Ta-Nehisi Coates. Photograph by Nina Subin. Courtesy of Spiegel and Grau
One night last week I was driving to my mother's home in the central Cincinnati neighborhood of Bond Hill.
I had the windows of her bright orange
Volkswagen Beetle down, and was stopped on Bond Hill's main drag, Reading Road, where the
pockmarks of shuttered storefronts and crumbling housing are evident from every
vantage point. On many a night, seemingly aimless, unemployed negro boys
sit and carp near a Richie's Chicken restaurant, across the street from a long-closed
Nation of Islam diner. Although I grew up a few neighborhoods away in
slightly leafier and more integrated Kennedy Heights I can
remember when the neighborhood wasn't quite like this, before the streets became so hopelessly violent and economically unsalvageable
that my father, who'd lived in the heart of the same neighborhood with his most recent wife, decided to get the fuck out. "I'm tired of niggers," he'd said, his processed hair straightened just so, the green eyes we share darting
away from each other. It must be tiring to be tired of yourself.
While stopped at the intersection, I
glimpsed out of my eye a tall negro dressed in a white tank top, his skin high
yellow like my own, crossing the street in what seemed like a beeline toward my
car. He was coming from a corner where much wasteful bravado and boisterous
ennui takes place, and I felt it immediately, that familiar sensation, the need
to secure my body against potential predators. I was driving an orange car with
plastic orange flowers on the dash, the same car I had been driving when held
up at gunpoint not far from that corner two summers before.
The man sauntered behind my car, and
I locked the door. Hearing this, the electronic click of the door locks
snapping into place, he looked back at me and we met eyes as I swiveled my head
to watch him. We didn't stop
looking at each other the whole time he crossed to the other side of the
street. The light turned green, and he said, "I ain't
trying to roll up on you, bruh."
"It's all good," I replied, but really, it wasn't. You see, for the past 50 years or
so, Bond Hill has become predominately African-American, and for the last 25 years or so, moribund and blighted. This is a direct result of redlining,
blockbusting, and deindustrialization, of racist federal policy and cynical
opportunism on the part of white developers—of America not having a clue how
to treat its black citizens fairly.
My best friend's father, a white man and an
intellectual property lawyer, grew up in Bond Hill in the 50s. His white family
fled with the rest of them, likely told of the coming negro hordes and the
imperative to save themselves from declining property values by huckster
slumlords. When I met and befriended his son at a prep school for the city's truly wealthy, and a few coloreds
who were nigger-rich like us, his family lived in the tony and almost
exclusively white district of Hyde Park. Bond Hill is now only 7 percent
white and just as segregated as it was a half century ago, when blacks first
started to seek refuge and opportunity there.
My foot hit the gas, and the
encounter ended. As I drove home, back to the rings of suburban simulacrum on
the outskirts of the neighborhood just a mile away—a suburbia my mother helped build
with other negroes—I couldn't shake the anger and shame. Why should I have to be afraid
of my fellow yellow brother, or any brother for that matter, in the fucking
first place? My mother has spent a generation and a half of her life locking
her door, owning a gun instead of employing an alarm system in fear of the type of
niggers (yes, the very word we use) negroes fear most. At the "Villages at Daybreak," not far from a golf course and a
decaying sports arena that hosted the NBA during the Kennedy administration, my
mother is trapped in a cycle of fear white folks of her station in life mostly
don't know.
The bleakest takeaways from Ta-Nehisi
Coates's
Between the World and Me, as
rich and abrasive a meditation on the existential quandaries of modern American
negro life as any I've come
across, include the notion that negroes will always be afraid of each other in
these ways described above. Regardless of class, regardless of whether they've succeeded at the bankrupt doctrine
of "twice
as good" (the
necessary effort/skill level needed to succeed in a white man's rigged world, so the saying goes)—in Coates's vision, justice simply isn't in their hands. And the reason for this traces back to white supremacy.
