The style is implacable but excellent and engaging. Ranging from ubiquitous, almost humdrum scenes to high philosophy and metaphysics in the space of a few pages, paragraphs or sentences! However, it’s highly readable and enjoyable. It has a familiarity of subject and scene that established its appeal to me immediately. It quotes rap songs from artists like Nas and Outkast that I knew and listened to growing up. It deals with a world of poor, urban, African America, that’s at once alien to me, in terms of experience, but also familiar in terms of its position in popular culture and my own childhood. It centered around recognisable aspects of life like interacting with family, hanging out with friends and going to school. As I continued the narrative brought me feelings of warm curiosity. Not necessarily because of the story’s content, albeit some of it is shocking and revelatory, but because of the insight the author brings to bear on that raw material of his own life. These feelings of curiosity were warm because, despite the cruel and unjust episodes of Coates’ life, he seems to have escaped becoming angry and bitter about the segregation and racism he feels so sensitively and expresses so eloquently. The reasons for this are not spelled out in this letter / essay addressed to his fifteen year old son. He acknowledges that he was angrier in the past, acknowledges the role of historical events like the American slave trade and the Civil War but stops short of providing a formulaic answer; either for his interpretation of racial culture in America or his response to it.
Coates conveys a different perspective powerfully and eloquently. There are great descriptions of childhood recollections like walking to school and getting beaten by his Dad, young adult experiences of university and getting pulled over by the police but, perhaps most arrestingly, experiences of casual strolls in NY once Coates has begun to venture out from the Baltimore he grew up in;
“They were utterly fearless. I did not understand it until I looked out on the street. That was where I saw white parents pushing double wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem boulevards in T-shirts and jogging shorts. Or I saw them lost in conversation with each other, mother and father, while their sons commanded entire sidewalks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to others”
This passage brought home to me a perspective I never would have arrived at through my own thoughts as someone who had mastery communicated to them as a child and never endured the ubiquity of fear that Coates describes from his own youth. In this manner, Coates simultaneously shows us something we know and a perspective or element of the familiar scene that we do not and herein lies the attraction of his writing for me.
One part of the book that made me stop and put the book down to reflect was the passage, or passages rather, concerning Saul Bellow’s quip, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?”. I had never heard of Mr Bellow but considered the question on what I saw as its merits. Tolstoy was a great writer whose works I have enjoyed and love. Did the Zulus have any writers, or creators, of this calibre? I wasn’t sure! Probably they do, but it will be in a different form as it comes from a different, distinct culture. But I still wondered to myself, but will it really be as good as Tolstoy if we could ever be objective about these things? To be sure, I had treated it as a meaningful question. A few pages later I was horrified to read,
“I discovered an essay by Ralph Wiley in which he responded to Bellow’s quip. ‘Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,’ wrote Wiley. ‘’Unless you find profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership’’ And there it was . I had accepted Bellow’s premise”
And so had I! With all my pretension to being liberal, open-minded etc. etc. It is around then that some of Coates broader ideas about racism began to develop in my mind. One, for example, was the idea of “believing that you are white”. What was this? I thought when I first encountered it. I am white. I know I am. I don’t allow it to make me think anything else about myself but I cannot escape it as a fact. I didn't understand how this could be construed as a belief. However, after the Tolstoy incident I saw things differently. I had identified with Tolstoy as Western and White, despite him being from a different country and period of history. Furthermore, I had identified his works as something that ‘mattered’, to use Coates language, while not according that status to the Zulu culture! It’s this kind of prejudice, concealed, or a least partially concealed, from even the person that holds it that seems to me to constitute a broader ‘belief in being White’ and the inherent ‘Whiteness’ of the world.
The ‘lack of control over your own body’, a phrase Coates uses to describe the African American experience, also gained in meaning and resonance as he shows us his own interactions with the police, those of his friends, including the tragically murdered Prince Jones, and contrasts them with those of wealthier, ‘whiter’ communities.
“What I would not have given, back in Baltimore, for a line of officers, agents of my country and my community, patrolling my route to school! There were no such officers, and whenever I saw the police it meant that something had already gone wrong”
This ‘lack of control over your own body’ amounted to constant subjugation to fear; fear of the streets, fear of the police, fear of failing school, fear of discrimination, fear of maltreatment, even fear of death. This perennial fear expresses itself in different ways. Fear as the rage of young men in gangs listening to rap “because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies”. Fear as the excitement of running away from police or scrapping with rival gangs from different blocks. Fear expressed as the gold jewelry and reinterpreted sportswear of ghetto fashion. Fear as the violence of parents towards their own children, whom they feel incapable of protecting.
However, Coates does not allow this societally enforced fear to become a hatred of its most visible exponents. Rather, he acknowledges the need we all have to use negative definition about ourselves in the face of our inability to say something more positive about ourselves, regardless of our identity:
“Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man”
But this is scant cause for celebration for Coates because, he seems to feel, it would be better to have this repression foisted upon you by an unjust minority rather than a complicit majority? Here, Coates demonstrates the bankruptcy of a model that holds the police culpable and places responsibility for its brutality solely in its own hands:
“But they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority”
It is a credit to Coates deep understanding of the subject and to his powers of self-control that he doesn’t allow the brutality or injustice of what he has seen and experienced to dominate his thinking on these topics. Rather he identifies racism and its effects in America more cerebrally:
“But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the pre-eminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organise a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible - this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully to believe that they are white.”
However, this historical, cultural view of racism and its place in American history provokes both optimism and pessimism in response. I’m heartened to know that racist attitudes do not emanate solely from people’s hatred of other races and the unknown. Nonetheless, if the causes of prejudice and racism are rooted so deeply in America’s history of slave-trading, slave farming and construction using slave labour; what hope does the country have of escaping, or transcending, its own history? Perhaps I have read him too pessimistically but I didn’t detect much hope in Coates' assessment of America. Coming from such an intelligent and well educated voice on the topic, this is depressing although I sympathise with the determinism inherent in his argument.
