Between the World and Me

Damn.

Ya'll should have read this already, I'm a late-comer because I waited for my hold to come in at the library. It's beautiful writing and a heartbreaking topic. I love the way Coates talks about bodies. And Dreamers. Ugh. Just read it.

From “Between the World and Me”:

Then the mother of the murdered boy rose, turned to you, and said,

“You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid to be you.”

Though short, this book packs a punch to the gut. We're only a couple of weeks into 2016, and I can already tell that this book will be one I recommend over and over again throughout the year.

It's not an easy book to read. It's challenging not only in the style of writing and the diction, but also in the message. It's the type of book you will probably see paired with Orientalism or The Autobiography of Malcolm X in future college classes.

“What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness.”
“‘Race' itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem.”

I will confess right away: I am afraid to write a complete and truthful review of Coates's Between the World and Me. I will begin easily enough. Coates has written an important and disturbing book, one which I am glad to have read and which I think (maybe) all Americans should read. It will and should be read for decades to come. Maybe it will become part of the conversation that leads to a solution to our national disease and horror.

There, that wasn't difficult. But now it becomes not so easy. As a moderately-well-educated, somewhat left-of-center, well-intentioned male person who thinks I am white, I understand that it is not legal for me to criticise Coates. I understand that I am expected to squee and bubble about how TNC is my favorite author of all time and I want to have his babies Oh My God! (Full disclosure: I come to Coates's book with built-in prejudices, not because of anything about him, but because of his gushing adoring fans. Gushing adoring fans generally give me hives. That is why I never got into Apple products. I already have a God; I don't really need Steve Jobs to fill that rôle.)

So let me just get it out in the open. The man's writing sometimes annoys me to no end. “Mr. Coates,” I want to say to him, “I hate to tell you, but I'm just not all that interested in your ‘black body,' beautiful and sacred though it may be.” I understand that he is making a point, and I think I understand his intended meaning, but after the tenth or twentieth repetition I was desperate for him to just drop it. Write “me” or “him” or “them” or “pickled purple armadillo snout” – anything but “black body” one more time.

The repetition was annoying, but more importantly, it obscures what might be a serious philosohical naïveté. Coates is a vocal and thorough-going materialist, repudiating “magic” and any such nonsense as a “soul.” The entirety of a person's identity, in his philosophy, is the physical. What unaware people would call the ‘mind' or ‘soul' is only chemicals and electricity. Fair enough. This is certainly the prevailing philosophy among moderately-or-more-educated, left-of-center Americans, and it may very possibly be true. But, if it be true, or to a person who believes it to be true, there is no “person” to “have” a body. The body is all there is to the “person.” So I wanted to beg Coates several times, “Please stop talking about yourself as if you have a body. Since your ‘black body' is all there is to you, to your son, to all those beautiful bodies at The Mecca, please use that construction one time and then just say ‘me' or ‘him' or ‘them.' You are not a ‘person with a black body,' by your philosophy. You are a black body; only that and nothing more. Be aware and consistent. And please be less repetitious.”

I am grateful that Coates allows me to be a “person” who thinks he is white. I am happy to be a person, not only a body, but i think he did not mean it as a kindness. It is obvious that I am the enemy and nothing more.

He emphasizes that people who think they are white are no group, no tribe, and have no meaningful identity or cultural claims other than as oppressor, but black bodies form a tribe, no matter how disparate. He at least implies that people who think they are white do not get credit for achievements by other people who they think to be white, but black bodies seem to get credit for the accomplishments of the global tribe of black bodies. I find it difficult to take this seriously.

It seems that he considers people who think they are white to be essentially different beings than black bodies, almost like separate species. Since I, a person who believes myself to be white, know myself to be human, I am left wondering what black bodies are if they are something essentially different. I turn aside from this line of thought as being utterly repulsive, but it seems to be the only path Coates wants to leave open to me.

Coates bears within his black body many generations of reasonable anger and fear. I understand that, and I read him with consideration for it, but I believe that only catastrophe can come as a result of speaking of people who think they are white and of black bodies as essentially different. Destruction of every body is the only outcome I can imagine.

[Deep sigh. Now what? I have so much to say, positive and negative. I think I will cut it short, but first this...]

