Dec/Jan TI Book Club - Between the World and Me

Huzzah!

This was such a sad and lyrical book. And important, of course.

I'll have to get my copy out and look over my highlights and notes again, but I do remember what struck me most was him talking about how his body is not fully his own: it can be destroyed by those who oppress him essentially at will and far too often with no real repercussion. I felt guilty making mental comparisons because his struggle is very obviously not mine, but it reminded me of how I often feel as a woman. That my body doesn't fully belong to me and society finds all kind of ways to remind me of that. 

I also felt sad reading the bit about how he doesn't want white people to read it just to feel like they're being "good" white people, because I've definitely seen people doing just that. 

I'm psyched we picked this! I've been wanting to read it for a while, because I'm a good white person.

Where was this bit? I didn't see it. 

I finished this over the weekend and I thought it was incredible. Every generation ought to have a core text about the state of racism; this seems like it's probably ours. (Lots of comparisons made to James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, which might be the core text of a couple generations ago. Maybe "Straight Outta Compton" was the last generation's?)

I was thinking about this book over the weekend as a friend and I hopped a fence to explore some derelict buildings in Brooklyn. We skulked around and had a great time. There's an insignificant example of my privilege, right? Black people can't just hop fences and skulk around. Black people get shot for skulking.

I actually read this over a month ago, but I've been really lazy about getting around to laying out my thoughts on it.  So anyway.

I thought it was excellent.  Ta-Nehisi Coates is a great writer, and some of his turns of phrase alone made the book a worthwhile read.  Like others on this thread have said, I certainly don't personally know the kind of fear that Coates has grown up with, but the way that he relates his personal experiences does give one an inkling of what it's like, such that any person possessing empathy ought to recognize the injustice of institutionalized racism after reading the book if they didn't already.  However, I think a lot of the people who deny that the US is still a racist society lack empathy in any truly comprehensive sense of the word.  So, in my opinion, one of the most powerful points that Coates makes is for those who, like me, already believed that institutionalized racism exists.  

That moment is when Coates writes about his son's reaction to the decision not to charge Michael Brown's killer with a crime.  On one level, it demonstrates the effects that racism have on a child who is living in relative economic security compared with the teenage Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the author naturally expresses heartfelt sympathy to his son's reaction.  This is well-executed and quite succinctly helps to counter inevitable claims of "Come on, there's poor white people too and what about wealthy black people" objections that legions of racist idiots will surely make.  But Coates also notes that he didn't find the verdict to be at all shocking, as his own personal experiences and reading of history have taught him that the incident is unremarkable in the context of nearly four centuries of unremitting institutionalized racism directed against black people in this country.  And I think that's a really important thing to stress in a country where racism is often presented as being merely things like slavery, segregation, or calling someone the n-word, which, with the benefit of hindsight are all obviously abhorrent to the average American today, which allows people to dismiss racism as the sort of thing that only a crazy fringe of white supremacists engage in, which gives people an excuse to lose their fucking shit whenever someone accuses them of racism for doing or saying or believing basically any racist thing that clears the incredibly low bar of being more subtle than calling a black person the n-word to their face.  I was already aware of the fact that people ignore the racist parts of America's history, but I think Coates' lack of shock at all the highly publicized racist killings of black people by police officers helped make me realize that I shouldn't really be shocked to hear about these incidents, either, and that expressing shock is, if anything, counterproductive to creating the kind of culture that can make serious strides at reversing racism.  Additionally, I like the way that Coates encourages readers to look at the big picture, and view these sorts of atrocities in the context of history, rather than as isolated incidents of a cop just randomly deciding to murder a black person.