Between the World and Me

Just to be clear - I am a white, middle aged (plus...) upper middle class heterosexual male with stable childhood and great family. I am, as John Scalzi wrote in his brilliant blog post, playing the game of life on The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is. My single interaction with the police was a weird one when a crazy person tried to attack my car with a baseball bat - I'll be glad to tell you that story over a beer some day. But it was more humorous than dangerous. We have a cop living in our neighborhood and, while my daughters played with his daughters, we didn't have much to do with each other, but it was nice to have the feeling our neighborhood got a little more coverage than the normal one.

All of that is to say that I just can't imagine what life as a black male in today's, yesterday's, last year's, last decade, last century, America must feel like. Coates wrote this 5 years ago and, as you are all well aware, things have not gotten at all better, especially it seems this year of awfulness that is 2020. Friends were murdered by the police and he never knew if he would be next. He writes the book like a letter to his growing son, relating a tough life in Baltimore growing up, finding redemption in the quadrangle at Howard and struggling as a writer and as a black man.

I loved his turn of phrase in discussing "the people who think they are white", and actually how he is a bit jealous that they (we!) can be so comfortable in our own lives. He writes extensively about how, even now, a black person is not the owner of their own body, that the powers that be can take it away without any fear of retaliation. How, when a woman pushed his 4 year old son and said get out of the way, when he "made the mistake" of sticking up for him, he was told "he could be put in jail".

It is just heart breaking to read this and realize, once again, just how little has changed. It's like Kenneth Clark said before the Kerner Report committee in 1968:

I read that report . . . of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’35, the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’43, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot. I must again in candor say to you members of this Commission—it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland—with the same moving picture re-shown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.

‘Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies.’ (p. 20)

Met kosmische metaforen heb je mijn aandacht al gauw te pakken. Nu wist ik van tevoren niet dat deze ter sprake zouden komen in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, maar ze bleken de rijpe kersen op de spreekwoordelijke taart. Werken van Coates’ hand las ik eerder al op The Atlantic, maar om een of andere reden heeft dit relatief dunne boek mij al een paar jaar vanuit de boekenkast staan tarten. Ergens, denk ik achteraf, ontbrak het me aan moed om het ter hand te nemen, omdat ik wist dat het een pijnlijke leeservaring zou gaan worden – it ain’t gonna be pretty, zoveel was duidelijk... Maar door de massale BLM-protesten wist ik: het is tijd.

And boy, did it hurt.

Maar dan wel op de mooiste manier denkbaar. Coates heeft met dit boek, een brief aan zijn zoon Samori, een onuitwisbare indruk op mij achtergelaten – de onrechtvaardigheid van de eeuwenoude ketens die hedendaagse zwarte Amerikanen tot de dag van vandaag ongehinderd omlaag blijven trekken, de tastbare woede en het ongeloof dat zich in zijn schrijven uit, het golft allemaal van de pagina’s en terwijl je het allemaal tot je neemt, denk je alleen maar: laat het in godsnaam stoppen. De gruwelijkheden dan, hè... Het boek mocht van mij eeuwig zo doorgaan.

Coates schrijft met een intellectuele wildheid, een ziedende eruditie waar ik haast bang van werd. Met deze bevlogen brief lijkt hij erop uit te zijn je hersenpan met een koevoet open te breken en het – de niet te misverstane boodschap, de grote Amerikaanse tragedie – vervolgens met z’n blote vuisten in je botte harses te willen stompen, net zolang ieder van ons het begrepen heeft, ongeacht je huidskleur of afkomst. De waterdanser, zijn romandebuut, waar hij ruim tien jaar aan werkte, staat alweer klaar als zijn volgende (en dit keer lijvige) boek dat me vanuit de boekenkast onbevreesd aankijkt, als een volgende rekening die nog vereffend moet worden. Die tijd komt nog wel. Ik zou er graag aan beginnen, maar ik moet eerst geestelijk recupereren van deze prozaïsche krachttoer van Coates.

Alleen al die vurige aanbeveling van wijlen Toni Morrison op de kaft – ‘This is required reading’ – dat zegt genoeg, toch?

This book is a chronicle of the mental and emotional changes of a sensitive man living in a black body in America. It's at times poetic and honest about deep emotion, and though most of the time he's addressing his son, the author speaks to the silent observer who takes their white body for granted in the luxury of ignorance. He never uses the term "white privilege," and he's less accusing than James Baldwin, but he welcomes the reader into his head and to see with his eyes.

"I wanted you to see different people living by different rules."

Coates has a complicated relationship with the place that he grew up. He complains that he was in a fight for survival, keeping his body safe, and putting him at the very bottom rung of Maslowe's hierarchy of needs. However, he justifies the very system of violence that he abhors, he casts it as an act of defiant identity creation and protection for the people living in his community from outsiders. It's very complicated for him as he talks to his son. He wants the best for his son, and he doesn't want him "blinded by fear" when dealing with the rest of the world, but he still wants him to remember where he came from and the struggle of his people, who are they his people? Are they really a race? Race is a concept created by the oppressor, so it can't be that. The conflict of wanting to pass on your child a Heritage, but not the negative aspects of that heritage hold universal appeal.

His experience of feeling free from all of the racial baggage that he experienced every day in New York City is not uncommon among American people in Paris. The idea that learning French in school seems pointless because you don't know any French people to talk to transforms into realizing subjects like French are Bridges to other universes with a different culture, with an entirely different way of thinking, and an entirely different way of perceiving beauty.

This feels like an important book. It's very honest, insightful, personal and a much-needed perspective. I am glad it exists, glad I read it, and I think most people could benefit from reading it and really thinking about it.

That being said, I feel like I'm not exactly its intended audience, as a white person who does try to unpack my own biases. I feel cynical about whether the message will reach the so-called Dreamers, the people who are perpetuating the harmful narratives in the first place. After all, not being willing to listen to black voices and do honest self-examination is sort of their defining characteristic.

Of course this is probably also an important read for the folks to whom it's ostensibly addressed, the ones who are on the receiving end of the violence perpetrated on them by ongoing American racism and injustice and who have to figure out how to exist -- let alone thrive, raise families, etc. -- within that power structure. But I can't and won't try to speak for them as to whether or not Coates' story resonates.