by Gail M. Koehler 
Rushed to release just after the Charleston mass shooting last June, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s best-selling second book Between the World and Me has been one of the most talked-about books of the summer. It has also served as a kind of Rorschach test: what readers see in the book illuminates what they bring to the issues he examines.
Cast in the literary tradition of the open letter—in this case to his teenaged son concerning the dilemma of growing to black manhood in America—Coates’s work also echoes as its predecessor James Baldwin’s 1963 message to his nephew, The Fire Next Time. On the front of the dust jacket for the hardcover edition of Coates’s book is printed the last part of an endorsement by no less a literary lion than Toni Morrison: “This is required reading.” In her fuller comment, she says: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory.”
It is the final line of that longer Morrison quotation one feminist reviewer emphasizes in her own more negative appraisal of the book. Shani O. Hilton writing for Buzzfeed in “The Black Experience Isn’t Just about Men” lets us know she has been a friend of Coates’s for years, since they knew each other at Howard University. Nevertheless, while she appreciates the literary achievement of the work, her concern is how frequently the book, focused so keenly on the black male American experience, has been claimed to stand for the entire black experience—a predicament of long-standing. Hilton, and other feminist readings of Between the World and Me, provide important correctives to Coates’s work. Brit Bennett, writing at the New Yorker, has perhaps the most thorough examination I've read to this point.
An example of many of the missing pieces of information comes during Coates’s experience at Howard, which he calls his “Mecca,” and which occupies a central place in his book. When I read those passages I had no idea that the campus consists of a primarily female student body. Hilton says: “When I was at Howard, the most frequently (jokingly) thrown around figure was that the freshman class was 7 to 1, women to men. Official numbers are somewhere around 65% female to 35% male. The sheer number of women on campus meant their influence was felt from all sides.” Coates has responded to Hilton's commentary by saying: “I understand that it is the male experience and I am a male writing the book. ...I don’t know how to remedy that.”
One remedy, perhaps, is found by Britni Danielle, writing at The Root, who provides a corrective list of black female scholars writing today: Barbara Ransby, Crystal Feimster, Deborah Gray White, Tamara Winfrey Harris and Blair L.M. Kelley. The evocation of these scholars is one important gloss on the cultural phenomenon Coates's work has become: some commentators have noted that Coates’s explication of the importance on the body, of the politics inflicted upon it, is indebted to the work of feminist scholars. Addressing his son, Coates writes: “You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regression all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
My own reading was significantly influenced after I read the Richard Wright poem referenced both in the book’s title and used as an introduction, although Coates includes only the first three lines. The stunning poem itself presents the price paid by the black male body in its depiction of a brutal lynching after the flames are cold and only ashes, bones, and skull are left of the victim. In imagining what that man suffered, the narrator then takes on the agony inflicted in this act of torture. My reading of Coates’s work, then, was accompanied by the specter of Wright’s graphic images such as when:
darkness screamed with thirsty voices; and the witnesses rose and lived:
The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves/into my bones.
The grey ashes formed flesh firm and black, entering into/my flesh.
It is that history of brutality to the black male body that is Coates’s focus in this short book. Writing in the New Yorker about the poem after Ferguson, Jelani Cobb identifies Wright’s poem as an example in which “history is an animating force [in which] we are witnesses to the past, even to that portion of it that transpired before we were born.”
I heard echoes, in Wright’s lines, of the truth that these acts served as what Bryan Stevenson has called “racial terror lynchings” in the historic lynching report issued in February 2015 by the organization he founded, the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala. Contrary to some claims, Stevenson says that “these brutal deaths were not about administering popular justice, but terrorizing a community.” That the Wright narrator imaginatively takes on the physical pain of the victim he knows only by bone, skull, “ A vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat,/and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood,” speaks to that terrorizing function the torture serves. In a compelling profile by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, for the New York Magazine, Wallace-Wells says that one of Coates’s achievements is that he can “express very deeply the dimensions of fear.” Coates writes of his own fear, growing up, and his fear for his son. Fear permeates the book, and I believe for readers who do not know that fear firsthand, the book cannot be read without some acknowledgement of the reclamation of the history that projects such as the Equal Justice Initiative are providing us.
Our responses to this history, of course, differ widely. In the case of David Brooks writing at the New York Times, the response is to toss off an opening line acknowledging that “The last year has been an education for white people” while persisting in an argument with Coates. In his piece, cast as its own open letter to Coates, Brooks says: “I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.”
Coates’s answer to Brooks’s claim, that for every K.K.K. there is some numerically equivalent “positive” force, is that Brooks is simply, factually, wrong. In his Democracy Now interview, when host Amy Goodman asks him specifically to respond to Brooks, Coates says:
“The Ku Klux Klan is not the opposite of the Harlem Children’s Zone. The Ku Klux Klan is the most profligate domestic terrorist organization in this country’s history. The Harlem Children’s Zone is an organization just based in Harlem, that is doing good work, but that there is not enough of across this country. The Ku Klux Klan was a national terrorist organization. It is not an answer—you know, one is not the answer for the other.”
