats in their business suits giving dap
to bald-headed Qs in purple windbreakers and tan Timbs. There were the
high-yellow progeny of A.M.E. preachers debating the clerics of Ausar-Set.
There were California girls turned Muslim, born anew, in hijab and long
skirt. There were Ponzi schemers and Christian cultists, Tabernacle
fanatics
and mathematical geniuses. It was like listening to a hundred different
renditions of “Redemption Song,” each in a different color and key. And
overlaying all of this was the history of Howard itself. I knew that I was
literally walking in the footsteps of all the Toni Morrisons and Zora Neale
Hurstons, of all the Sterling Browns and Kenneth Clarks, who’d come before.
The Mecca—the vastness of black people across space-time—could be
experienced in a 20-minute walk across campus. I saw this vastness in the
students chopping it up in front of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall,
where Muhammad Ali had addressed their fathers and mothers in defiance of
the Vietnam War. I saw its epic sweep in the students next to Ira Aldridge
Theater, where Donny Hathaway had once sung, where Donald Byrd had once
assembled his flock. The students came out with their saxophones, trumpets,
and drums, played “My Favorite Things” or “Someday My Prince Will Come.”
Some of the other students were out on the grass in front of Alain Locke
Hall, in pink and green, chanting, singing, stomping, clapping, stepping.
Some of them came up from Tubman Quadrangle with their roommates and rope
for Double Dutch. Some of them came down from Drew Hall, with their caps
cocked and their backpacks slung through one arm, then fell into gorgeous
ciphers of beatbox and rhyme. Some of the girls sat by the flagpole with
bell hooks and Sonia Sanchez in their straw totes. Some of the boys, with
their new Yoruba names, beseeched these girls by citing Frantz Fanon. Some
of them studied Russian. Some of them worked in bone labs. They were
Panamanian. They were Bajan. And some of them were from places I had never
heard of. But all of them were hot and incredible, exotic even, though we
hailed from the same tribe.
Now, the heirs of slaveholders could never directly acknowledge our beauty
or reckon with its power. And so the beauty of the black body was never
celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a
child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white.
This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys
with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history
books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black
four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always
presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious
history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me
in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember
where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the
Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was “white,” I understood
him to say, and so Tolstoy “mattered,” like everything else that was white
“mattered.” And this view of things was connected to the fear that passed
through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black,
beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior
because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our
inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those
that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were
civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?
And so I came to Howard toting a new and different history, myth really,
which inverted all the stories of the people who believed themselves to be
white. I majored in history with all the motives of a man looking to fill a
trophy case. They had heroes, so we must have heroes too. But my history
professors thought nothing of telling me that my search for myth was
doomed,
that the stories I wanted to tell myself could not be matched to truths.
Indeed, they felt it their duty to disabuse me of my weaponized history.
Their method was rough and direct. Did black skin really convey nobility?
Always? Yes. What about the blacks who’d practiced slavery for millennia
and
sold slaves across the Sahara and then across the sea? Victims of a trick.
Would those be the same black kings who birthed all of civilization? Were
they then both deposed masters of the galaxy and gullible puppets all at
once? And what did I mean by “black”? You know, black. Did I think this a
timeless category stretching into the deep past? Yes? Could it be supposed
that simply because color was important to me, it had always been so?
This heap of realizations was a weight. I found them physically painful and
exhausting. True, I was coming to enjoy the dizziness, the vertigo that
must
come with any odyssey. But in those early moments, the unceasing
contradictions sent me into a gloom. There was nothing holy or particular
in
my skin; I was black because of history and heritage. There was no nobility
in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent
meaning in black blood. Black blood wasn’t black; black skin wasn’t even
black. And now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to
live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an
escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of
the
universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their
standards of civilization and humanity.
But not all of us. It must have been around that time that I discovered an
essay by Ralph Wiley in which he responded to Bellow’s quip. “Tolstoy is
the
Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing
off
universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there
it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to
Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I
chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not
that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact
of
dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
And still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on
one
hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there
on
the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector,
borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a
delegate to the great world party. I remember those days like an OutKast
song, painted in lust and joy. The black world was expanding before me, and
I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of
the
people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed
to
protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes
this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining).
But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to
the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to
exist for want of reasons. There will surely always be people with straight
hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these
straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to
the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our
fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with
enslaving
as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down
here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had
taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made
ourselves into a people.
And what did that mean for the Dreamers I’d seen as a child? Could I ever
want to get into the world they made? No. I was born among a people,
Samori,
and in that realization I knew that I was out of something. It was the
psychosis of questioning myself, of constantly wondering if I could measure
up. But the whole theory was wrong, their whole notion of race was wrong.
And apprehending that, I felt my first measure of freedom.
This realization was important but intellectual. It could not save my body.
Indeed, it made me understand what the loss of all our black bodies really
meant. No one of us were “black people.” We were individuals, a one of one,
and when we died there was nothing. Always remember that Trayvon Martin was
a boy, that Tamir Rice was a particular boy, that Jordan Davis was a boy,
like you. When you hear these names think of all the wealth poured into
them. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to
football games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think of the
time
spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the surprise birthday parties, the
day
care, and the reference checks on babysitters. Think of checks written for
family photos. Think of soccer balls, science kits, chemistry sets,
racetracks, and model trains. Think of all the embraces, all the private
jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and
capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And
think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its
holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back
to
the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori,
because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further.
You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by
the Dream of living white.
I remember that summer that you may well remember when I loaded you and
your
cousin Christopher into the back seat of a rented car and pushed out to see
what remained of Petersburg, Shirley Plantation, and the Wilderness. I was
obsessed with the Civil War because six hundred thousand people had died in
it. And yet it had been glossed over in my education, and in popular
culture, representations of the war and its reasons seemed obscured. And
yet
I knew that in 1859 we were enslaved and in 1865 we were not, and what
happened to us in those years struck me as having some amount of import.
