Every new month brings with it a flood of new names forever lost to this life, here and now. Trayvon, Brown, Garner, Tamir, Emanuel 9, and Sandra, with innumerable names before and many more to come. True tragedies. Unspeakable evils.
Those who bear the inhumane weight of racism seemingly burst with grief constantly. How can a human endure such relentless onslaught? The truth of being a person of color in America, is that this country was not built for all. This country was, though, built on the backs and bodies of black lives.
"Whites" that benefit from white supremacy and privilege don't want to understand the insidious cost of an empire with a history (and ongoing reality) that diminishes and devalues non-"white" persons and cultures.
I've read "Between the World and Me" in the wake of Sandra Bland's murder. "Suicide!" some will vehemently counter. No, Sandra was murdered.
I will never know the struggle to survive that a woman, a black woman, has to daily endure, moment by moment, her whole life long. Being non-white, non-male, non-evangelical, non-heterosexual, and non-abled bodied is a constant struggle in the empire of America.
Sandra Bland never had a day of her brief life where she did not have to struggle against a history and future always set against her. I'm not saying I know what precisely ended Sandra's life, the specific mechanism of her death, but I do know that she was murdered. All black lives are daily being murdered by the "white" empire of America.
Race is a construct. It is true that we, whatever shade of hue, all are human. But, some constructs of race are fuel and plunder for the militant machinery of empire.
Coates explains,
"Plunder has matured into habit and addiction [for "white" America]; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline."
Coates also contrasts dreamers and strugglers.
Dreamers want to be "white". The dream of equality is really a desire to be "white"; that is, to benefit from this empire, instead of being churned by empire, one has to be white. Coates does not quite say it like this. This is my interpretation of his term, "dreamers".
Strugglers have awaken from the dream, and strugglers just want to live their brief lives, they only desire to be human. Strugglers are under no dreamy illusion that they will ever fully be equal in this empire. The empire of America is not interested in or built for equality. Empire is built for and by domination. Again, this is my interpretation of Coates, and not his words.
Coates writes (and lives) with an immediacy of the here and now. His writing style is hauntingly poetic and sobering. He doesn't use the phrase, "black lives matter," but he is clear that his physical body matters. His son's life matters. His book is a memoir for his son's benefit-- a matter of life and death.
Coates' own awakening from the temptation to dream, and to succumb to illusion, is born out of a grounding revelation that his life, his physical body, is all he gets.
Coates explains:
"I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us—Christians, Muslims, atheists—lived in this fear of this truth. Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional."
Practically too, Coates exposes some often touted anthems of the white empire of America:
“'Black-on-black crime' is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return."
Some further contextual reflections as I read "Between the World and Me":
White privilege serves white supremacy, the social construct [of my] "whiteness" hides in the cloak of normalcy, "it is what it is", left unquestioned & unexposed for what it really is, a sinister systemic evil.
Someone recently asked me "What if what happened to Sandra Bland was about a 'black' officer and a 'white' civilian?"
Police brutality is perpetrated and experienced by various persons of all constructs of race. But, what happened to Sandra is not as frequent of an experience for "white" persons. Officers operating from a position and system of white supremacy (even officers of color) are extra cruel, historically speaking, toward persons of color.
Consider that our present moment in history is not far removed from slavery followed by segregation, then by Jim Crow, then by the unsettled civil rights struggle, and then still yet by an uphill climb for minorities. An African American person in his forties might only be two to three generations from slavery.
This country, with all of its history, is only 4-5 generations old (depending on how one accounts for a generational span of time), that's a pretty young country. And, if an unfolding history ebbs and flows, like a pendulum swinging forward and then slightly backwards, then true progress is slow.
So, to answer the hypothetical (fantasy) question (switching the race roles of the Sandra Bland injustice), considering that African Americans are about 13% of USA population, and that black officers are a lesser percentage of the USA police force, then the frequency of "black" officer violence against "white" civilians is far less frequent then the more frequent way around. Plus, history has largely not been kind to minorities in this country.
Back to Coates, even as a person of faith (clergy), I too sense in my own self that perhaps this physical life is all we get. And, to survive is to struggle; to know any degree of joy is a struggle.
And, if one is a person of color (non- "white"), then the history and ongoing reality of the American empire will always be against them.
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Popular Highlights in this book
The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.Highlighted by 16,051 Kindle readers- And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do.Highlighted by 14,809 Kindle readers
- The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.Highlighted by 11,442 Kindle readers
From the Publisher
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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Between the World and Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow, Coates has received the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, and the George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story “The Case for Reparations.” He lives in New York with his wife and son.
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| THE WATER DANCER | WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER | THE BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE | THE BEAUTIFU STRUGGLE (Adapted for Young Adults) | |
| A boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom | A vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment; this collection includes the landmark essay “The Case for Reparations.” | An exceptional father-son story from the about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us | Adapted from the adult memoir, this father-son story explores how boys become men, and quite specifically, how Ta-Nehisi Coates became Ta-Nehisi Coates |
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A right work for the good of us all.
Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2016
The most descriptive and accurately written perspective and presentation of life as an African American within the strict confines of White American society. It is unbiased and plays no favorites, it picks no sides, as any right written work should. It is truth as I have experienced it throughout my 47 years, as taught by my grandmother who grew up during Lynching Sport and Jim Crow, and whose father was a former slave. The dynamics of hatred and superiority may have changed slightly but the underlying fuel for and of division remains steadfast and unmoved. The truth is that the presentation concerning superiority is the poison that taints the whole of humanity. There is no such thing as race and color, none of it. It is the foundation of all of our problems right?To the Plundered: "fashion your constructive mind, your knowledgeable tongue, your very unbreakable will with the purest of iron."To the Dreamer: "Your oblivion will surely destroy us all. Awaken Now!"Only through our courageous efforts at understanding one another can we grow to care for each other. Let us begin!Peace.
Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2016
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