Here is the next memoir I read, after Joan Didion’s, as inspired by that NYT list. This is a statement by a black intellectual to his 15-year-old son, about life as a black person and the struggles and dangers he faces in the world. It’s heartfelt and moving and grim and blunt. Its function to readers like me is to reveal perspectives I’ve never had, and couldn’t even imagine.
The book came out in 2015 and I have the 20th printing — with blurbs on the cover about it being a bestseller, and a National Book Award winner. So I didn’t buy it when first published. Its subject is nothing obviously up my alley. Presumably after a year of acclaim, and since frankly that it was short!, I did buy a copy, in April 2016.
So Coates writes to his son while pondering American history and how black people have always been targets of white people. Two repeated phrases jump out. He refers to the latter as “those Americans who believe that they are white.” And he ponders “how one should live within a black body” and how police are authorized to “destroy your body” even if only mistakenly.
On the former is this revealing passage on page 7. I’ll put it in some context:
This leads us to another equally important ideal, one that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism–the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them–inevitably follows from this inalterable condition.
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..the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible–this is the new idea at the hart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white–Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish–and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again.
It’s recent decades it’s been stressed that, genetically, the differences between the “races” are minuscule, and of no significance; thus, races are “socially constructed.” From a very different perspective, we just read in Steven Pinker (mentioned in this post, under Ch8) that racial differences are adaptations to climate, sort of like large inbred families. Of course he’s taking the 40,000 foot view. At the level of society, Coates recalls how many different identities, even “races,” have over time become melted together into the American race of “white” — as compared to black, or brown. It’s all relative, and a matter of context.
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Part I. Author recalls growing up, intellectual and keeping a low profile among others in his neighborhood. Learning to write from his grandmother: how to interrogate a situation. Learning about the civil rights movement: blacks never fought back. His Mecca was Howard University. A quip from Saul Bellow asking, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” and realizing the answer was “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus.” He reads history, how e.g. the Irish were once portrayed the same as blacks, being at the bottom of the hierarchy. At Howard he falls in love more than once, realizes that most people have affairs with everyone. He’s attracted to a boy, Prince Jones, but they don’t do anything. He meets his son’s mother. The son’s name, by the way, is Samori.
Here’s a beautiful passage, from page 69:
I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress-making and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. …
Part II. He himself is stopped by the police, and let go. But the same police of that country, with a notorious record, kill again–they kill Prince Jones. There’s nothing he can do. There are no consequences; police claim any kind of threat, and are exonerated. He and his family move to New York, two months before 9/11. He sees rich people in Manhattan, worries that he cannot save his son from the world. Later, he and his son visit Civil War sites, and ponder the lies of the Civil War, how white people came to believe, needing someone below them, that black victims of the police somehow deserved their deaths.
He ponders the futility of the “race” problem, page 115:
You see this from time to time when some dullard–usually believing himself white–proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all beige and thus the same “race.” But a great number of “black” people already are beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead “races” (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose–the organization of people beneath, and beyond, the umbrella of rights.
He gives up the “Dream” of holding a place in society like the whites. There will always be something between the world and himself. But he travels, to Paris, later to Geneva, to Paris again, and knows his son already knows things he didn’t know until much later.
He mentions several times throughout the book that his family never had any use for religion, and that he himself is “godless”… so he does not rely on the dreams of divine justice.
Part III. Finally he looks up and visits Prince Jones’ mother, how she heard the news, how she is formal, and not angry. And finally, he has a visionary sense of what will have to happen, page 150:
Once, the Dream’s parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. … And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.
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That’s quite a shift in perspective at the end — aligning the sins of racism with the unbridled technology that has enabled a portion of humanity (who consider themselves white, at least in America) to threaten the safety of the planet. Is this fair? Perhaps it depends on perspective. His and mine are quite different.
