This week I read "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This book is a letter from the author to his son about his experiences, thoughts, and feelings about being a black man in America. Ta-Nehisi stumbles through thoughts of how black bodies have been and continue to be owned and exploited by white people. He tries to find how history and the present collide and what to do with the mess it has created. His letter explores all the current issues we are thinking about, but painted with the passionate palate of a father's love.
As a mother, I can feel the urgency of every word on every page. As my own children come into adolescence, I have an urgent desire to make sense of this world for them, and to share every hard-learned lesson with them. I want to pour into their minds what I know, and bind up their hearts before they break. Every second ticks toward the time when they leave my nest and I panic at times that there isn't time enough. And it is with all this emotion that Ta-Nehisi approaches the topic of racism. There are times when I cannot follow his thought process, when I can tell that the ideas run so deep that words are completely inadequate. And yet I do not fault this weakness, for I know that it means the feelings are true and deep. While it means I cannot access that depth, it reassures me of their importance.
In this book, I feel like I understand less of the subject than ever before, and yet it solidifies how necessary the confrontation is. It is a strange feeling as an intellectual, as a reader, to come away from a book feeling lost and yet knowing what I read is true yet unattainable.
What has left the biggest impression on me is Ta-Nehisi's attempt to convey how he feels his body is not his own. He describes feeling that he must make decisions about where to go, how to walk, how to express himself, and how to talk based on white people and white standards around him, or risk injury, incarceration or death. He shared a story about watching a white couple with their young child "own the sidewalk" as they walked down the street, their child careening around on a tricycle. Their attitude was being subconsciously passed onto their child: there is nothing to fear, we are in charge, we have a right to be here, no one will challenge that. He compared that to the message he gives his son when he leaves the house: be careful where you walk, keep your distance if you think it might get you in trouble, eyes down if you see a police officer. I liken this to the adjustments I make as a woman if I walk alone, go out at night, or find myself in an unfamiliar area. I feel a hate growing for the "adjustments" people have to make to live in a white man's world. It is unfair and I do not know why we are still in this place. We have come so far and yet we have so far to go.
This book more than any other I read truly brought the issue back to the individual level. There is no more intimate relationship than a parent to their child. When your literal flesh and blood stands before you and you would jump in front of a train to save their physical body. In this way, Ta-Nehisi is throwing his mind in front of the racist systems of our day in an attempt to explain, apologize for, and change the way we live for his son.
In the author's own words:
"A society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the bluc of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker."
"The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies - the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of systems - are the product of democratic will."
"So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason."
"The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of the theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free...To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, faillible, breakable humans.
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