I'm taking a class this fall through the University of MN.
This is my first reflection on Part 1 of Ta-Nehisi's Coates bestseller, Between the World and Me. I highly recommend this book. A classmate recommended that I listen to the audiobook, read aloud by the author. I love listening to memoir read aloud by the author. So, when class is over and I have opportunity to savor a good listen, I will.
This text was beautifully written and yet brutal to read. Coates took me under water and held my head there forcing me to look at the bottom of that metaphorical iceberg that we educators like to talk about in our PLC, SIT, IEP and 504 meetings when we attempt to address race and all that we think we know. After coming out of the water and gulping for air, I feel as though I am beginning to understand just how much I do not know about being a black person in these United States of America.
I read this text as a white woman and as a Latina. I am both, you see. However, my lived experience has been mostly in the white world, so my white woman self tends to be the dominant one in this body. On p. 11 the author describes an interview, where the interviewer showed him a photo of a white police officer hugging it out with a black boy. Then she asked him about hope. He felt like he had failed. Why? I asked myself. We can’t live without hope. Don’t we want little black boys and girls holding hands with little white boys and girls, and by extension with adults? Aren’t we striving for positive relationships between police officers and the people they are charged with protecting? What is wrong with photos that give us warm fuzzies?
I had to go back and reread. What I found hidden from me in the text (not hidden by the author, hidden by my own constructs and perceptions) were the details. The photo, this “widely shared” photo depicted a crying black boy being consoled by a white officer. The subtext of this photo is the story that is continually fed to Americans in our popular culture: a submissive person of color being cared for by a privileged white person. I see it now everywhere I look and I missed it here on my first read. This makes me wonder just how often I am missing it. The story is subversive, but it’s in our faces, which is why we don’t see what it is doing to us white people. This story is our normal. It keeps our privilege in place by keeping one group up and the other down, and we white people don’t even see it. We just feel the warm fuzzies and move on.
Black History month is the perfect example of how we feed this narrative to our students in the educational system. It is a systemic way to make ourselves feel good, because we, the teachers, are meeting the needs of our black students by sharing their stories. But, which stories are we sharing? Why are we only sharing Black stories in February? For that matter, why are we only sharing Latino stories in September? When are we sharing the stories of our Indigenous people, Muslim people, Asian people? Don’t they all make up our population? But, I digress. Young Coates noticed that the story being told in schools each February was one where the narrator was not Black. The protagonists, “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 firehoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets” (32). He began to question why Black heroes were nonviolent. When he writes, “I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality...The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send out out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?” (32). This is all playing out right in front of us every day. Trevor Noah recently posed the question, When is it ok for black people to protest? He gave example after example of lack protest in different scenarios and it was never ok. While the segment was meant to be funny, it nailed some uncomfortable truths.
There is a segment of our population that is very vocal when they feel their power, their culture is threatened. Then there are those of us who know better, and yet see the picture of the white police officer hugging a black child and get stuck in feeling the warm fuzzies. We think we are all going to be ok if we can just hug it out. This is a lie we tell ourselves because we like feeling good and it is easier to believe the lie than it is to dig into very uncomfortable areas of our shared history and acknowledge that our very culture was founded on extreme violence. Then we need to name how the consequences of this history play out today. Naming things is hard. It makes them real. Reality is not pretty or warm or fuzzy or comfortable.
Then, there is another image. The one of the black boy who pulled a gun on young Coates. The idea that a people might inflict violence on one another is foreign to those who live in comfort and with privilege. It gives a reason to stay separate because those people live in dangerous parts of town. That a group of people, … “would break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies (22) is foreign. There was some black on black violence at the SLP High School last year right after the election. This had nothing to do with the political climate, in the eyes of some, because they (the Black students) were fighting one another. I heard these comments. My own children had questions about this. Coates describes the answer perfectly. After generations of having no power, the need to revel in the might of one’s body has to be fulfilled.
I know that I made several sweeping generalizations here. And yet, they are based on truths that I have witnessed. I did not enjoy reading this book, yet I couldn’t put it down. Coates wrote poetically about things that made me uncomfortable. I don’t like discomfort. I don’t like discord. I am learning, though, that unless I go underwater to look at all that is underneath the surface, I will not grow as a human being. I will not have the information nor the tools needed to make my world a good place for everyone.
