I’m taking a sociology class called Learning Of Culture with Lisa Stulberg. It could just as easily be called Culture Of Learning, since it views school as just one cultural setting among many. Our first assignment was to read Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I agree with Toni Morrison’s cover blurb.
After reading just the first few pages, I couldn’t help but adopt Coates’ prose style. It’s infectious.
America has always placed a high value on people having the right to vote, but we as a country have had a shifting definition of who a person is, politically speaking (6). All the recent police killings prove to Coates that black people still have tenuous status as people.
Americans believe that race is a natural trait like height or hair color. But like any good sociologist will tell you, race is a constructed category. Coates puts it neatly: “[r]ace is the child of racism, not the father” (7). He sees race as an ideology, the ideology of oppressor or oppressed. Whiteness is an invented category for a formerly disparate collection of tribes and ethnicities. No joke! Jews were only invited into this category during my parents’ lifetime. Polish-Americans’ whiteness is still shaky–Polish jokes are still socially acceptable among supposedly progressive people who should know better. “People who need to be white” also need to be (seen as) not racist. The bad guys never see themselves as the bad guys.
A journalist interviews Coates about police killings of black men, and at the end asks him if he has hope. He feels like she’s asking him “to awaken her from a most gorgeous dream” (10-11). He doesn’t think that America has failed at enforcing its good intentions, but rather that it has succeeded at enforcing its bad ones. This echoes a brutal analysis I once read of our schools, that maybe they aren’t failing, maybe they’re actually succeeding at a different set of goals than their ostensible ones.
Education for Coates growing up was coextensive with discipline. The rules of the streets were brutal but they made sense. The best that could be said of school was that it was an alternative to prison or death–sixty percent of black men who drop out of high school go to jail. Coates felt continually lied to in school. The only thing that kept him there was the threat of violence. He describes himself as being more about the library than the classroom, which: me too. But that’s a bigger risk for him.
Hip-hop swagger, “brutal language and hard gaze” (15) is armor against fear. I think white hip-hop fans recognize that, and it’s what attracts us to the music. I don’t feel the same fear that a black man does, but I still feel plenty of fear. I’m a ball of anxiety most of the time and I face no oppression or violence whatsoever. After a lifetime in New York I’ve felt threatened or menaced on the street maybe a half dozen times? I’ve given up money out of fear three or four times. I’ve been the victim of violence zero times. How well would I be functioning if I was under constant threat that way not just from random kids and hustlers and muggers and the mentally ill, but the police too?
I live around the corner from the local precinct. I see cops standing around with guns, plainclothes officers in the bagel shop with guns, riot cops with armor and huge guns. They make me queasy and nervous, and I’m under no threat from them at all. What would I feel if I was black? I can’t imagine. Milo is becoming interested in the police, what they do, why they sometimes have people in handcuffs. It’s hard enough to explain any of that to him, and he’s as white a child as has ever existed.
American colonialism and militarism makes me sick, and I have only ever been their beneficiary. America didn’t go to war with Germany specifically to help my Jewish ancestors, but we ended up on the same side. The American right has sketchy motivations for embracing Jews at home and in Israel, but the embrace is real. On Lady Dynamite, Maria Bamford says to Sarah Silverman: “You’re Jewish, and that is just so cool.” It’s funny because it’s true.
Coates is a spectacularly good writer. But beyond that, why do I care about this book and the issues in it? Beyond wanting to not be a racist monster? My Jewish ancestors faced some of the same nonsense that black Americans do now. We have nose jobs, literal and figurative. They have Michael Jackson.
There’s constant pressure on high-achieving black people to be twice as good, to change the world by being extraordinary individuals. But Coates thinks it’s a myth that any individual can effect major change. He feels the pressure to be twice as good because black kids don’t get to make mistakes. They all have to be Jackie Robinson. But even Jackie Robinson wasn’t always Jackie Robinson (96). Coates addresses his son:
I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save you–but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real–when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities–they are shocked in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be. And I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact (107).
Wow.
On how Prince Jones was forgotten by white America:
The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of 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. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. 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, fallible, breakable humans (143).
This is true.
At the very end of the book, Coates connects racism to environmentalism–white supremacist industrial capitalism is literally destroying the world. The automobile is “the noose around the neck of the world” (151).
The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all (151).
The book is short and difficult and wonderful. Worth reading for sure.