#btwam

I cried reading this today. There’s an urgency to say something about my experience with Coates’ work. Racism as it is dissected in Between the World and Me is something I think about often. The briefest summary of racism as BtWaM describes it is that racism is akin to a typhoon. This description is both accurate and errant of the ways that understand the world to be composed and how my world would describe it. It’s made by us, and it’s here now, as real as the computer at which I type and the book which has called me to think again on the topic. He’s as forward about this as can be without citing traditional academic works.

I have culpability in this. It’s true to that regardless of my intent or desires, I have been born and raised in America, and that entails that racism bred into me. Not just that -ism, many more too. Given what the world sees me as, and what I to a plain degree would accept, I have not lived with the same fears that Coates describes in his letter to his son. I am impoverished too by this racism, even as I am on the, well, white side of things. My whiteness, the one to which I claim and others take me as at face value, affords me an ease of movement and interactions among most anybody in the US. This is something I struggle with, or that I make my struggle, because I don’t enjoy a happiness born out of ignorance. I am often uncritical, inexperienced, and uninformed about what it’s like to be somebody else, what it’s like to inhabit their body. I need to listen more than speak and think more than react. This too is something I struggle with.

As is surely apparent, I analyze and write with analytical tone. Really, I’m not skilled at writing something economic or raw. But I started writing by mentioning that I cried while reading BtWaM in order to be raw.

I cried several times actually. I cried realizing that the life of a black person entails a life of constant fear. I’ll never know that fear. I cried knowing my German heritage has afforded me a perspective that has made the foreign mundane, at least at times. In that moment it was recorded within me as though that were a loss. I cried comprehending what my family has done for me after reading about the life of Mabel Jones. How what my folks did and continue to do heals and helps them as it helps me. I cried troubled that their gift of energy and warmth carries a responsibility. I need to propagate that gift in my own way. I’m left anxious by the thought.