I am gay. My entire life people have said about me, “You're really straight, but you've chosen to live a homosexual lifestyle.” (What does that even mean?) “You were molested by a man when you were young. You don't remember because you have repressed the memory.” I have been told “Since you can't reproduce more of your kind, you want to recruit our sons to be like you.”

All my life people and black bodies have chosen to pretend they know my thoughts, my motives. They have presumed to treat me as an interchangeable member of the class “Queers,” sub-class “Faggots.” They have chosen to do that, and I have chosen to call them on it.

I am thinking of the escalator incident, when the woman who thinks she is white rudely moves his son out of the way. That was surely inexcusable and she needed to be called on it. I think maybe it makes the world a better place when people get called on their rudeness. But Coates then puts thoughts into her head, ascribes motives to her, and he does so with a high degree of confidence. There is no “perhaps.” He thinks he knows. He calls her a racist and declares her motive to be racist, and he preëmtively denies her the chance of self-defense. Maybe she is a racist. Probably she is. Most people who think they are white and quite a few black bodies do harbor some anti-black racism–this is scientifically provable and a really sad thing. But neither Mr. Coates nor I know. And even if his guess about her racism is correct, he does not know her motive in that particular instance. He denies her full humanity and tosses her into a group, knowing nothing about her thoughts or motives. He treats her much the same way straight people treat queers. He treats her in much the same way people who think they are white treat black bodies.

And here is the problem I have with this incident. The one time I witnessed something similar it was a black body who picked up a young girl who thought she was white. The black body, a man, lifted her off the ground by a couple of inches and moved her two feet to the right so he could pass her by. I did not kick him out of the library for the day, but maybe I should have. Given his history, if he had been a person who thought of himself as white I might have done so. In fact, I probably would have.

So what to make of that? The rude woman who thinks she is white is reduced to a representative of an ongoing oppression of black bodies, but what about the rude black body? Unless we are to treat them as separate species, we must give each the honor of being respected as an individual, with unknown thoughts and desires and motives.

Mr. Coates's fear and anger are reasonable and justified. But if that is all there is, and if that fear and anger dehumanize people who think they are white and even other black bodies (the way Coates dehumanizes the cop who killed Prince and all the 9/11 first responders) then I think it is Doom for all of us. Coates gives us nothing but fear and anger, and he uses those emotions, legitimate though they are, to destroy the humanity of almost everybody.

All I can say at this moment is that I recommend it to everyone.

It's the kind of book that while reading, you have to fight yourself to not put it aside and start writing your own cause you have so many thoughts going through your head, and really that's the best thing a book can do to you.
I don't think I have the words to explain it, nor will I give it justice (many have written about it and much more eloquently), so I'm just gonna urge everyone to read it.

Unless you've been living under a literary rock, you've heard of or better still even read the works of Ta-Nehisi Coates. A journalist/writer for The Atlantic, his longform essays on race relations in today's turbulent times are the perfect recipe for those trying to sift through the jingoism. His profound understanding of African-American history is a revelation for someone who didn't grow up here. Heck, I'm sure people who were even born here are aware of much of the sordid history of race and how it permeates American society to this day.

This book is a long open letter to his teenage son who reads and sees the troubling news today and gets distressed. Coates doesn't sugarcoat his words on how ‘his body' i.e. that of an African-American is not really in his control and is subject to abuse not by a racist cop but rather by institutions that've thrived on subjugation of minorities and adds that history has been replete with such injustices. Perhaps we hear about them more often now than before thanks to the tech social networks. He doesn't proffer violence as the solution but his tone is of resigned anger that has festered over years thanks to countless incidences of being unfairly profiled.

Coates talks about the other side of white privilege which any non-white person doesn't need any explaining. The norms that have been set that we constantly try to fight against are dictated by what is expected of you. I cannot imagine what it is to be a black man or a Muslim in America as much as a white person can't imagine what's it be to a brown person trying to board an airplane just to get home.

Be warned that parts of the book will make you angry. Very angry. But it also instills you in a finer understanding of the world around you and all you can hope is to make it a slightly better place. As Obama often says, we strive to make it a more perfect union. But I don't think we're there yet. Far from it, in fact. But someday.

