Between the World and Me

In the little bit of this book I read, Coates said a number of thoughtful, insightful things. And that's great. But I hate the way he writes this so much. I've read articles by him before that I liked, but the dense and flowery writing of Between the World and Me is like reading a 16th-century pamphlet on a nobleman's struggle with gout.

Often he seems to just be playing with language for the fun of it. His constant use of the word "body" in sentences that would commonly use words like "safety" or "life" seems to have become popular, but to me it is distancing; with Coates, the definition of "body" feels indistinct, becoming whatever he wants it to be in that particular sentence.

According to my Kindle the book can be read in two hours, and I'm sure the guy has a lot of interesting things to say, but I find the style so aggravating, so floaty, so indirect in its directness, that I found reading it close to intolerable.

This small book packs a big punch. The writing is fluid and smart, and the structure - written as a letter to his 15 year old son - helps it land square in your gut. It definitely opened my eyes and helped me understand what it is to be "brown" in the United States - and the sins we're all guilty of, even if our ancestors weren't slave-holders.

Additionally, I hadn't realized Coates was friends with Prince Jones and would write about him in this book. When his name popped up, I stopped, cold. I knew Prince - he worked in my gym and was always ready with kind words and a friendly smile. I remember being shocked when he was killed - but I hadn't realized the greater context of blue-on-black killings at the time. This book would've been powerful without a personal connection to one of his subjects, but that tipped it over the edge for me.

And the ending - he does a masterful job pulling up to an even broader perspective of where we are in the world and the fate that awaits us all. I suspect people who found some of his language or ideas tough to grasp will find some common ground in those final sentences.

I'll have to go read the book that won this category for the 2015 Pulitzer, because I'm struggling to see how anything could've topped this.

John Brown's raid struck a nerve on the eve of the Civil War because it evoked the white South's deepest fear: that having been the masters they would become the slaves, and that the cruelties they had visited on their "property" would be visited upon them in their turn. This has been the deepest fear of "white" America since both before and after the Civil War, and it explains a great deal about the violence of American policy domestic and foreign. It is reflected to this day in the virulent racism of the white underclass that flocks to the banner of Donald Trump.

To keep our privileged position in the world, we must suppress those of whom we have taken advantage, generally defined as "non-white": whether African American, Asian, African, or Arab. We live with the comment misattributed to George Orwell that "We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us." And in doing so, we project our own violence onto them. If we live in fear of Muslim Arab terror, it is nothing to the hundredfold terror we have visited upon the Muslims and the Arabs. A friend of mine likes to say that people in the Middle East have no respect for human life, and yet the minimum count of the civilians murdered in the Iraq War is 120,000. It shows itself in the internment of Japanese Americans and the ruthlessness and racism of the War in the Pacific. It is manifested in the winning of the West and the ethic cleansing of the Native American. Of course, the phenomenon is not limited to America, witness the German genocide of the Jews. This insight, although expressed in slightly different terms, lies at the heart of Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

The fragility of the "black body" permeates Coates' work; he posits that African Americans have a unique appreciation of the violence that is visited upon them, whether by Baltimore gangs or the Prince George's County's police. This is the violence that preserves untroubled white America's dream of peaceful suburbs and two cars in the garage, built on the suffering of the people it excludes. It is reflected in our gated communities, the fear of my neighbours in suburban Detroit even to enter the city, inhabited by alien beings quite forthrightly described as n*s. It is reflected in our reflexive attribution of criminality to African Americans, the readiness of the police to shoot and the ease with which we excuse the shootings. It is reflected in our segregated neighbourhoods and our segregated schools. Coates talks about how from the days of his childhood to his present life in New York as a well-known writer, a third of his brain has always been devoted to self-preservation, whether in be fear of violence in the 'hood or fear of arrest in upscale New York.

Abraham Lincoln famously said, "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master." Like it or not, the ruthless pace of demographics is eroding the privileged position of "white America," no longer a majority in "their country." There will not be peace at home or abroad until people who consider themselves white are willing to renounce their Dream of supremacy and the violence that attends it. And yet the reality is that white America simply lives in denial of the fragility of their own bodies, a denial that is enabled by the violence out of sight at the margins of their society, for our houses are built on sand, and we can only hope that the violence we have meted out to others will not be repaid upon us. We are not ready for Lincoln's prophecy that the war shall continue "until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword." It has not been paid yet.