White folks are "Dreamers" in Coates's parlance, and that "Dream" is one
undergirded by Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism, and racism. These
beliefs, even unconscious, provide a special kind of innocence for "Dreamers," an innocence where the sins of
slavery and genocide and plunder will not be visited upon the children, where
the poisoned seeds of history don't bear strange and dangerous fruit. Coates observes that,
for most people who think themselves white, the prosperity of cloistered
suburbs with the accouterments of well-to-do modern American life from the 50s
onward has no correlation to the crime-ridden streets, underfunded schools, and
urban housing tracts purposely fashioned by city planners such as Robert Moses
to foster status anxiety, claustrophobia, and dislocation among people of
color. They don't see
the connection. It is this plunder of the contemporary sort—housing wealth, not slavery—that Coates focused on in "The Case for Reparations," his groundbreaking essay for the
Atlantic,
where he has become recognized as one of the sharpest cultural commentators on
the internet. In the award-winning piece, Coates hints at the billions of
dollars of post-war housing wealth blacks were forbidden from accruing due to
restrictive covenants, loan discrimination, and outright white
terrorism.
This is the American Dream in action, Coates is saying. Take it at
face value, but do so at your own peril. Especially if you're a young negro man.
The question of whether Coates is Baldwin's equal seems rather beside the point to me, as it surely will to his son, or any young negro child, or any and every American with the intelligence and the humanity to read it and grasp its terrible truths.
Coates's book is somewhat self-consciously indebted to James
Baldwin's 1963
classic
The Fire Next Time. Addressed to a young black man coming of age
in a time of great racial upheaval just as Baldwin's book was,
Between the World and
Me
uses its author's experience as a guide of sorts to the intractable
legacies of white supremacy in much the same way. Baldwin has been a flashpoint
in early discussions of the book, with Toni Morrison providing the blurb of a
lifetime on the back: "I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual
void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates." A few days after the book's publication, Cornel West dismissed Morrison's comparison in a somewhat tone-deaf,
surely less than charitable Facebook post ("Coates is a clever wordsmith with journalistic talent who
avoids any critique of the Black president in power"). The question of whether Coates is
Baldwin's equal
seems rather beside the point to me, as it surely will to his son, or any young
negro child, or any and every American with the intelligence and the humanity
to read it and grasp its terrible truths.
The respectability politics of John
McWhorter, whose
Losing the Race once set conservative hearts afire with
his condemnation of black anti-intellectualism and complacence in the late
Clinton years, and the moralism of now-disgraced comedian Bill Cosby, whom
Coates inadequately profiled in his first assignment for the
Atlantic back in 2005,
find no purchase here. Coates also shuns the argument put forth a dozen years
ago by Debra Dickerson in
The End of Blackness that "no one can stop the American, black
or blind, who is determined to succeed" and that blacks are mostly to blame for holding themselves
back from reaping America's
fruits. Scholarship in the ensuing years, from people like Coates, Michelle
Alexander (
The New Jim Crow) and Isabel Wilkerson (the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Warmth of Other Suns),has rendered these arguments suspect. The ghetto, in Coates's telling, is the result not of black
pathology or irresponsibility, but of government policy and "a syndicate arrayed to protect its
exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies"—otherwise known as White America.
Fashioned as a six-part letter to his
teenage son Samori, Coates's vision of the future awaiting his boy is less than
sanguine. This too, has little to do with either of them. The powerlessness the
book evokes, of blacks not being able to protect their own bodies and property,
is a feat of courage amidst the sea of generally disingenuous positivity
concerning racial matters in this country. Coates's atheism informs this surely: He is outside of the
tradition of mainstream African-American thought, even as he embodies the
feelings of helplessness and anger that so many blacks, despite their God, feel
daily. Whether you are one of Cornel West's "black
nihilists,"
ruining the streets of urban America two decades ago, or performing black pain
for your own benefit and self-aggrandizement with a "mask of piety" on, as Hilton Als would have it, Coates is here to tell you
that you're one
of the victims of white supremacy and you can do little about it but "struggle."
Clocking in at a slender 152 pages,
Coates's book achieves a grave rigor and thunderous momentum that few authors can
muster. Tracing his own miseducation on the dangerous streets of mid-80s
Baltimore to Hollande's
France, where we are not "their
niggers," Coates
experiences a lightness and sense of freedom, tinged with skepticism, that he
has never found as a African-American in his own country. From this point on,
late in the book, Coates's
painful insights prove unrelenting. While intellectual curiosity
finally finds him at Howard University, where his independent Africana
librarian father once worked and the Coateses are something of a dynasty, Coates
sees struggle, not hope, as the normal tenor of things. Although he finds a "Mecca" at Howard amongst a lively and truly diverse universe of
the African diaspora's best
and the brightest—the talented tenth if you will—no arena is safe from
plunder for American blacks, in Coates's telling. Not when negroes will always be afraid of the
intentions of caucasians, especially ones who wield nightsticks and guns and
the authority of the law, although those controlling banks, potential job
interviews and community associations can prove just as scary.
