Ta-Nehisi Coates

Hopeless. 
Jumbled. 
Illuminated. 
Informed. 
More Aware. 
Hopeful. 

Sue and I joined four other white activists for a pot-luck dinner and a discussion of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ very powerful book, Between the World and Me. We began by saying how we felt after reading the book, each person giving a one-or-two-word summary of their feelings. Then we discussed our responses, read parts of the book aloud, admired Coates’ writing, reviewed our privilege, discussed what he means by “those who believe they are white,” and brainstormed about possible future actions to dismantle white supremacy. 

This book just won the National Book Award for nonfiction. It’s a black man’s letter to his son, and it lays bare the systemic racism that besets the USA. Coates talks about the fear of being “disembodied”--literally robbed of his body. Murdered. He writes, 

“Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional. Disembodiment. The dragon that compelled the boys I knew, way back, into extravagant theater of ownership. Disembodiment. The demon that pushed the middle-class black survivors into aggressive passivity, our conversation restrained in public quarters, our best manners on display, our hands never out of pockets, our whole manner ordered as if to say, ‘I make no sudden moves.’ Disembodiment. The serpent of school years demanding I be twice as good, though I was but a boy. Murder was all around us and we knew, deep in ourselves, in some silent space, that the author of these murders was beyond us, that it suited some other person’s ends. We were right.”


I think the book should be required reading, along with The New Jim Crow and The Warmth of Other Suns, for all who want to understand what the USA is and how its particular flavor of racism affects us all.