Still Tired of Waiting

I know I have already written a blog post here with a similar title, but Langston Hughes' words come to mind yet again as I finish reading the slim book, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It feels false to write a review of a book about the black experience when I am clearly not able to understand that world view at all.  I am a privileged white woman living in the urban South. I have no familiarity with the world that Coates describes in this book which is framed as a letter to his teenaged son. But yet, but yet, I urge everyone to read it. Read it more than once.  This book, winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015, parted the veil a bit more for me.

Between the World and Me is not a hopeful book. Coates doesn't say that we can make things better in this racist America - "this terrible and beautiful world." But he examines his journey and the reality of growing up black in America and explains these truths to his son and to his readers. He forces all of us to take a hard and difficult look at the systemic racism of America. Coates says, "I am writing to you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect." 

Coates tells about growing up where "fear ruled everything around me" on the streets of Baltimore and beginning to "dimly perceive the great barrier between the world and me."  He writes about his college years at the Mecca, Howard University, where he saw the "dark energy of all African peoples" in the Yard and where he began to immerse himself in research and writing about the expanding black power he experienced there. Some of his strongest writing is about his college friend Prince Jones who was killed by a police officer in 2000. Years later he interviews Dr. Mable Jones, his mother, a radiologist who raised her children to have a better life with an excellent private school education and privilege. But the dream didn't hold when her son was killed mistakingly and his murder was not punished. 

Coates tell his son that he doesn't think the hurt that Dr. Jones and the parents of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner experienced will go away. "I do not believe we can stop [the Dreamers], because they must ultimately stop themselves." He writes throughout the book about the Dream and the Dreamers - the "perfect houses with nice lawns…treehouses, Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake."

But Coates, a journalist and correspondent for The Atlantic,  does urge his son to struggle. "Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom…Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers (the white American dream). Hope for them. Pray for them if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversation."  Coates' book is the story of his life and a story of the future for his son and a look at the reality of the black experience in America. Toni Morrison calls it "required reading." I have to agree with her. We must see the world for what it is - a "terrible and beautiful"place.