Public Writing

Dear White Racial ‘Progressive’

It’s past time you and I had a chat about some things. There’s a lot of taking for granted that seems to go on between us and it needs to be addressed. The past few years have been a real test for us. Well, in many ways, all of American history has. But my own experience with you has been under deepest scrutiny as I’ve watched what feels an endless stream of news stories of black lives not mattering to the American public or its institutions. What I have to say does not apply to every white progressive in America. Some folks really do get it. Some get it with little effort, their capacity for sympathy being finely tuned in rare fashion. Others get it with more effort but not for the sake of scoring the achievement of ‘getting it’ but for the sake of doing the tough work morality demands. Then there are the rest, which I fear very likely comprise a significant portion of white liberals, possibly the majority. A lot is at stake these days and I find my own ability to modulate my own feelings about what goes on in America under an unreasonable strain that seems unfair for me to bear alone. So I will say what I have to say and you will judge for yourself if I am really speaking to you. And if I am, and you feel under the strain of shame then we will then be doing the tough work of ethical living together.

Truth be told, I often wonder about you. I grew up thinking, well, actually, taught to believe, that in all the world, the White Racial Progressive was the best friend a guy (or gal) colored like me could have. Many white folks are able to get by most of their lives without ever really having to deal with black people. Us on the other hand? Not possible – especially if we want things like jobs, a bank account, green lettuce, or a nice car to drive. So, things being what they are, there seemed to be two options available to me: the outright racists – the Bull Connors, David Dukes, the plain vanilla white supremacists – or you. It always seemed wise, again, so I was taught, to embrace you. Clearly, I had to choose so between you and the outright racist, and you were the better choice because you tolerated me. But funny word that. Tolerate: allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of something (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference. Hmph. I wonder, my ‘friend’ if you’ve ever been tolerated. I think not. Only one of us really has the power to ‘allow’ the other to exist.

Now, I can see you frowning and tense and I hear you saying: but I’m one of the good ones, the real deal – I really do like black people! My words feel to you a barb, maybe a betrayal given your good intentions. Fine. Then answer the following: why don’t you send your kids to the public schools while insisting to the city that the school experience must be fair and just for everyone? Why don’t you live across the street from us leveling all our property values making all our economic opportunities filled with genuine potential? Why are you happy to trot out the fine goods from the local boutique gourmet deli for you friends but hesitate in patronizing local black businesses to cater your party? Why is it that every time I mention diversity, a dozen other identity groups that have never had it as hard as blacks suddenly seem to have complaints as urgent as ours? Why is it that the freedom to protect oneself is a live debate for you but an open and shut case for me, a matter of public safety the minute blacks arm themselves? Isn’t the constitution supposed to recognize equal rights? Why is it you are so eager to don a button of sympathy and solidarity and support when foreign whites are murdered by zealots yet our own homegrown zealot, Dylan Roof, killed those nine similarly innocent black churchgoers and your wardrobe that week expressed all the sympathy of a cold stone? Where’s your “Je suis Freddy Gray” social media profile image? Right.

So, you can see why you get the side-eye from me. Your words point in one direction, but your actions often go in another. This is why the outright racist, evil as she or he can be, is also a source of comfort. There is no confusion about where I stand in relation to the racist. We can try to talk out our differences but if at the end of the day the racist insists on hating me then the solution is clear, we must go our separate way and accept being enemies. You, on the other hand, are a source of confusion and anxiety. You never cease in reassuring me that you’ve got my back, but that I need to be patient. Institutions don’t easily change; people don’t always see things like you do; these things take time. Patience: an ability or willingness to suppress restlessness or annoyance when confronted with delay. Do you see what’s happening here? I am meant to suppress my anger as you allow me to exist, as I wait for what is rightfully mine: human recognition under conditions of basic decency and the full force of my rights as supposedly secured by the law. I remain waiting but I’m done being patient and I’m done with your toleration. We are at a crossroads and you’d like to know just what I want from you.

Here it is – your realization that calling yourself a progressive or a liberal is not the same thing as being decent. Rather it is a label, a garment easily draped over oneself and shown to the world to indicate your style.