This is one of the most important books on race I've read. Every American should read this, even if you think you're a liberal white person. Coates has something to tell us all.

Brutal but excellent. I'd recommend it to anyone and everyone. I'm not sure I understood all of it, but I plan to keep especially those passages in mind as I continue to learn and grow.

Holy crap. I got maybe 70 pages through the book and it wasn't gelling for me. So I stopped and started over. This time slowing down to read it instead of simply consuming it. It's worth the effort.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie blew me away in Americanah when she said she only became black when she came to America. Now Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about those who believe they are white. Here is a raw and open letter to his 15 year old son. It is his story as a continuum, trying to understand his changing place in the American Dream.

It is beyond me to articulate the power of the book. It's an entirely readable PhD thesis. It is humbling in it's sharp eyed examination of now, and human in it's rendering of ideas. It is a fantastic read, worthy of re-reading and discussion. Wow.

The most important book I've read all year.

Very moving, and challenging to understand as a white reader. One of the few “important” books that is actually better than the hype.

Ugh. So beautiful and moving and overwhelming and challenging and it's difficult to express the way this book made me feel. Toni Morrison was right in her review - this book should be “required reading.”

Going into this book, I had some apprehension. Could it live up to the acclaim? Was Coates the resurrected Baldwin as some seem to believe he is? Would Coates correctly identify the root of the problems that racial tensions grow out of?

Initially, it seemed Coates was heading down the wrong direction, making socio-economic comparisons of the black reality versus the white world of Mr. Belvedere. Not only is this comparison hugely erroneous, but it ignores the black world of The Cosby Show and seems a rather juvenile argument to make. But these were the thoughts of a young Coates and it eventually becomes clear that Coates' argument is anything but juvenile.

Despite a rocky start and an end that gets lost somewhere in Paris, Between the World and Me is everything others have said it is. In fact, it may be more. Coates drops serious knowledge, and he does it in a way that is so incredibly eloquent, yet lyrical. If the subject weren't so incredibly infuriating, his words could easily lull a reader to a restful state.

Is Coates the next Baldwin? In my opinion, no. They are different writers with different styles. The comparison is certain to be made as both authors carry a certain eloquence and broach the same subject. But in comparing Between the World and Me with Baldwin's influential The Fire Next Time, one cannot ignore that Coates really tackles the subject, truly shines light on the issue until it becomes transparent, while Baldwin's work was more proscriptive. Baldwin spent much of his work addressing religion and its role in the issue; Coates groups all human constructs and identifies the problem not so much as the fault of God or society, but as the individual's inability to think beyond these concepts.

Between the World and Me is a phenomenal work that gives voice to Baldwin's assertion that “freedom” was still one hundred years in the future. Here's to hoping this book gets us closer to true emancipation within the next 48 years.

Good Lord.

Short Review: This is a book that will be on my best of 2015 list, and I think many others as well. It is a hard book to read because of the difficult reality it is dealing with. But that makes it more important, not less. It is formatted roughly as a letter to his 15 year old son. Occasionally that format really brings an additional level of poignancy to the book, but also occasionally just seems like a excessive narrative structure.

I listened to the audiobook, which is read by Coates. His passion carries through well in the audiobook format, but I will re-read in print to make sure I am forced to be more careful with his thoughts.

There are a few places where I think he is overly self-indulgent with his writing. But this is a short book and it is easy to forgive those places.

I want to say, that I spend a fair amount of time arguing with Coates in my head. But I think that also forced me to pay closer attention to the broader point, that systemically the US is a racist nation that has always treated its African American citizens differently. Coates is not that interested in an individual's racism. He is more interested in the system that does not solve the problems of the individual's racism and that regardless of what a person feels, there is a resulting action that exists.

My longer review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/between-the-world-and-me-by-ta-nehisi-coates/

I plan on reading this again before the end of the year.

HEY guess what, when Toni Morrison says something is “required reading” you should listen to her.

This is so powerful and also beautifully-written. I knew this was an important book for me (for all Americans) to read but I thought it might be a bit of “homework” (just an unfortunate attitude I have sometimes about reading nonfiction even though I generally enjoy it), but the style is so lovely it kept me turning the page through material that was hard to read.