The best book I’ve read this year is Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, written as a letter to his son for when he’s older.
Coates recognizes the dignity of each person, each “one-of-one.”
Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress-making and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved… Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains — whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
Also, despite our nation’s wealth being built out of slavery and systematic abuses of power to safeguard the American Dream, Coates sees the beauty in the world. He sees the stark reality of how easily bodies can be broken by human and natural causes, and how to be insulated from that reality is to not only be ignorant, but also to be farther from grasping the meaning of life itself: life’s transience, our mortality, the richness of our differences, and the way we depend on one another.
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. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real — when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities — they are shocked in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be. And I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
There is so much I would like to talk about with this book, and I realize I’ve just slapped down some large quotes with very little discussion. But first, without delay, I recommend it to you so that I have you to talk about it with.
After that, I’d like to discuss how Coates talks about how racism perpetuates itself, how it’s not about race but about a people. How Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. And so much more. But first, read the book.