Actually, there are variations on the style, “progressive.” Of my least favorites is the Totally Down white American. When you meet me you sometimes want to show me and tell me all the things that make you “down”. One time you were busted for smoking weed in public and spent a night in jail; you have memorized most of Tupac’s raps; you once went to Brooklyn and simply adored ‘the culture’; your momma and poppa once marched in a march having to do with something blacks were marching for; you want to have me over for dinner. And there will be other cool people there! And I show up and all your cool friends are white. But I thought you really liked black people…

But Totally Down is not the only flavor self-proclaimed white progressives come in. Another least favorite comes in Such A Shame. This person has lived most of his or her life having had nothing to do with black folks. Often, this person has lived a quite privileged and charmed life. Mommy and daddy held jobs in good ‘liberal’ professions like the academy or maybe journalism with a little bit of the medical field in there somewhere to help pay the bills. They taught you to care for your fellow humans as brothers and sisters as they packed your bags for Exeter. Maybe you did go to a state college, but you know, a good one like University of Virginia or Berkeley, and there you thought about the unfortunate after you pledged your frat or sorority. You spent a summer teaching in the “inner city” and writing a paper on it for your favorite sosh prof. Then you graduated, married and had a child and, wonder of wonders, live in a segregated suburb where now neither you nor your child have black friends (except for me, that is). And as you tsk tsk about the news stories of black child citizens murdered by the police, your middle class parenting leads you to constantly indicate to your child just how special s/he is and you begin to make preparations for your child to start competing in the race for the very tip of the top they already occupy so you send them to more segregated activities completely oblivious to the fact that more likely than not you are effectively raising and training my son’s future enemy, that you are raising a person who will grow up thinking that his or her own destiny is important enough to climb ladders even if they mistake a neck for a rung.

Notice, whether you are a Totally Down or Such A Shame white American I don’t want you to do anything for me. Really, most of the time the best thing you can do for me is to not try to do anything for me. I’m good, thanks. Rather, I want you to do something for yourself. I am asking you to stop worrying about how you look and start worrying about who you are. I need reliable people around me, those for whom the role of decency is a not part to be played but a life lived according to the tenets of sympathy and care. That kind of person neither tries to signal their supposedly progressive pedigree nor mistakes easy condolences for moral aptitude. Rather, that person embraces the toughness of moral demandingness, realizes the radical awkwardness that can ensue when a wrong judgment is made, and possesses the courage to face it without the facile aid of good intentions, which are necessarily future oriented and open-ended, but rather with actions born of ethical commitment. Such a person realizes that America’s history threatens to doom us all: me for being brown, thus often endangered or at risk; you for being white and making you too easily complicit in the destruction of brown life chances and sometimes of life itself. I can’t quite say that you are one of the downtrodden; your privileged lot in life is certainly unfortunate in certain morally relevant ways but certainly no misfortune – you can turn yourself around much more easily than I can overcome the obstacle that is white passivity and complicity.

Though overcoming that obstacle is what me and many other brown folks do. Maybe that is the thing I resent (though maybe not the most). I resent that I must work around, through, and over, while you merely work and sometimes not even that – your ‘progressivism’ is rarely a disincentive to benefit from the goods your skin tone helps secure. For example, take the public good of trust. See me? I walk into a store and it’s on everyone’s faces: is he really here to buy? Can he afford this stuff? I walk into an academic conference: is he a serious thinker or does he ‘just’ write about race. I play my music loud out of my car: how does he afford to have a car like that? Maybe it’s drug money. I walk into a Starbucks: the young white guy taking my order still calls me ‘man’ or ‘bro’ despite the fact the suit I am wearing cost more than two weeks of his salary and that he called the white guy in front of me in sweats and a t-shirt ‘sir’. Yes, this is all about trust. Whether the people that engage, avoid, confront, shirk away from, enjoy, loath me in these situations really trust that I am in fact, just like them – a person who may or may not be in the mood to buy an overpriced scarf; a scholar who thinks the world of ideas extends beyond dead white men, or living ones, for that matter; a music lover who indulges the privilege of a nice car; a gentleman and not a ‘bro’ that enjoys a pumpkin spice latte like the last ‘sir’.  And that is really only one of the many, many public goods I must struggle to secure while you simply choose whether or not to recognize that it has always been profitably within your grasp.

Last year (actually, the last 400 hundred) was not an especially good year for black folks. You and I were both reminded how disposable black lives can be. In at least one case, racism was the straw that literally broke a back. This is a new year. I have nothing against those who make resolutions but that is not really my goal here. Why? Well, nothing about me will change so much as continue to entrench itself within me: the will to live a good life. I don’t want you to make a resolution either. The things the moral life require of us are not year-long projects to be assessed under the influence of a half-drunken reverie around our friends’ coffee table at the end of twelve months. But I do want your resolve, the resolve to face yourself, to look inward rather than perform outwardly. Make no mistake about it. My will to live the good life can take many forms. It can be defined by the soft compassion of brother- and sister-hood or it can be shifted by the hardness of resentment and regret. Ultimately there is only so much I can do to bring you closer to me. Indeed, there is only so much I should do – there are other worthwhile things in the world I intend on enjoying; your reticence, insecurity, and weakness is not among them. If it is ultimately your position that being closer to me is uninteresting to you then I can happily accept that. If you stand far from me then I really know where you stand and, like I said, that is much more comforting to me. Otherwise, leave your Tupac verses and Teach For America stories behind and talk to me as friends do, bearing the risks and rewards of mutual trust and sympathy. If you are one of the white folks to whom none of this applies, do not be cross with me, for you are not the ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’ person that is my target here. Rather, you are something more enduring – a person for whom racial decency matters for its own sake.

