Coates on Coates: A Book Review of Between the World and Me

Hailed as one of the best books of 2015 and winner of the National Book Award, critics continue to heap approbations on the newest work of the critical race theorist and emerging black intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Written in the form of a letter to his fifteen year old son, Coates writes about what life in a black body is like in a world build upon the systematic enslavement and destruction of black bodies.  Though we are allowed to overhear this conversation between one black man and his son, it is clear that the real audience for this book is the white "race," a people Coates constantly refers to as "the Dreamers" due to their singularly undivided focus on attaining the American Dream -- an edifice that they have constructed by means of oppressing and (ab)using black bodies.  What is the Dream? "It is perfect houses with nice lawns.  It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways.  The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts.  The Dream smells like peppermint and tastes like strawberry shortcake."  And, try as he might to attain the Dream, it remains ever inaccessible to his people because "the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies" (11).

Though deeply cynical and acerbic in its tone, Coates does powerfully communicate to the white reader many sharp insights into life and struggles of black women and men.  Coates exposes the ways in which large-scale systems -- legal policies, city districting and policing, cultural attitudes, and so on -- operate to disadvantage those with black skin.  Particularly insightful is Coates' recurring argument that the enslavement of black bodies was and is a profoundly physical act, not some abstract idea.  Racism destroys particular people with particular experiences, preferences, and characteristics.  This racism "is a visceral experience... it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscles, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth" (10).  The insidious ideology of white supremacy possesses a foul taste, a rancid smell, and leaves dead bodies in its wake.  If Coates' highly emotive language feels like a punch in the gut, it does so for good reason.

Regrettably, Coates structures his argument in such a way that a white man like myself is denied permission to voice any disagreement lest I be charged with the crime of "privilege" or even "racism." (Nevermind the fact that as a black man Coates seems to know precisely what is going on in the white mind).  And though I plead guilty to the former, recognizing the way my social status has shaped my own perception of the world around me, I want to resist the latter label.  Likewise I reject the tendency ubiquitous among both the far left and the far right to deny certain people the right to dissent, to express reasoned disagreement, and to subject every idea to rigorous scrutiny.  If we cannot dialogue, after all, what hope do we have to arrive at even a modicum of understanding?  Yet this, it seems, is precisely what Coates considers to be impossible.  Rooted dogmatically in the Nietzschean ethic of "will to power," the author's arguments throughout the book assume that relations between whites and blacks must ever remain marked by struggle, conflict, and even violence.  Assuming that white people can change, that they might one day be anything other oppressors, that they will stop plundering black bodies for their own personal economic gain, Coates tells his son, is harmful idealism that distracts from the pragmatic, ongoing project of the struggle for black power.  In this world, one either eats or gets eaten.  And the Dreamers have been feasting on black flesh for far too long.

Given his rejection of theism and the uniquely Christian hope that the arc of the universe bends toward justice, it should not surprise us that Coates offers no suggestions for a way forward other than armed popular resistance.  Trashed as idealistic gas is the pacifism of Martin Luther King; in its place Coates seeks to revive the militant tactics of the Black Power Movement and the violent rhetoric of his hero Malcolm X ("If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds.  He would not turn the other cheek for you.  He would not be a better man for you.  He would not be your morality") 36.  For this reason, Coates denigrates those heroes of "Black History Month" who staged sit-ins, marched for freedom, and "seemed to love the worst things in life -- love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire hoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets" (32).  Nonviolent methods are lauded by whites because pacifism poses no genuine threat to white power, Coates cynically argues.  It is an oppressor's morality.  Besides, any willingness to suffer or die nonviolently for a cause depends upon the conviction that history is aiming at a particular end or telos.  Yet that is not the world we inhabit, according to the author.  Ridiculing those who believe that the meek will inherit the earth, Coates inhabits a universe that is purely "physical, and its moral arc [is] bent toward chaos then concluded in a box" (28).

As a Christian and a theologian, I must part ways with Ta-Nehisi Coates at this juncture.  Though he has much to teach me about endemic racism, the social and physical conditions of urban poverty, the black diaspora, the shortcomings of the white Dream, and much more, I must (at the risk of being discarded as another privileged white oppressor) declare my belief in the possibility of reconciliation and transformation.  Christ's prayer for those who crucified him remind us today that the cycle of violence -- long though it may have lasted -- can grind to a halt through the power of forgiveness.  History is not condemned to be, as Coates believes, one long game of "king of the mountain" in which whites stand on top of the pile, shoving down black and brown pretenders to their throne.  In contrast to all of this stands the kenotic movement celebrated by Paul in Philippians 2, the master who washes his servants' feet, the black baptist preacher who instructs his followers to overcome hatred with love.

For though Coates' vitriol positively drips with righteous indignation, he never offers to me a convincing reason why I ought to share his outrage at injustice.  For if the world we inhabit really is mere chaos that ends in a box, for what reason might I consider surrendering my status as a white male?  If that's the game we're playing, then I will do what I will do, compelling others to serve my own purposes and making no apologies for doing so.  Coates either overlooks the danger of the oppressed becoming the oppressor or else he tacitly approves of it.  And it is this great struggle which provides Coates and his son with meaning and purpose in their lives.  In perhaps the most honest moment in this letter, the author states the conclusion that he is compelled to embrace: "Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about this world is meant to be... These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope" (71).  This is a profoundly dark and cynical perspective from which to advocate for "racial justice," one which effectively renders terms like "good," "true," "beautiful," and "just" devoid of any meaning beyond the personal and subjective.  And so I have every right to reject the author's idea of justice just as much as I might claim to dislike tomatoes.  Who is he to argue with me?  On what grounds will he convince me otherwise?

Thankfully, I believe in the God of Justice and Peace who provides content and definition to such ideas, enfleshed in his very body hung on a cross and resurrected.  Just as guns will one day be reforged into garden tools and just as the lion will one day lay down with the lamb, so too I cling to the hope that "one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls" and we will know peace.  This was Dr. King's dream.  One day we will all wake up to find that this reconciliation is the fabric with which this universe was woven all along.