The book is on BARD and is ood reading.
Miriam
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Subject: [blind-democracy] The anguish of racial oppression
http://socialistaction.org/chronicling-the-anguish-of-racial-oppression/
The anguish of racial oppression
Published December 24, 2015. | By Socialist Action.
Dec. 2015 Coates
By JOE AUCIELLO
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me” (New York: Spiegel & Grau,
2015), 152 pp., $24.
When Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke to an overflow audience at Boston College last
October as a distinguished guest of the Lowell Humanities Lecture Series, he
was introduced by the Law School dean as a new voice in the tradition of great
African American authors, from Langston Hughes to James Baldwin and Toni
Morrison. It was a remarkable statement about a 40-year-old writer whose
publications include only two brief books (with an eventual third, a collection
of award-winning magazine essays from The Atlantic, etc., no doubt in the
offing).
Perhaps it will also turn out to be a prophetic statement about Coates, whose
second work just won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. For now, in one
sense, at least, the statement about Coates’s literary legacy is certainly
true: Coates writes social commentary even when he is at his most personal. He
clearly cites not only Baldwin and Morrison but also Richard Wright, Amiri
Baraka, and Sonia Sanchez, whose tradition and influence on “Between the World
and Me” “is all baked in there,” as he commented in an interview on receiving
the award.
“Between the World and Me” is written in the form of a letter to Coates’s
teen-age son, Samori. As such, it intentionally follows—clearly in homage—James
Baldwin’s letter to his nephew in “The Fire Next Time”
(1963). Any number of pages and observation from Baldwin’s book could be lifted
entirely and placed in Coates’s text.
The point here is not to fault Coates for lack of originality but to praise the
quality of his prose—for Baldwin was a sublime writer—and, more importantly, to
highlight a social reality that, after more than 50 years has in profound ways
remained unchanged. Since America continues to murder the souls and bodies of
Black people, and to do so routinely, just as it did in Baldwin’s day, Coates
can’t help but describe what he sees and feels. And, in the process, if he
punctures the pretensions of “hope and change,” then so be it. Better to be a
foe of facile optimism.
Coates writes about racial oppression in the most intimate of terms. The
opening sentence of his book finds him explaining to the confused host of a
news show “what it meant to lose my body.” As he explained in his talk at
Boston College, that which he lost was actually taken or stolen.
“The kind of oppression that Black people feel in this country is very, very
physical. It’s about people taking possession of your body.”
In “Between the World and Me,” Coates writes: “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.” Or, as he says more concisely, “The answer is
American history.”
While Coates’s book is rooted in history, it is not a work of history, or even
reportage. Nor is it an essay in the traditional sense of the term, where an
author presents a statement of opinion and supports it by example and argues
with appeals to reason and logic. “Between the World and Me” is more of a
meditation or reflection that moves, not as point by point, but more by the
free association of topic and thought. Here, too, the influence of James
Baldwin is evident.
Coates also follows Baldwin in tearing apart the fairy-tales in which much of
this nation takes comfort. In “The Fire Next Time,” Baldwin writes, “The
American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed that collection
of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all
freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world
has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace. …
Negroes know far more about white Americans than that…”
Coates’s target is the same; he calls them the Dreamers, the white Americans
who without question trust in the American Dream and who are blind to the
reality of Black oppression on which this Dream was built and on which its
continued existence depends.
As Coates first describes it: “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 treehouses 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.”
Coates develops this point further into the book. “The Dreamers accept this as
the cost of doing business, accept our bodies as currency, because it is their
tradition. … Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural
resource of incomparable value.”
America is dangerous for Black people, and children must be trained—Coates
recounts beatings by his father—to know the contours of that danger and to fear
it. “Fear ruled everything around me,” Coates writes, “and I knew, as all black
people do, that this fear was connected to the Dream out there, to the
unworried boys, to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns
nightly beamed into our television sets.”
