Normally I let my Goodreads reviews sit in the sidebar, but this book is too important to sit on the sidelines.
This gets five stars not because I enjoyed it, but because of its importance. Coates holds nothing back, nor should he, in his declaration of oppression by, not white people, but by those who call themselves white. He alternates between his descriptions of everything that has come "between the world and [him]" - personally, societally, historically - and how finding his place at Howard University, the Mecca, gave him an understanding of his own race. This forces me to wonder whether that isolated experience, that time when he, because of his race, was not subjugated, not beaten, not oppressed, not killed is the first step. It forces me to ask how we, as a society, can expand that feeling of safety and belonging. Do we simply add in other non-white races and ethnicities until whites are the only ones not counted? Do we undo who is considered white? Where do people from the Mediterranean fit in? Are they white? But I digress...
I want to write so much more about this book. I highlighted lines and passages that speak to me for various reasons (much to the horror of my students - "You annotate willingly‽"), but I cannot find the words to explain why. So here, in some kind of chronological order, are some of my thoughts throughout this book:
*"America believes itself exceptional [but]... one cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error" (8): How can we claim to be the greatest nation in the world, a beacon of freedom to all, and continue to deny what we've done to black people for over four hundred years and show few signs of improvement?
*Coates's grew up in schools celebrating Black History Month where he watched films "dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera" (32), forcing him to wonder what non-violence achieved.
*"[The] power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, 'white people' would cease to exist for want of reasons" (42): This goes back to my earlier comments. Are Italians or Greeks white only because it gives them a position of power? Are they white only so they can have non-whites beneath them?
*"[Perhaps] being named 'black' was just someone's name for being at the bottom" (55): the corollary to the example above.
**"[The] bodies of women are set out for pillage in ways I could never truly know" (65): This is exactly how I feel being a white person trying to understand what it's like to be black. It's something that, despite all the reading I'm doing, I can obviously never understand.
*"Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country" (78): This is a perfect description of the institutionalized racism inherent in our country. At the same time, he was killed by a black officer, and I have to wonder how that officer reconciles these two (in this case) disparate elements of his identity.
*"[Whenever] I saw the police it meant something had already gone wrong" (85): I have to ask if police have dual objectives - prevention for whites (I have never seen police simply in the neighborhood in any area I've lived) and punishment for blacks.
*[On] West Broadway... white people spilled out of wine bars with sloshing glasses and without police" (89): This speaks to the previous line; I can't imagine police being as tolerant of black people drinking in public.
*"[Without] the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity" (105): This hearkens back to Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, the idea that blacks must be subjugated for the simple reason that whites need someone to be superior to.
*"The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history" (111): This is probably the essential theme of the book. Blacks were used from the start to improve the standing of those who call themselves white, a situation that has not improved. Look at the NFL for example - over 70% of the players are black, sacrificing their bodies and well-being to entertain the masses, while only 1 of 32 head coaches is black. And look at the situation with Brian Flores, who was denied the Giants' head coach job before he was ever interviewed .
*When speaking with Prince Jones's mother, Coates asked her if Prince's white friends' parents treated her with respect, and she said, "By then I was the chief of radiology at the local hospital... [and] so they treated me with respect," but "[she] said this with no love in her eye, coldly" (141): If I had to guess, I'd say they respected the position, not the woman.
But the two moments that stand out the most to me are:
*"[Southern] Manhattan had always been Ground Zero for us.... Bin Laden was not the first man to bring terror to that section of the city" (86, 87): This does much to reinforce the brutality of black life in the US. Yes, what happened on September 11th was horrific, an attack on this country not seen in generations, but where is the outrage over the other attacks that have happened on American soil? It's absent, because those killed were not viewed as worth remembering or even seen as human.
And on a strictly personal level, these two:
*"Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have and you come to us endangered" (82):
*"...my beautiful brown boy, who would soon come into the knowledge, who would soon comprehend the edicts of his galaxy, and all the extinction-level events that regarded you with a singular and discriminating interest" (90): These forced me to think of my son's future. My son who is half black living in a 96.6% white town. What's going to happen on that day he comes home from school and unlocks the front door, and someone drives by and calls the police? This is no longer a hypothetical situation; it's a probability as far as I'm concerned, and I'm scared to death that I will be unable to prepare him for what lies ahead.
