Words&Dirt

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one of the great records of 19th-century American consciousness. Ruminating on the concept of whiteness, Melville writes:

Not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous––why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind. (163-4)

It’s doubtful that Melville had race relations in mind when he wrote these words, but they describe with chilling accuracy the dual nature of racial whiteness in American society. Given the recent surge of media attention to the systemic violence and discrimination that black Americans have been living with for centuries, it’s clear that we are still confounded by “the incantation of this whiteness.” The reality is that we can no longer look to whiteness as a “symbol of spiritual things,” and were never right to do so. We must confront the damage that the idea of whiteness has wrought, both on those who believe themselves to be white and those who do not.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me is one of the great records of 21st-century American consciousness. Written as a letter to Coates’s fifteen-year-old son, it is a stunning examination of whiteness as “the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind,” as well as a heroic depiction of the struggle for black consciousness, dignity and safety in modern America. This is among the most intimate, honest, eloquent and infuriating pieces of nonfiction I’ve ever read.

From the opening sentence, it is clear that Coates has a special gift for communicating the deep and painful complexities faced by black Americans. The most potent of these is the fear young black men feel for their bodies:

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear.  The law did not protect us. (17)

Coates describes how this fear transmutes itself into various permutations of violence––child abuse, gang warfare, self-loathing––tracing the psychological links between external oppression and internal conflict in black minds and black communities. Further, he demonstrates how black bodies are robbed not just of confidence and the right to safety, but also of opportunities for intellectual growth and moral imagination:

When I was about your age, each day, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not––all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body…I think I was always, somehow, aware of the price. I think I somehow knew that that third of my brain should have been concerned with more beautiful things. (24)

Coates claims that this experience left him with a “stunted imagination,” and while it’s difficult to think of the mind behind this book as stunted in any way, the text reveals in visceral detail how American society has stifled the potential gifts of generation after generation of oppressed peoples (85).

When certain communities are systematically denied access to safety and prosperity, the law functions as a tool of oppression, separating the powerful from the powerless, the Dreamers from everyone else:

I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. (11)

Since American prosperity was built from the destruction of black bodies, the re-humanization of those bodies is paramount. Coates’s humanism is based on the recognition of particularity and potential embodied in black flesh:

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 dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. (69-70)

Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth. (81-2)

The first of these passages describes an imagined slave woman, while the second refers to Prince Jones, a college friend of Coates’s who was gunned down by a police officer. Both characterize the body as a sacred carrier of knowledge and preference, an intelligent and nuanced vessel through which the world speaks.

Since he is an avowed secularist, the body is Coates’s only hallowed space. “I have no God to hold me up,” he writes. “And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything” (113). In a world where souls are nothing more than “voltage conducted through neurons and nerves,” there is no retreat from the tragedy of killing, no refuge within any story that says what is lost can be recovered (79). Coates’s extreme valuation of the body––which runs contrary to black and white religious narratives alike––bestows an incomparable sense of grief for each body lost, and an ardent commitment to the struggle to prevent harm in this life and no other:

Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope. (71)

This is not a book about redemption or reconciliation. It was not written for white people so we can “get it,” although it may serve that purpose for some. It is a letter from father to son, an imparting of emotion and wisdom from one holy vessel to another. It feels strange to have such a document play such an important role in public discourse, because public discourse demands critique, and this text defies critique; or rather, it simply does not concern itself with critique.

Taking all this into account, I will now offer some criticism, trying to be aware of my status as a Dreamer, one of those who, even after reading this book, still labors at least partially under the illusion that he is white. And I confess that I can find very little to push back against, although I’m certain that wouldn’t be the case were I less familiar with our national history and the current deplorable state of racism in modern America.

Even so, I cannot fully agree with this assertion:

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 suspects––are the product of the democratic will. (79)

Any response to this will hinge on one’s particular definition of “democratic will,” which undoubtedly admits a wide variance of interpretation. In my view, most of the actions of the American political system cannot be honestly portrayed as expressions of democratic will. I don’t think it’s fair to say they are entirely “imposed by a repressive minority,” but the truth is somewhere in between. It’s no secret that wealthy individuals and corporations exert a disproportionate influence on American politics, and that this influence subverts the democratic will with increasing effectiveness. Additionally, government bureaucracies can hardly be called efficient mechanisms for translating the democratic will into action. All Dreamers are culpable for racial injustice in America, but some far moreso than others. I do not believe that the majority of 21st-century Americans actually condone the policies cited above.

There is also the problem of circumstance of birth, which all people share but do not benefit or suffer from equally. Coates and his son were born into an oppressed group, and Coates makes it clear that no one is to blame for this: “You are the bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country…This is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility” (137). The second sentence is also true of those born into the Dream. This is not an attempt to equalize our positions, which is impossible. But I do think it’s important to acknowledge the incredible power that the Dream holds over those who live it from birth. Many who might otherwise reject the Dream will never get a chance to see beyond it. And for those of us who learn to question it, how much do we truly stray when comfort and stability are so close at hand? I can’t speak for others, but will admit my own considerable shortcomings in this regard.

As Coates rightly observes, we Dreamers are “obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration” (97). But can responsibility be taken up without seeking exoneration? Is there any way a Dreamer can cease to be part of the problem? In what way might I contribute to what Coates calls “the hope of the movement”?

To awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world. (146)

We Dreamers must awaken ourselves rather than wait to be awakened. Coates has helped many of us begin to stir, although that is not––and must not be––his mission. We cannot rely on brave and talented people like Coates to do the heavy lifting for us.

Coates rightly urges his son not to “arrange your life around…the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness” (146). The charge of the roused Dreamer is to help transform that small chance into a bigger one. In time, perhaps we will earn the right to ask the question of the future, the question from which our prejudice and history have torn us:

Is there some Dream beyond the Dream, one we can all share?

Rating: 10/10