Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates visited our campus last year and I have been looking forward to reading his memoir, Between the World and Me, since then.  He had me at the opening words, “Dear Son,”.  He is writing to his son about what it means to be an African American Male, but he was speaking for me – in a parallel world vernacular – as the reluctant son prepares to go off to college.  How do we tell our children – how does a man tell his son – what he needs to know?  I want to know.  I am reading with Coates from the first line.  And what he is telling me about is something that I balked when I first heard a black analyst, Dorothy Holmes, say it, but that I have, across time and as a result of many experiences, including with Mr. Coates himself, come to appreciate.  He is telling me that the primary concern of the American Black Male is with the integrity of his body – a body that he does not feel is, in some primal and fundamental way, his own.

Had I read this a couple of years ago, I think he might have lost me at this point.  Wait a minute, I would have said, we are 150 years out from the civil war and the emancipation.  What do you mean that your body is not yet your own?  But Coates patiently walks us, his co-author of the letter to his son, through the experience of growing up in a culture where a boy is beaten regularly by people who love him to protect him from acting in ways that could lead to his being arrested or worse.  He is also, if he is growing up in a ghetto, as Coates did, fearing for his life from other quarters – he has to know which blocks are safe to navigate and which are not.  And then he becomes puzzled and envious of those who, as he would and does provide for his son – provide a different kind of protective layer so that his son does not have to experience the same fearsome forces determining his life – until his son discovers that an innocent black boy has been murdered by a policeman and the policeman will not be charged – and his son, despite his privileged and protected life – is confronted by his own variant on the mortal fears that have plagued the father.  And isn’t there something universal about this wish of a father to have his son escape the traps and turmoil that he has found himself in only to find that the son, despite his best efforts, must confront some variant of them?  And don’t we want to provide some succor, some guidance, as he does this?  And, at least for me, I wish that I could be as eloquent – as readable – as Coates is.  I wish that my son would read what I wrote or, barring that, that someone would, as people have read Coates.

So he tells his son about his experience – about going to Howard University in Washington, D.C.  And I have told my son about my own experience of going to college.  And he has chosen to go to a college that was not mine.  And Coates acknowledges that his son will have to make his own choices in life – but I sense that he deeply and powerfully wishes that his son would experience Howard – the Mecca – as he experienced it, filled with celebrities – some of them known to me and some of them not – as likely his son would hear the names – it is amazing to me how many people I know on a first name basis who are unknown to my children and to my students because of the barriers that time erects – and between Coates and me there are social barriers where he is reciting names of people that are celebrities within the African American community, but not so much within mine.  He is building bridges to, but also necessarily pointing out divides between, he and his son and he and me.

Coates revels in his blackness – he celebrates it – and then he pulls up short of imagining that the black universe is the entire universe, something that he once wanted to do.  He connects with me (the “white” reader – whatever and whoever “white” is) when he owns the entire human race and all of its magnificent production as his own.  I am proud of my family – and proud of their products – they get some extra juice and vigarish and I overvalue them because of my knowing and being related to them.  I am also proud of my various brushes with fame and overvalue the production of those individuals.  But I am also proud of and feel related to the whole human race – what we have accomplished – despite all the trouble we have also managed to cause – is nothing short of miraculous – and Coates shares in that appreciation – and that becomes another connection point.  Implicitly, at his moment, he invites me to appreciate “his” world as he is appreciating “mine” and I feel more comfortable acknowledging what he would have me see – that African Americans, despite my prejudice of being a drag on the economy, have been one of our most important economic engines.  This land is our land.

I experience this as the result of a kind of openness that feels like it flows off the page.  There is an honesty that is palpable and, while I think I have been as honest with my son as he is being with his, sometimes in ways that make me wonder (for both of us) “Should I have told him that?”, when I told a psychoanalytic friend that I was reading Between the World and Me, he commented on how defended Coates is in it.  By this he means that the flow is not free – that this is not a series of Freudian free associations unencumbered by what we call defensive functioning – where we craft our sentences to hide as well as reveal.  And I suppose he is right.  This is a very well-crafted book – it reads like poetry or spoken word soul – which sounds spontaneous but is deeply and carefully crafted.  And, as a reader, I appreciate that.  I have the sense that I am in the hands of a craftsman.  That this sentence, this paragraph, this page, this section will resolve.  So I suppose that crafting a piece of writing is like interpreting a dream and then using that interpretation to address a problem area.  Sometimes I will flat-footedly say, “I had this dream and I think it was about this and it resolved in this way and I think that is a really good idea, what do you think?”, but I frequently get more mileage out of the dream if I think about how to engage with a person so that they, too, feel the solution that the dream presented or the way that the dream articulated the problem is useful for us to consider as we work on the problem, and this requires crafting – working the solution into the interaction between us as we work together on the problem.

Coates has taken what I think are real, raw direct experiences of the world and worked them into a form that engages the reader.  He wants to connect.  He wants us to be with him.  This requires craftsmanship – especially when working across racial, ethnic or social lines.  It requires honesty, but also appreciation of how what we have to say will be perceived.  We have to write – and then read our writing not just as editors but as the Other – how will this be heard by someone who is not me?  And he has, at least with this me, allowed me to read it as if it were me – as if I had written it, which of course I couldn’t have.  What could be further from my capacity to write about than the subjectivity of a black man?  In an earlier post, I noted that the white author of The Help was wise to avoid writing in the first person about any of the blacks (she did with the whites) in her book.  It may be that I am able to read this piece in part because I have been working to understand this perspective, but I think I am able to read it as something that I might have written because Coates has crafted it to be that.  I can imagine myself in his shoes.  I feel his concerns to be my own.  This is an accomplishment that is partly based on the crafted nature of the writing, but also I think on the honesty of it.  While it may include defensive components, it comes, I believe, from a heartfelt and genuine place – the kind of place that we can discover when we sit with the parts of ourselves and the world that are beautiful and ugly and see them as directly as we are able.

The writing then, is the writing of an empowered person.  A person who feels free to say what he believes and to do that without inhibiting himself - though doing that with sensitivity to his audience - not because he is kowtowing to them, but because he cares about them as equals.  He cares about them as similarly free people who will necessarily relate from their own place to what he has to say, just as he will say what he has to say from his own place. 

This book has become an Important Book – but it is not weighty or tough to plow through.  It does not deliver all that it might promise to a hungry son, but we have been warned that what we want and what Dad wants is not the same thing – and I think more than that, that Dad is a seeker, too, and that he has not come to the end of his search.  I did think Dad was going to become a hero – by taking up the task of reporting on the wanton killing of black men he moved from passive victim to actively working to address the situation.  I was rooting for him.  But the resolution was less complete than that.  And, in the wake of the events this week in Charlottesville – where white supremacists gathered to promote racial hatred and were tacitly supported by a President who had not yet been elected when this book was written, anything like a resolution to the issues that are raised in this book would be way premature.  This book is about engaging us – Coates’s  son, his people, and all people – in an ongoing struggle.  There is hope here, but it is the hope that comes from Coates’s capacity – and ours in sympathy – to look at a situation and to appraise it honestly and directly, no matter how painful and uncomfortable that might be.  For me, because of that, this is a quintessentially psychoanalytic book.     

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...