On Munchies: 'The New Food Movement Has a Problem with Race'
Coates brings this to stark relief
while recalling his college friend Prince Jones, the respected Christian son of
a black woman, raised in Louisiana poverty, who became a star radiologist.
Jones was shot dead by an undercover black cop, dressed as a criminal, who had
followed him across three jurisdictions under the pretense that Jones was
involved in criminal activity. The cop claimed that Jones had tried to run him
over. Case closed. The dead young man hovers like a ghost over Coates's narrative. The names John Crawford,
Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown get plenty of mention too. In
Between the World and Me, these deaths are but the tip of the
iceberg because caucasians will always erect laws, customs, and institutions,
along with justifications for these based on their fear and ignorance, designed to keep a large swath of negroes at the bottom of American society, poor and
afraid of each other, powerlessly plundering those around them regardless of
how many dead black bodies lay at the feet of the police.
Whether those that call themselves
white do so unwittingly or with maliciousness is of no consequence to Coates. Whiteness was erected, constructed, formulated, and expanded in order to
justify this barbarism. And ultimately, such conditions are out of the hands of
African-Americans to change, Coates suggests, whether Black America produces a
Marcus Garvey or a Barack Obama, a Nat Turner or a Martin Luther King, whether "black-on-black" crime subsides or "personal responsibility" reigns, whether pants are pulled up or bandannas are
removed. Only those that call themselves white, or climate change (likely the
latter!), can change the thing.
White folks are "Dreamers" in Coates's parlance, and that "Dream" is one undergirded by Manifest Destiny, American exceptionalism, and racism.
Coates is currently en route to France, where
he'll be
spending a year with his wife and kid. Reading the book I couldn't help of but think of Chester Himes,
the great and unfairly forgotten negro author, who also spent a significant
amount of his adult years in Parisian exile. He once wrote that black Americans
were "the
most neurotic, complicated, schizophrenic, unanalyzed, anthropologically
advanced specimen of mankind in the history of the world." A contemporary of Coates's idol Baldwin, who also spent a significant period of his
life in Paris, Himes wrote widely about how negro men could navigate the
pitfalls of whiteness in novels such as
The Third Generation and Pinktoes.
Unlike Coates or Baldwin, Himes's
negroes weren't victims, but agents of their own fate, regardless of the
chips staked against them. They used sex and guile as weaponry against whites,
many of whom they fetishized. He found Baldwin and Richard Wright's more celebrated and sentimental
works full of alienated negro men to be a bit boorish.
"At
times," Himes wrote in his autobiography, "my soul
brothers embarrassed me, bragging about their scars, their poor upbringing, and
their unhappy childhood, to get some sympathy and some white pussy and money,
too, if they could." Himes,
who unlike Baldwin or Coates grew up middle-class, was forever fighting the
sway of his scared, color-struck, high-yellow mother, whom he himself referred
to as an "octoroon."
Himes wanted to know what we were
supposed to do after we realized white people were crazy, and had made us crazy,
too. Is "race" a handicap negroes have to "marry," as Bob Jones, the hero of Himes's
debut novel
If He Hollers, Let Him Go once pondered?
More days than not, unlike Jones, I think it is: The folks who believe
themselves white can't see
past or
within it (even if they claim they do), and neither can the numerous
institutions they've
erected.
But like Jones, I too have used my skin color for a myriad of social
and economic gains in various milieus—black, white, and somewhere in between. Blackness, even in
these sorry times, can have its perks too. These complexities, of what black people
make of their respective colors beyond shared fear and a whole gorgeous culture
we've
built from the depths, are where answers to our existential quandaries might
lie.
This, admittedly, is an area Coates isn't as interested in as the white man's sundry means for tearing it all
down. But history isn't over. And the question of "what
now?" hangs
over the air as you finish
Between the World and Me, like a fog one is
helpless to traverse until a clearing comes.
Between
the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is available from Spiegel and Grau
in bookstores and online.
Brandon Harris is a contributing editor at Filmmaker Magazine. His directorial debut Redlegs has played over a dozen festivals worldwide and was a New York Times Critic's Pick upon its commercial release in May of 2012. Follow him on Twitter.