Your new book, “Between the World and Me,” is a great and searing contribution to this public education. It is a mind-altering account of the black male experience... There is a pervasive physicality to your memoir — the elemental vulnerability of living in a black body in America. Written as a letter to your son, you talk about the effects of pervasive fear...
But the disturbing challenge of your book is your rejection of the American dream. My ancestors chose to come here. For them, America was the antidote to the crushing restrictiveness of European life, to the pogroms...
Your ancestors came in chains. In your book the dream of the comfortable suburban life is a “fairy tale.” For you, slavery is the original American sin, from which there is no redemption. America is Egypt without the possibility of the Exodus. African-American men are caught in a crushing logic, determined by the past, from which there is no escape... You write to your son, “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”...
In what is bound to be the most quoted passage from the book, you write that you watched the smoldering towers of 9/11 with a cold heart. At the time you felt the police and firefighters who died “were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.” You obviously do not mean that literally today (sometimes in your phrasing you seem determined to be misunderstood). You are illustrating the perspective born of the rage “that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.”
I read this all like a slap and a revelation. I suppose the first obligation is to sit with it, to make sure the testimony is respected and sinks in. But I have to ask, Am I displaying my privilege if I disagree? Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions? Does a white person have standing to respond? If I do have standing, I find the causation between the legacy of lynching and some guy’s decision to commit a crime inadequate to the complexity of most individual choices.
I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.
In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam. But a dream sullied is not a lie. The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow.
This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.
Friday, July 17, 2015
David Brooks: Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White
Quotable David Brook responds to a letter/book author Ta-nehisi Coates wrote to his son.
Labels:
American dream,
David Brooks,
Race,
race relations,
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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21 comments:
You know what they say- "You have to be carefully taught." And it seems that Mr. Coates is carefully teaching his son to carry the hate forward.
Good response from David Brooks.
Framed as a "letter to my son," we can see precisely how bigotry is transmitted in black culture.
I'm thinking this is what happens, one of the inevitable results of losing the faith.
If Coates is not a believer he can't very well blame the almighty for making him in his image.
Atheism is cruel... assuming Coates is an atheist, which he could very well not be in reality. In which case, I take it back, before they come and take me away in the middle of the night.
Come down Lem... it's not like you made an anti-Muslim YouTube video.
You are totally safe as long as you observe the laws of the Profit ;)
But Coates HAS achieved the American Dream, at least externally. He has a wife and child, a good job and, presumably, a nice home. That IS the American Dream. His failure and inability to get there is internal.
He points to white on black violence and/or police on black violence but it simply is not that common. Want proof? Look at the examples lauded by the press and activists. The ‘victims’ died while committing crimes. If the police attacks on blacks were as widespread and pernicious as Coates seems to think, those events where the ‘victim’ died while commissioning a crime would not be used.
There certainly are exceptions. The cop who shot the Walter Scott in the back while he fled. (Though, technically, even then, he was committing a crime.) And I don’t know what the hell those cops were doing in Cleveland when they killed Tamir Rice. That was terrible police work.
But, Michael Brown? Trayvon Martin? Eric Garner? (For those who object to the inclusion of the last incident, Eric Garner was a very large man. There is no reason to believe that cops would not have treated him any differently had he been white.)
Those incidents were elevated in the public eye because there simply are not enough REAL examples of what Coates decries. Coates’ inability to achieve the American Dream is only in his head.
David Brooks reading Ta-Nehisi Coates...
I thought Brooks's response was good, too. If there's enough common ground to be able to sit down at a table and talk, then most black people, in my admittedly limited experience, will opt to answer yes to his third question and admit that these questions are discussable even by non-blacks. I've run into a couple of people (who are a great deal nearer to TNC's socio-economic position than the folks who live in impoverished circumstances down on Sycamore Street) who have 'denied me standing', though; shrug. One can only do so much.
The only way (and I say that with some trepidation because I'm only speaking for me) Ta-Nehisi Coates anger would be substantially justified would if that anger was directed at baby parts retailer Planned Parenthood.
But apparently and unfortunately that does not appear to be the case.
If he went after Planned Parenthood then I could say... black lives mattered to him.
Perpetual whiner.
Never heard how many immigrants had to sell themselves into bonded indenture (now that was a racket) once they got here to pay for their passage, never visited a Civil War cemetery (Union or Confederate).
It's over. Grow up, get a life, be a man, get yourself a real job.
(which is good advice for Ritmo)
Borrowing a professor Instapundit rhetorical devise, I tweeted...
.@tanehisicoates told me if I voted @MittRomney black bodies would be harvested for spare parts... and he was right ;-) #PlannedParenthood
Identifying yourself as a victim allows you great latitude to ignore responsibility: the responsibility to see truth, to be tolerant, to teach your children in a way that will make them and their world better. It's despicable to justify such a failing out of the smallness of self pity and a hatred you could never rise above yourself. The people you sire and those around them deserve better from you - at the very least they deserve the truth - the whole truth.
Coates' family may have come in chains, but he wasn't in chains. His laborious grousing of what it means to be a black man is another infantile whine about the petty truths of life, which is you are either the neck or the boot that stands on the neck. He has a neck ache. He rejects the American Dream because well, one of his fellow cocksucker traitors currently in office is actively killing it, quitter.
There are perhaps 130,000 Jews living in Germany-- it'd be fascinating to see if there are TNCs there. "There is a fine line between commemorating, remembering, never forgetting and being hamstrung by the weight of history" (Toby Lichtig in the TLS a couple of years ago.) Short version, so far as your point goes, is that there probably are a very few TNCs in Germ
The Planned Parenthood scandal has dropped out of 'the news' altogether, hasn't it, apart from someone at Politico gossiping today about the evil Republican pro-lifers doing something evil-- and yesterday's Cecile Richards's 'apology' wasn't noticed all that many places, either.
(Am glad I discovered Lem's blog; thanks!)
Presciently, Abraham Lincon's letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates is probably the best response there is to this whiner.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
(Am glad I discovered Lem's blog; thanks!)
Thank you for coming and commenting.
Related: "Chattanooga Shooter Marinated In Self-Pity Over Islamophobia"
http://pjmedia.com/blog/chattanooga-shooter-marinated-in-self-pity-over-islamophobia/
This is the inevitable outcome of teaching your children your paranoia.
"There’s this misconception that Islam is a violent religion. Muslims are actually peaceful."
So what religion are all these murders practicing? Was Your brother a Muslim? Was he following his religion? Are the claims correct by ISIS and other terrorist that their action are following Islam? If not, will you say so publicly? Will you denounce the Islam your brother was practicing?
Lem, that was an excellent observation you made @1:56. I think we could stretch the thought even further and suggest that if 'black lives matter' to TNC he would be a conservative/Republican/anything but a socialist democrat, an in, those who have done more harm to black lives than anyone.
"an in" = "as in".
Lem said ...
By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star...
Those generations trapped today are usually trapped in a false history...as Bagoh20 more or less said above.
I no longer know what to say to those who insist on dwelling on the worst of our history and then embellishing it with BS and failing to grasp the progress we have all made. They linger on a point in time as if time never moves on. This is one of the major failings of our schools today...failing to teach history and experienced and written about by those there at the time.
Coates is a great wrighter who says all the wright things.
Bagoh @ 2:10 - very well said.
These are the People of Privilege now. They can fail with impunity and drag other people down with them and you can't say anything or they'll bring you down, too. All hail the massive fail. That's what they teach in school.
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