Ta-Nehisi Coates: A fresh voice for an impatient generation
Clarence PageTa-Nehisi CoatesJames BaldwinCommentaryOpinion
CHICAGO TRIBUNEcpage@chicagotribune.com
cptimeTa-Nehisi Coates: A fresh voice for an impatient generation - My Columnhttp://t.co/nLAd9Q6iFx
Author Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks to an audience July 15, 2015, at Union Baptist Church in Baltimore. (Algerina Perna / Baltimore Sun)
Race relations may still be a mess, but at least people are interested in reading about it.
Congratulations to Ta-Nehisi Coates. His meditation on race in America has hit No. 1 in its first week on The New York Times' Best Sellers list. Race relations may still be a mess, as his book suggests, but at least people are interested in reading about it.
Good timing helps. In the age of smartphone cameras, police dashcams and Twitter activism, the nation is abuzz with talk of minor encounters between police and black Americans that suddenly escalated into fatalities in places as varied as Long Island, N.Y.; North Charleston, S.C.; Waller County, Texas; and, most recently, Cincinnati.
Ta-Nehisi Coates' new book speaks resolutely to black America (but should be read by all)
In these places, in particular, video now validates much of what black communities have been complaining about for decades. Video has become what Paul Butler, a professor at Georgetown University Law School and a former prosecutor, has called "the C-SPAN of the streets."
Amid this heightened conversation, Coates, a national editor at The Atlantic, offers a brief, often angry yet elegantly provocative 152-page book, "Between the World and Me," that could have just as easily been titled, "The Talk." That's what many black parents call the chat we have with our children about how to behave on the streets — between the perils of armed gangbangers on one side and touchy police officers on the other.
Coates offers his searing reflections on race in the form of an open letter to his 14-year-old son, Samori. His approach, inspired by James Baldwin's 1963 classic, "The Fire Next Time," and titled with a line from a Richard Wright poem, puts us inside the world of black parents and their children trying to navigate the world that poses pervasive threats to the black body.
Decades later, black homebuyers' battle for justice back in spotlight
He describes the fear he felt growing up. Police, he cautions his son, "have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body," and commit "friskings, detainings, beatings and humiliations."
Street gangs — "young men who'd transmuted their fear into rage" — might also break your body or "shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies."
The "need to be always on guard" can be exhausting, Coates writes, but death might "billow up like fog" on any ordinary afternoon.
@segesta65 looking in the mirror is not in any of their play books
CHAZ MICHAEL MICHAELS
AT 8:36 PM AUGUST 01, 2015
I've been a fan of Coates' work for years as a fresh voice in social commentary, and he offers many valuable observations here. Yet I also was disappointed by the pervasive sense of pessimism in regard to America's ability to redeem itself from past sins and provide opportunities for more progress — if we all work at it.
I heard in his impatience the voice of my own son, who is far more eager to gripe about how far we have to go as a nation than to express appreciation for how far we have come. That's OK, I have reasoned. It is the job of each new generation to express impatience with the present. It is up to older folks who remember how bad things were in the days of Jim Crow segregation, for example, to tell the youngsters not to abandon hope.
'Go Set a Watchman' has important insights into contemporary racism
To test my theory, I called Coates' father, W. Paul Coates, a former Black Panther in Baltimore who is founder and director of Black Classics Press. Paul was predictably proud of his son's success with a book that was not expected to make him rich but mainly to "let what was inside of him out."
But, unlike me, Paul Coates refused to acknowledge any daylight at all between his son's outlook and his own. We may have moments of progress, including the election of an African-American president, Coates told his son, but "we must continue to struggle," he said.
"Much of what he's writing sounds like what I told him," said the elder Coates, "only less eloquently and with a lot more repetition. I don't believe the arc of justice bends our way. I think we have to go out and bend it our way."
With that, the elder Coates raises a good point. His son offers an eloquent diagnosis of what ails us about race and racism these days. But it mostly leaves prescriptions for the rest of us to find and to fill.
Clarence Page, a member of the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board, blogs atwww.chicagotribune.com/pagespage.
Twitter @cptime
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment