Book Review: Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me. Ta-Nehisi Coates. New York: Spiegel and Grau. 201. 152 pages.

I write in books. Most of my books have at least a line or two underlined. It’s an academic tic. I did everything not to write in this one. Instead of reaching for a pencil or pen as I usually do with books I have not borrowed but purchased, I pulled a stack of small Post-It Notes from my desk. I wanted to note the following passage:

Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresy—torture, theft, enslavement—are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure ‘that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,’ he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant ‘government o the people’ but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term ‘people’ to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of ‘government of the people,’ but the means by which ‘the people’ acquired their names.

Coates goes on to point out that the naming of people as white and not-white—the illusion that this construction, race, is real and not mutable and predates racism is a myth that has allowed for the hierarchical ordering of people in this country. This is not the accidental by-product of our history, but its institutionalized foundation, “the violence that undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence of ‘Yeah, what’s up n—, what’s up now?’ were not unrelated. And this violence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design.” Our success as a nation is the result of a direct, continuing assault on black bodies. Coates’s long-form essay, framed as a letter to his son, in part recollects his youth in Baltimore and his education at Howard University—the relative safety and prestige of which is not enough to save his friend Prince Jones from a deadly run-in with the Prince George’s Co. police (having grown up in the DC Metro area, his description of that particular police force is no writerly conflation.) He sees his own mother’s fear for his black body growing up in how he’s raising his own son. The books begins, though the story is much older than this, last summer after the death of Michael Brown and the exoneration of the police officers who murdered him. The book’s release date was moved up in response to other cases of police brutality that followed Brown’s death. This decision is remarkable only insofar as the book itself lays bare that this is not a new phenomenon or in any way unique to last summer and there was no need to move up the book’s release to coincide with any particular case because there is always a next case.

Coates states that the success of one people as a direct result of the subjugation of another is not unique to the United States. What makes us special is our belief in our continued exceptionalism despite what we know of the history of black life in this country. Coates calls this the Dream, that we’ve convinced ourselves that our democratic ideals are our cultural, political, and economic realities. He hopes earlier in this text that Americans, white Americans in particular, can challenge themselves to meet these ideals and reject this presumed cultural innocence.  “We the people…” is a marvelous notion until you start to ask who the men who wrote our founding documents actually meant to include as “people.”

This is where I have to admit to a few things: before Travyon Martin and Michael Brown, I did not think very seriously or very often about race. I certainly rarely interrogated my own whiteness, apart from pointing out that the Irish were not always considered  white. I can’t recall the context within which I made this argument. But I can tell you that it doesn’t even really apply to me. My people are mostly Welsh and we’ve been here entirely too long for that to matter. Coming from what was a working class family (we have since becoming solidly middle class), I rejected accusations of “privilege.” Born and raised in Virginia, I told myself that I was not Southern in any of the regrettable ways, as if having parents born in Ohio and Maryland, respectively saved me from having racists relatives. It did not. I come from a long line of bigots who just happened to reside north of the Mason-Dixon line. I did not consider “whiteness” a construction that could be studied until my literary theory professor pointed it out during a lecture. Even then, I remarked as an academic oddity. I never really questioned how my liberalism and feminism, as I developed each, were still limited in scope by this blindness. I still have a lot of reading and listening to do. Mostly, I’m learning to keep my mouth shut and do just that.

I think maybe I did not scribble in this book the way I have so many others for this reason. Because I know this is not my story. There is nothing in Coates’s narrative, in his letter to his son (regardless of its own literary conceit), to which I can add or from which I should detract. I should just read and listen. I would be lying if I said there were no lines that made me bristle or think, “that’s not me or people I know.” It’s not unreasonable to feel defensive when the narrative you’ve constructed for yourself is so skillfully taken apart in 152 pages. It’s normal, I’m learning, to feel uncomfortable. That the uncomfort is a necessary part of the process.

I think a lot about the role and job of the writer in crafting a story. Mostly I think about this while reading fiction— what does the writer bring to the piece, what is left for the reader to fill in, how is that relationship marked—but here I was less concerned with Coates’s responsibility than with my own as his reader, I don’t know if I am his desired audience, but I’m listening.

Reading Syllabus: I know there is a slot on there for a collection of essays, but this doesn’t really feel like that and I don’t really feel like trying to force it. I’ll get back to the syllabus, I just didn’t want to wait until I was done (sometime in December, I hope) to read this book.