Readers’ responses to Coates’s work, then, depend in large part on their response to his claim of the centrality of the violence at the heart of American history. In what Michelle Alexander (author of The New Jim Crow) claimed, in her New York Times review, would be “the most widely quoted passage”of the book, Coates tells his son: “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”
It is this insistent claim of Coates that makes many, like Brooks, so uncomfortable. Especially for those white liberals—like me—to whom the news of the past months has been so shocking, and who want to “believe in” progress, Coates’s message is intended to be unsettling, disturbing our previous level of comfort. In the Democracy Now interview Coates is asked whether he doesn’t see progress. He points out that some nebulous idea of progress does no good for any of the black Americans who are dead. Their lives are over, he says. A vague, feel-good “progress” has not benefitted them one iota.
For the larger society, “progress is nice,” he says, “but it’s to be noted, and the struggle continues after that.” He points out that the entire history of the U.S.A. is founded on land wrested from Native Americans, and on the too-easily forgotten killings and brutality of the past. Yes, there is an American dream, but in his pages, the distortions necessary to the insistence on our individual innocence in the face of historical evidence, becomes a dangerous, life-denying Dream, the ideology that underpins white supremacy, one that demands the forgetting of the atrocities foundational to the power and wealth of the country.
This starkness of Coates’s is another point of discomfort for many readers. His atheism is a central part of Between the World and Me, part of what Benjamin Wallace-Wells, has said “makes it both unique and bleak.” Some Christian commentators, however, see in Coates’s work only an “alleged pessimism” (Daniel José Camacho writing at the Christian Century, for example).
The loss of life is not only historic. As one part of the structure in this work, Coates uses and returns to the killing by a black undercover police officer of a Howard University classmate, Prince Jones. This death punctuates the end of his college experience, and at the end of the book, years after the death, he arranges to meet Dr. Mabel Jones, Prince Jones’s mother. Hers is the example of “an exceptional life,” evidence of what a high-achieving first-generation college graduate can accomplish, including time in the Navy, taking up radiology, and serving as the chief of radiology at the local hospital. She lives in a gated, exclusive community. But when Prince was followed across three jurisdictions in a a case of mistaken identity by that officer who finally killed him, none of that protected him.
"[Dr. Jones] alluded to 12 Years a Slave. 'There he was,' she said, speaking of Solomon Northup. 'He had means. He had a family. He was living like a human being. And one racist act took him back. And the same is true of me. I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It’s all it takes'.”
Coates indicts not only the system that allowed the officer who killed Prince Jones to return to his job, but also the nation that forgot Prince Jones, and that forgets so many other lives snuffed out in the context of a system that results in these atrocities. “The forgetting habit,” he says, “is yet another necessary component of the Dream. ... I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free.” To Greg M. Epstein, Humanist Chaplin at Harvard writing for Salon, this call by Coates to eschew the forgetting so endemic to the Dream has a profound effect: “reading Ta-Nehisi Coates woke me up from a groggy state, a kind of semi-lucid haze I did not realize I was in.”
At its base, the Dream is about that forgetting of the violence, and what Coates characterizes as plunder, a word he uses to describe the loss of Prince Jones. Plunder is a word he used to sharp effect in his 2014 cover article for the Atlantic, where he is a staff writer, titled “The Case for Reparations.” That piece has been called the most talked-about article of that year, and I find it salutary to recall that plunder (used, says one reviewer, 41 times in that 2014 piece) can be defined as “the violent and dishonest acquisition of property.” Coates’s continued use of the term and his foregrounding of the plunder that operates at the heart of America is a service rendered to all of us who care about inequity and need to continue to be awakened to its persistence.
The opportunity to respond to Coates’s larger body of work continues anew in the cover article of the October 2015 issue of The Atlantic, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” As his book has been one of the most talked-about works of the summer, this October Atlantic piece may well be one of the most talked-about pieces of writing this fall. It begins with an extensive examination of the history that brought America to this point. “Fifty years after Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report ‘The Negro Family’ tragically helped create this system, it's time to reclaim his original intent,” says the tag line for the online article. The statistics have become familiar to so many of us since Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. In its Criminal Justice Fact sheet, the NAACP summarizes:
• From 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled-from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people
• Today, the US is 5% of the World population and has 25% of world prisoners.
• Combining the number of people in prison and jail with those under parole or probation supervision, 1 in ever y 31 adults, or 3.2 percent of the population is under some form of correctional control.
The unique political moment we are in now, where politicians from across the spectrum “are now eager to disown a failed criminal-justice system” is not one many casual observers could have predicted not too long ago. A cursory review, as this is, of Coates’s most recent contributions to the discussion suggest those contributions are both essential and intentionally discomfiting.
There will be no easy fix to the mess, Coates insists. The sound of all the voices responding to the challenge he’s laid before the country reminds me of the “brawl of ancestors” he met in the books he immersed himself in while at Howard. Our efforts to figure out how to right the wrongs of mass incarceration will engage us in another kind of verbal brawl, I imagine. But for this reviewer, following the response to this latest contribution of Coates to our public discussion is going to be at least as important in this next election season as the “horse race” coverage of political candidates’ progress.
reviewer: Gail M. Koehler
Recent Comments