I’ve put off writing this review for a while. I find, as a straight, white, middle-class dude, conversations about race feel thorny. As I walk along this journey toward racial justice, however, I’m learning to embrace my feelings of discomfort and to not hesitate to speak up. I won’t let my sweaty palms stop me from pecking out notes about what I’m learning. Stumbling through a conversation about race is one of the best ways to learn sensitivity and empathy. Additionally, I was encouraged by the vulnerability of the author to describe his own failings and his progress as he learned about the role that race plays in this country. Sometimes I think reckoning with the complexities of race is a uniquely white problem for which I do not have any good answers. I’m encouraged to know that people of color walk this path of dawning understanding, horror, and aching for change. This insight may be remedial. In fact, I’m sure most of mine are. But I take pride in these tiny ignorances dispelled and in these small steps toward justice and equality. I know that I too can walk this bumpy path forward keeping an open heart and an eye toward my own missteps.
Beyond the author’s honesty in his growing racial understanding, the book is poignant, insightful, and beautifully written. I particularly appreciated the author’s emphasis of what is really at stake when we talk about racial injustice: black lives (or, as Coates puts it in relating to the African American’s ongoing fight to escape from the historical chains of slavery woven into our society, the “black body”). He places preservation of the black body as the highest priority. This is no political point. It’s about ending pointless death based on nothing other than skin color. There is no abstraction here. The black body is what is at stake because the black body is what is most grievously endangered by racism and social injustice. Coates writes, “All our phrasing--race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy--serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body” (10). Coates’ focus on the real-world realities rather than intentions drives home the pervasive presence of racial oppression built into our modern world.
Another important point is the power of forgetting. Denial and forgetting are key in upholding unequal power structures. We can advocate for equal treatment while forgetting that our ancestors (and even our younger selves) have already rigged the system in our favor. It’s a point I consider especially trenchant as I watch protests slowly waning across the country. Will we remember George Floyd in a year? Will we remember the gut-punch of black bodies destroyed needlessly on the streets? Or will we allow it to fade with time? We must, if we’re serious about our commitment to equality, remember. Remember every galling episode of racial injustice you can, keep it at the forefront of your mind, let your memory guide your actions toward change. I’m fumbling and bumbling to try to articulate points that Coates draws beautifully and with deep empathy. He often writes in the second person as a letter to his son to prepare him for the world: “You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold” (71).
Coates’ story helped me to realize how very different my upbringing was because of my whiteness and social class. He expresses thoughts that I never had to consider because of the insulated childhood I enjoyed. For example, he writes, “When our elders present school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing” (26). Again, “My father beat me for letting another boy steal from me. Two years later, he beat me for threatening my ninth-grade teacher. Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out” (28). And, “All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to ‘be twice as good,’ which is to say ‘accept half as much” (91).
Coates weaves history, personal experience, and informed insight beautifully. His story is honest and visceral and convicting and horrifying and encouraging. This is an important book that ought to be read with an open heart willing to listen and believe.
A
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Popular Highlights in this book
The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.Highlighted by 17,411 Kindle readers- And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do.Highlighted by 15,986 Kindle readers
- The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.Highlighted by 12,472 Kindle readers
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Reviews with images
A right work for the good of us all.
The most descriptive and accurately written perspective and presentation of life as an African American within the strict confines of White American society. It is unbiased and plays no favorites, it picks no sides, as any right written work should. It is truth as I have experienced it throughout my 47 years, as taught by my grandmother who grew up during Lynching Sport and Jim Crow, and whose father was a former slave. The dynamics of hatred and superiority may have changed slightly but the underlying fuel for and of division remains steadfast and unmoved. The truth is that the presentation concerning superiority is the poison that taints the whole of humanity. There is no such thing as race and color, none of it. It is the foundation of all of our problems right?To the Plundered: "fashion your constructive mind, your knowledgeable tongue, your very unbreakable will with the purest of iron."To the Dreamer: "Your oblivion will surely destroy us all. Awaken Now!"Only through our courageous efforts at understanding one another can we grow to care for each other. Let us begin!Peace.
Top reviews from other countries
Kinky Kid
Hermoso. triste y lleno de rabia, una lectura obligatoria
Reviewed in Mexico on December 30, 2021
liviar
A must-read if you're interested in current (and historical) Afro-American issurs
Reviewed in Italy on February 25, 2024