One of the most troubling and moving sections of “Between the World and Me” is
Coates’s account of the police murder of a friend from Howard University,
Prince Jones (and, in the third section of the book, a visit to Jones’s
mother). It is a tale so essential to the book, told so artfully, with a
climactic point so surprising, that in deference to readers, it will not be
summarized here.
What can be raised instead is a possible link between the title of the book and
the useless and tragic murder of a young man. Coates includes the opening lines
of a poem by Richard Wright and ends with the phrase “between the world and
me.” Wright’s poem, originally printed in the 1930s, is included in his talk,
“The Literature of the Negro in the United States,” published with three other
lectures as the book, “White Man, Listen!” (1957).
Wright’s poem is a “vision of horror” about a man who comes upon the remains of
a lynching and gazes at the “stony skull.” In a nightmare sequence of the poem,
he becomes the victim: “The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting
themselves into my bones.” The mob, too, returns to life, and the lynching
takes place again until, finally, the narrator’s skull becomes the skull he had
seen.
The terrible merging with the victim in Wright’s poem—a powerful
identification—captures the relationship between Coates and his fellow Howard
graduate, Prince Jones. The fate of one could easily have been the fate of the
other.
In his lecture, Wright comments, “The horrors that confront Negroes stay in
peace and war, in winter and summer, night and day.” This is Coates’s
conviction as well and is a major reason for the book’s popularity and
controversy.
As Coates writes toward the end of the book, “The killing fields of Chicago, of
Baltimore, of Detroit, were created by the policy of Dreamers,” and so the
incidental and accidental, the latest tragedy on the nightly news, is really
typical and deliberate. “The same hands that drew red lines around the life of
Prince Jones drew red lines around the ghetto.”
So, for all of Coates’ attention on the personal, the book speaks to a larger
condition. He unsparingly depicts just how the powerful social context of
America, a culture that can be at the same time blind and hostile, impacts him
and his family. Coates would likely agree with the statement that begins Angela
Davis’s autobiography: “… the forces that have made my life what it is are the
very same forces that have shaped and misshaped the lives of millions of my
people.” His account is most sociological when it is most autobiographical.
“Between the World and Me” is no political tract. Readers searching for an
overall social analysis and solution, whether reformist or revolutionary, will
be disappointed. Coates offers no prescription for social change, no basis even
for believing that change will occur, and no apology for his opinion, despite
the imperative need for progress.
There is, fortunately, no “happy talk,” á la Cornel West.
This point is made more as observation than criticism. The absence of a program
does not detract from the importance and value of a book that describes
American culture in the most personal and powerful terms. Like Baldwin’s “The
Fire Next Time,” a brutally honest account of what is constitutes a large step
towards what can be. Raising essential questions is part of that “stride
towards freedom,” to cite Martin Luther King Jr.’s phrase.
In the book’s concluding paragraph, Coates writes, “The Dreamers will have to
learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the
stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.” The
question of what might motivate white people (all of them, or by class division
within white society?) to struggle, and how white people will come to learn and
understand, is not even asked.
At the same time, Coates says to his son: “And still I urge you to struggle.”
No political platform is suggested here, as Coates discusses the need for
struggle only in personal, existential terms. “Struggle for the memory of your
ancestors. Struggle for wisdom… Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather,
for your name.”
Essentially, a father is saying to his son, “You will have to find your own
way.” For older readers already engaged in any form of social protest and
political activity, this answer cannot be fully satisfying, but there is also
an undeniable truth to the statement.
A young generation will have to engage socially and collectively, as in fact,
it is doing. In the early decades of his adult life, Coates found no adequate
body of thought and no substantial organization to further the beliefs and
values he felt. He is hardly to blame for the weakness of left movements; yet
lessons of the past are still relevant and valuable. Such lessons can be found,
analyzed, and applied as a newly developing movement considers appropriate. So,
it is necessary to agree with the advice Coates gives his son, “And still I
urge you to struggle.”
Photo: Ta-Nehisi Coates hold his son Samori in the summer of 2001.
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Posted in Arts & Culture, Black Liberation. | Tagged books, Coates.
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