With attentiveness and hope Chris Lebron From New Haven, Ct January 3, 2016

Between Coates and Us: A Review of Between the World and Me

Spiegel & Grau, 2015. 152 pp. $24 (cloth). ISBN 9780812993547

 Really, who could say that the past handful of years have been especially pleasing or life-affirming for black Americans? Faced with news clip, after Associated Press trawl, after Youtube upload, after news clip after another of black lives being taken with near impunity, it would be surprising to find a contemporary account of black life in America filled with joy. Indeed, the seeming endless loop of black lives not mattering before our very eyes on media mainstream and not so much has come to resemble the endless loop of the World Trade Center towers falling – except with a bit of variety in the case of blacks: in one video it is a chokehold, in another it is a severed spine, a story that both horrifies and astounds. A main difference between the terror attacks of 9/11 and the relentless terror attacks against blacks is that the former were exceptional and motivated a nation to self-righteous international justice while the latter has been tragically par for the American democratic course since our founding and has motivated our nation to very little save entertain putting a camera on every cop, as if more surveillance is really the thing black communities need. It is into this moment Ta-Nehisi Coates has stepped with his book, Between The World and Me. In it he urges Americans to take blacks’ fear seriously, and, to his son, Samori, insists that his body is in constant danger and the most his dad (Coates) can do is inform him that Samori’s vulnerability “brings you closer to the meaning of life.” This is apparently the book’s entire reason for existence. It is a slim, epistolary tome well-practiced in alarm and side-eye. Yet we are invited to gaze directly into its lessons. Should we?

 Coates’ book is the most recent entrant into a genre with a storied history in black American thought, essays, literature, and letters. I do not mean the epistolary form so explicitly signaled by the book’s opening address: “Son[.]” Rather, it is a book that means to bear witness and provide the black experience vicariously to readers. From Olaudah Equiano’s autobiograghy chronicling his enslavement and subsequent freedom to Frederick Douglass’s address to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, “What, To The Slave Is The Fourth of July,” to James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew, “My Dungeon Shook,” this tradition has made a point of providing a litmus test confirming white Americans’ inadequate grasp of racial morality, exposing them as the broken and lost people they are with respect to black Americans basic well-being. It is to the point to observe, as a brown reader, that Coates’s intended audience is primarily white Americans and, possibly, black youth. I deeply appreciated Coates’ re-creation of his civic education under racial oppression, but, for me, there was not much new to be found in his elegantly rendered passages – rather I nodded along in the knowing way you do on the street when you see someone that is personally unknown to you yet categorically familiar in important aspects. What is this vicarious experience Coates seeks to provide white Americans? Fear and insecurity. Coates’ idee fixe is the precarious mortal status of the black body – it can be here today and gone tomorrow for little reason other than that a person influenced or infected by white power thinks that body should cease existing, or, maybe more darkly, for little reason than that such a person doesn’t think about that body at all and merely acts upon it, erasing the life within that body as easy as he cancels a bank check for a bill he no longer wants to pay.

This morbid preoccupation of Coates’ can make the book tough reading, but tough in the manner that is necessary if we are to get stronger as American citizens as well as a people (if such a thing can be said to exist). For example, Coates writes early in the book: “The fearless boys and girls who would knuckle up, call on cousins and crews, and, if it came to it, pull guns seemed to have mastered the streets. But their knowledge peaked at seventeen, when they ventured out of their parents’ homes and discovered that America had guns and cousins, too.” (27) The streets and schools of Baltimore provided Coates what seem to be some of his longest lasting and most resonant life-lessons. Whites were mostly absent from Baltimore’s streets but America’s history of white supremacy had already structured and so severely limited the possibilities of black life that its denizens turned toward certain black others for support to only then turn on a different set of black others for profit, bragging rights, or enduring street cred. Things were not better in the schools where there were whites. Coates divulges his distinct sense of being lied to and given history lessons meant to suppress his understanding of blacks’ social, political, and economic conditions as well as to dull his critical thinking about those conditions. Thus, students – the fearless boys and girls – get their most valuable and practical wisdom on the streets. But that wisdom not only has upper limits (when the youths turn seventeen) but also subjects them to a mortal reckoning. The rules of vengeance and chest thumping might be clear and instrumentally effective on Baltimore’s streets, but take that to the rest of America and you will learn that white society is more tightly knit, resistant, and has bigger guns all made possibly by the civic ties of a historically white democracy that funds and supports police departments’ suppression of black Americans. One can almost hear Coates cautioning, “If you don’t believe me, just ask Michael Brown”, who was shot dead by a white cop in Ferguson, MO while unarmed. This is not the kind of message that affirms America as a land of milk and honey and Coates is fine with that as he seems to sympathize with a well-used principle in hip-hop for justifying retribution against one’s enemies: y’all got fat while we starved.

