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.