But
whenever I visited any of the battlefields, I felt like I was greeted as if
I were a nosy accountant conducting an audit and someone was trying to hide
the books.
I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg
Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a
tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in
the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most
interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot,
and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this
engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were
only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this
meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence,
where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise
their
burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what
it always was.
At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth $4 billion,
more
than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and
factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen
bodies—cotton—was America’s primary export. The richest men in America
lived
in the Mississippi River Valley, and they made their riches off our stolen
bodies. Our bodies were held in bondage by the early presidents. Our bodies
were traded from the White House by James K. Polk. Our bodies built the
Capitol and the National Mall. The first shot of the Civil War was fired in
South Carolina, where our bodies constituted the majority of human bodies
in
the state. Here is the motive for the great war. It’s not a secret. But we
can do better and find the bandit confessing his crime. “Our position is
thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” declared
Mississippi
as it left the Union, “the greatest material interest of the world.”
But American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made
enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass
slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that
both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie
of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream. Historians conjured
the Dream. Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels
and
adventure stories. John Carter flees the broken Confederacy for Mars. We
are
not supposed to ask what, precisely, he was running from. I, like every kid
I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think
more
about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must
necessarily
be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra
for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither
important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the
officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you
need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the
American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate
that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate
number of them will be black.
Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to
destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the
antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to
commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement
must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains
blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so
regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this. I have
no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the
body and brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so
precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on
gospel wings. The soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit
was
the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of
the
American garden. And the fruits were secured through the bashing of
children
with stovewood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn.
It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the
crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman
“chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday
again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron
pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break
the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation.
The
bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies
were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife,
or a summer home in the mountains. 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 the mark of civilization. “The two great divisions of
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.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the
meaning
of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has
always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain
is
not a mountain if there is nothing below.
You and I, my son, are that “below.” That was true in 1776. It is true
today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you
they
must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble
out
of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their
suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails
toward
something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy
independent
of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when
the
people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and
begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of
such
a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of
America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible
truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.
But still you must struggle. The Struggle is in your name, Samori—you were
named for Samori Touré, who struggled against French colonizers for the
right to his own black body. He died in captivity, but the profits of that
struggle and others like it are ours, even when the object of our struggle,
as is so often true, escapes our grasp.
I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in
someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must
all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the
key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet,
fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number,
strength,
or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or
ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control.
What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies
of
our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction
of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our
walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and
of itself, has meaning.
That wisdom is not unique to our people, but I think it has special meaning
to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were carried off and
divided up into policies and stocks. I have raised you to respect every
human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the
past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular,
specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range
of
feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one
particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in
a
nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her
sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels
at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and
capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly
proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential
texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold
her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this
woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can
hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when
she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends.
For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the
never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history.
Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been
free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into
chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but
chains.
You must struggle to truly remember this past. You must resist the common
urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that
imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your
road,
and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were
people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not
destined
to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how
improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the
posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can
never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps
struggle is all we have. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no
natural promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at
all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself:
verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.
The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know,
each
day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise. I am not a
cynic.
I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I
discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your
body
in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for
the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be
assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the
powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find
his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the
chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and
how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and
gold.
Perhaps you remember that time we went to see Howl’s Moving Castle on the
Upper West Side. You were almost 5 years old. The theater was crowded, and
when we came out we rode a set of escalators down to the ground floor. As
we
came off, you were moving at the dawdling speed of a small child. A white
woman pushed you and said, “Come on!” Many things now happened at once.
There was the reaction of any parent when a stranger puts a hand on the
body
of their child. And there was my own insecurity in my ability to protect
your black body. And more: There was my sense that this woman was pulling
rank. I knew, for instance, that she would not have pushed a black child
out
on my part of Flatbush, because she would be afraid there and would sense,
if not know, that there would be a penalty for such an action. But I was
not
out on my part of Flatbush. And I was not in West Baltimore. I forgot all
of
that. I was only aware that someone had invoked their right over the body
of
my son. I turned and spoke to this woman, and my words were hot with all of
the moment and all of my history. She shrank back, shocked. A white man
standing nearby spoke up in her defense. I experienced this as his attempt
to rescue the damsel from the beast. He had made no such attempt on behalf
of my son. And he was now supported by other white people in the assembling
crowd. The man came closer. He grew louder. I pushed him away. He said, “I
could have you arrested!” I did not care. I told him this, and the desire
to
do much more was hot in my throat. This desire was only controllable
because
I remembered someone standing off to the side there, bearing witness to
more
fury than he had ever seen from me—you.
I came home shook. It was a mix of shame for having gone back to the law of
the streets, and rage—“I could have you arrested!” Which is to say: “I
could
take your body.”
I have told this story many times, not out of bravado, but out of a need
for
absolution. But more than any shame I felt, my greatest regret was that in
seeking to defend you I was, in fact, endangering you.
“I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s
earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and
choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the
rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the
West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single
file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.
But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will
yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people whom you
shouldn’t. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson—not even Jackie
Robinson was always Jackie Robinson. But the price of error is higher for
you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify
itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his
or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon
Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s
mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the
small-eyed boy pulling out.
You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because
it assures you an honorable and sane life. I am ashamed of how I acted that
day, ashamed of endangering your body. I am ashamed that I made an error,
knowing that our errors always cost us more.
I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save
you—but
not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you
closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe
oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams,
their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes
real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should
enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children,
when
nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages
of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and
bred to understand cause and effect can never be. And I would not have you
live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always
at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying
degrees
this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the
privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
I am speaking to you as I always have—treating you as the sober and serious
man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human
feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his
beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is
that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people
comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to
be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack
every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who
must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not
have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious
citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
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