 Is there any place in the country that blacks can find themselves both safe and happy? Let Coates tell it and you’ll be convinced that Howard University is the center of the black American universe. We find ourselves in the company of “the scions of Nigerian aristocrats in their business suits giving dap to bald-headed Q’s in purple windbreakers and tan Timbs. There were the high-yellow progeny of AME preachers debating the clerics of Ausar-Set. There were California girls turned Muslim, born anew, in hijab and long skirt. There were Ponzi schemers and Christian cultists, Tabernacle fanatics and mathematical geniuses.” (40-1) Besides being a lesson in how to paint a picture with words – a skill Coates possesses in abundance – this sentence tells us almost all we need to know about why Howard holds such a special place in his heart. The scene Coates presents is rich with the diversity of black life, deep in the possibilities of black difference, and crackles with the energy of black potentiality. It is a life-affirming scene against an American backdrop marked by murder and the theft of black lives absent democratic accountability. It is little wonder that Coates proclaims with no hint of exaggeration or misfired effusiveness: “My only Mecca was, is, and shall always be Howard University.” (39)

 At Howard, Coates loved to learn and learned to love. The pages chronicling his time there bounce, among other things, his ritual of periodically filling out three call slips at Howard’s re-known Moorland-Springarn Research Center taking notes on whatever books recently caught his interest and pursuing women that he seemed to feel could ground his sense of falling down the shaft of American insecurity, until he finally meets the woman that would become his wife (a character that remains decisively nameless as well as strangely non-corporeal in the book save when Coates remarks on her physical features).

 But it turns out even Mecca’s cannot bestow talismans of invulnerability nor cast protective juju over their believers. Soon after dropping out of Howard and moving to New York City, Coates learns that a Howard friend, Prince Jones, a person he would feel comfortable describing as “a good brother”, is killed by the Prince Georges, VA police force under circumstances that are unsurprisingly questionable. The tragic loss of his friend only confirms for Coates his thesis that America is unsafe for black bodies. Living in New York City, thus being located in a major metropolitan center, its streets often defined by their cosmopolitan pulse also fails to provide Coates his desired safe haven. Though early in the book Coates recalls an instance of a gun being pulled on him by one of Baltimore’s fearless boys, he tells what struck me as a much more harrowing story of insecurity on the upper West Side of Manhattan, involving no weapons at all – just the threat of asymmetrical social power. Exiting a movie with Samori in tow while still a small child, Coates recounts the rage that surged up in him as a white woman gave his little boy a shove out of her way. Upon justifiably confronting the woman with the anger appropriate to a parent protecting his innocent child, another man – white, of course – gets involved threatening to call the police. The verbal kerfuffle threatens to become a tragicomedy of errors and Coates wisely decamps – out of mortal fear; who knows what will happen if the police make an appearance? Moreover, what will happen to his son’s mind when he sees his father carted away in handcuffs, stamping Coates indelibly with the stigma of a social deviant, and what will happen to Samori’s own body without his father there to stand watch and guard over him?

For all the rage that would be a rational response to a life spent under threat readers – maybe brown readers moreso – will be surprised that Coates’s book, while taking the occasional moment to admire figures like Malcolm X, almost from a distance, never issues a call to radicalism or even revolution. This is surprising. If one takes the contents of Coates’s bearing witness for his son’s sake (and thereby, our sake) at face value it would make a lot of sense to ask: just what is stopping blacks from punching, bludgeoning, pillaging, Tasering, night-sticking or shooting back? This might be one of the book’s most peculiar features. Despite all the bravado black men are encouraged – scratch that – expected and often instrumentally required to display on every front, I never stopped admiring the frequency with which Coates sincerely copped to being afraid of his American life: afraid for himself, for his friends, for his family, for his people, and not least, for his son. Coates’s fears are palpable on almost every page – when he isn’t explicitly drawing attention to it, he is giving us background reasons blacks would justifiably feel afraid, and this is troubling.

