Between The World And Me

I have read the most glorious books so far this year that I am hesitant to keep reading for fear of breaking the streak.

The Tsar of Love and Techno

Between the World and Me

My Documents

David Benem Excerpts

All very different and all written by people different than me (other than Benem, who is only bigger than I am and drinks Bud Select in I unfathomable volumes. But all brilliant.

I love to travel because it opens my eyes to the beauty and suffering in the world and helps me appreciate my easy (albeit hectic) life. But reading is almost better because writers can take us to places with depth and forethought that my scattershot "travels" often lack. I can observe the poverty of the Deep South but I cannot experience the lack of opportunity for someone born there without reading about it from someone who has lived it. I can visit Ferguson but not experience the loss of a mother who invested he love and 18 years of time and treasure in a son, only to see this asset gunned down and gone forever. But writing takes you there.  

The book "Between The World and Me" is Coates letter to his son. Toni Morrison called it "required reading" and while initially suspicious, I can only echo that sentiment. Coates refers to people like me (and probably you) as "dreamers" who have had an entire reality system constructed around us to keep us from waking up and having to confront the the obvious truth and ugliness of what we have created and profited from. He derides me for my obliviousness and pushes me, but not to action. He makes very clear that what has been done by our country in regard to the black race cannot be "fixed”, at least not quickly and by half measures.  Instead he shoves me to thought and conversation, intolerant of denial and remaining in the comfortable sleep of a dreamer.

He starts the letter when his 15 year old son retires to his room to be alone after hearing that the killer of Michael Brown will not be charged… with anything.

To begin,  he outlines his own life to his son, negotiating violence in his home, in his school and on the street. Never having the luxury of being asleep but always awake to the possibilities of harm should he ever not be alert, afraid, paying attention. To always be awake to the taking of his body and the bodies of others.  Then he recounts how he went to Howard University (the Mecca) and first experienced the depth of black culture and community. How he had to be awoken from that by a fellow student, unarmed and gunned down outside of his suburban home by an undercover police officer.

He displays the lessons for his son not to call his son to anger and violence but to incite awareness and understanding that he will not, cannot and should not ever be a dreamer but by the necessities of our societies plunder of his race and his body must instead be vigilant, and appreciative and also... most importantly to find joy.

This is a humbling letter and many of us don't want to read it but we should. We cannot "fix" our nations history of enslavement, rape, and systemic, organized, relentless exploitation and marginalizing of black people in America. We can seek to understand it amd discuss it and OWN it.

It is a sad book to have to write to ones own son. But it is a beautiful picture of a father urging a son, his son, his joy, towards a life of understanding, meaning and appreciation of his own beauty and the beauty of an ugly, broken sinful world.

Not for the squeamish but an important book never the less.  To read it is to be humbled and perhaps to be called to greater understanding, a non-dismissive understanding iof what it is like to e called “equal” and yet find over and over again that you are “other”.