Between the World and Me will unavoidably draw comparisons to James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew, “My Dungeon Shook” which prefaces The Fire Next Time. Toni Morrison’s now famous (in some quarters, infamous) passing of the Baldwinian baton to Coates in the book’s main blurb on the back cover has for better or worse provided the young journalist and essayist an imprimatur with real cash value. I for one think the comparison is overdone and not a little bit irresponsible on Morrison’s part if for no other reason than that it draws a level of scrutiny of a young thinker that Coates cannot bear. Not for lack of skill necessarily as much as lack of history. In addition to being blessed with a pen from which seemingly pre-ordained passages drenched in both hope and sadness spilled forth, Baldwin had the distinct advantage of being in the middle of one of black and American history’s most significant eras alongside those who will prove to be world historic figures in Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. How can anyone stand to compete? I don’t think Coates had this conception of himself as he composed Between The World And Me. However, he also knowingly followed Baldwin in form if in nothing else and this I am confident was no mere coincidence. So the comparison is to be drawn. Coates does not fare so well.

In what really needs to be accepted as one of the book’s most important passages, Coates says with respect to the unsatisfactory level of security he feels Samori is sure to inherit by way of his blackness: “I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I cannot save you – but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it.” (107) One can only imagine the tough pill this is to swallow for a boy aging into manhood, which raises the question as to why Coates feeds it to Samori? To say that it is part of the widely relied upon ethic in the black community of tough love is too facile. It is one thing to ready a belt; it is another to tell a son that the most reliable signifier of his existence is the delicate nature of that existence. A welt from the wack of belt clears up in day or two. The inheritance of existential precariousness lasts a lifetime. To see just how dangerous this kind of message is we can turn directly to Baldwin’s opening salvo to his nephew regarding Baldwin’s own father: “Well, [your grandfather] is dead, he never saw you, and he had a terrible life; he was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.”[i] Baldwin is clear in his message. The only way to a black life of meaning is to be aware of one’s vulnerabilities but to simultaneously resist being defined by them, to deny the insistence that one frame one’s life in terms of those vulnerabilities. The vulnerabilities at issue for both writers ought, for Baldwin, be taken as markers for resistance and personal radicalism broadly understood and not as reference points.

Maybe Coates meant something else in counseling his son in this way. If the above is a misinterpretation, I daresay it is partly Coates’s fault. A great deal has been said about his ability to write – and Coates most certainly can write. Whether he writes as well as Baldwin or any other favorite essayist is a dull and uninteresting question. Anyone who can render high stakes street life in a manner at once grim and glamorous should be left to his own writing devices: “The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experiences, is thrilling.” (22) No, when and where the book fails has nothing to do with Coates’ prose as much as it has do with the perspective from which that prose issues. To put it plainly, Between The World And Me is a terribly lonely book. In its one hundred and fifty-two pages, Coates almost never conveys a meaningful conversation had with another human being, Samori, heading towards his teen years at the time of the book’s writing has no voice, even when he is a character in a recalled moment or rhetorical question, Coates’ wife remains something of a non-person (a criticism that does nothing to shield him from a growing number of observations that women play a minor substantive part in Coates’ extensive reflections) despite the fact that she gets him to go to Paris – a trip that is yet another source of fear; and, once in Paris, one could be forgiven for thinking Coates only ever went out by himself since his experiences center strictly on his own perambulations and meals, encounters chance and not chance.

One will be tempted to charge Coates with blatant narcissism – in the final analysis, his mind, observations, opinions, and emotions are the main and nearly only star of his show, and this can be a deeply unattractive quality in an essayist. But this strikes me as quick and ungenerous. I am an introvert and I know one when I read one. Though I don’t know Coates personally, he strikes me as a quiet man who is happy to live in his own mind. But this is not an acceptable vantage point or dwelling place for a man writing a letter to his son and us about bodies in danger. Coates has and will hopefully continue to make a good living leveraging his capable mind but Samori and the rest of us must live in the world. I’d like to think we have more to do than merely cope with the vestiges of white supremacy, a man-made quality of human decrepitude that Coates often threatens to naturalize thus remove from the realm of human responsibility and culpability by frequently referring to those vestiges as earthquakes and other natural but blameless disasters. And I like to think that there is a wider foundation for black action than fear. It often seems that between the world and Coates is trepidation and a perpetual sense of dread. It is a sure thing that no people ever took hold of the land beyond the mountain ranges of oppression by simply mapping those mountains. They had to put one step in front of the other and get to climbing.

[i] James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time” in Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: The Library of American, 1998), pp 291-348; p. 291.