“Live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream”, from the book by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Achille Mbembe (and many others) has reflected plenty on this kind of belief that has underpinned inequality between people over the centuries, and from which it doesn’t seem easy to break free: race. Violence, cruelty, slavery, the slave trade, colonialism, apartheid, the dead with no graves. The great night of Black culture’s history. Despite the camouflage maneuvers and the ever-so-deceptive universal claim that we are colorblind, racism returns on a daily basis. Non-Whites continue, today as in the past, to be thought of, remade and confined to their mysterious origins as an absence.
In his book, Critique of Black Reason, the author asks: What is the Black man? “He is the one (or the thing) that one sees when one sees nothing, when one understands nothing, and, above all, when one wishes to understand nothing.” Without memory, no democracy can be developed or even exist. Hence the importance of reconstructing the history of Black people’s reduction: a fabrication, an imaginary account of inferiority that has legitimized systematic violence since antiquity, peaking with the establishment of the colonial enterprise. At the same time, several authors approach Black issues through the search for a sense of community, a declaration of identity, based on denunciation and counter-narratives of resistance, which is equally imaginary and contradictory.
On the subject of the murder of yet another Black body in the US, George Floyd, it seems appropriate to recall the book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, published by Spiegel & Grau in 2015. At the time, journalist Isabel Coutinho framed it within the current political discourse, referring to the Black Lives Matter movement. It was created following the deaths of Black people in the US, which were becoming more visible, symbolic and would mobilize widespread indignation. Deaths resulting from blind police violence but also carried out by civilians who justified them as protection and self-defense.
Ta-Nehisi Coates enjoyed popularity as a commenter and journalist (for the cultural magazine Boston Atlantic). The title Between the World and Me (2015) was taken from a poem by Richard Wright (1908-1960), an American writer and Black rights activist. Ta-Nehisi is an Egyptian name given to him by his father which can be translated as Nubia or “Land of the Black”.
The book tells the story of Prince Jones, Coates’ classmate at Howard University, a brilliant student who managed to break through the bubble of what would be expected for a person of his racial and social status. Jones was murdered in 2000 in Virginia by a police officer from Prince George’s County (PG). Located just outside Washington DC, the PG neighborhood, by which it is known, has become one of the most violent and brutal in the United States, a “great enclave of black people”, as the author describes it. “Its residents had the same homes, with the same backyards, with the same bathrooms” that you saw on television, “They were black people who elected their own politicians, but these politicians, I learned, superintended a police force as vicious as any in America.”
Coates recounts how he lost his innocence as a young history student at university when his colleague was murdered and the crime, committed by a policeman (who was also Black), went unpunished. This event triggered a silent revolt in him that his 15-year-old son Samori, to whom he writes a letter, would later feel when history repeated itself. In 2014, the policeman who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, would remain equally unpunished, and yet another case of police impunity would be shelved. Any resemblance to what happens daily in our peripheries, where much of the population is of African descent, is no coincidence.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book describes what it’s like to be Black, born in West Baltimore in 1975, growing up exposed to guns, crack, rape, and persistent fear (of police, family, neighborhood, future). The book marks two deaths perceived by two generations, but it could have gone much further back and forth. Because this is a story with no beginning and, unfortunately, no end in sight, in which oppression and fear are carried out again and again - in a continuous line of times and places - Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, Europe, each with their own histories and political agendas.
This letter from a father to his son, who nevertheless grew up with different references, shows this continuity (the son was lucky enough to see two terms of a Black president, an example to the African American community in terms of representation and ambition). United by fear and anger, they underpin the idea of an imagined community, since the Black body demolishes any theory or story of personal success (studies, money, status) as long as it’s marked by discrimination.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The author explains his purpose, satirizing the idea of the American Dream and the myth of progress: “The question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself.” Ta-Nehisi Coates researched myths and contradictory stories, when he woke up desiring to counter the mystery and invisibility of his “community,” enthused by countless authors and perspectives, various factions, pursuing an idea of dignity and moral in a country that traditionally subjugates being Black. He realized that he was linked to a group of people who “suffered under the weight of the Dream”, and what united them were “all the beautiful things, all the language and mannerisms, all the food and music, all the literature and philosophy, all the common language that they fashioned like diamonds under the weight of the Dream.”
This text by Coates remains central to the discussion about what it means to be Black in America, yesterday and today. It challenges our understanding of the complexity of a country that, on one hand, is held up as an example of the socio-economic rise of African Americans, yet on the other, experiences violence against Black people on a daily basis. Coates elaborates on the way politicians and society deal with racism, fortunately with more media coverage (in the US and around the world), but which, despite this visibility, still occurs in the form of random crimes - as George Floyd’s asphyxiation brutally reveals. Common sense’s propensity to see the Black population as a whole as more aggressive and dangerous is still very indignant.
His writing draws on the literary heritage of the writer and activist James Baldwin (1924-1987) – a parallel even reiterated by the writer Toni Morrison – in particular the essay My Dungeon Shook - Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation (1963), in which Baldwin advises his 15-year-old nephew not to adjust to the White conception of the world which reserves a limited future for him. “You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason….Please try to be clear, dear James, about the reality which lies behind the word acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you.” Baldwin recalls the ideology of Malcolm X, but without the religious faith held by the founder of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, another Black body assassinated in New York in 1965.
Alongside Baldwin’s legacy, there are also other authors who have affirmed Black humanity, such as Ida B Wells (American journalist and sociologist, 1862-1931), W. Du Bois (sociologist, historian and Black rights activist, 1868-1963), Luther King, Malcolm X, Audre Lourde, and so many names from the African American literary tradition who have expressed frustration and anger.
The autobiographical and confessional side, written as both chronicle and essay, helps us see the world through his eyes, from the place where he grew up, the pains and hesitations that haunted him. The narration is close to a storyteller’s orality, and to the tradition of personal testimony in which the first person becomes stronger through lived and personal experience. It’s a political implication, like the records of Kendrick Lamar, Kara Walker or Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
For the author, America’s central problem is still racial. The nation’s progress towards racial equality has been halted by White reaction and apathy, which has led to a tense moral reckoning. “America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.” To be White is to forget oneself and invent the other. This idea of superiority can be linked to the idea of empire which, like “like all empires of humans, are built on the destruction of the body.” In order to gain and occupy territories, empires “stain their nobility, to make them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.” And in this, it is not faith that solves anything, “And I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us— Christians, Muslims, atheists—lived in this fear of this truth. Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional.”
Coates explains his fragility to a son who is discovering the tragic tradition and the weight of his heritage. He is pessimistic when he can only glimpse a harsh truth in his son’s present and the generations to come: the vulnerability of growing up Black in the USA, the fear inscribed in the skin of experience. There’s something untranslatable about this, but it is naturalized by children and teenagers, and it makes them wade through dangerous mires (physically, mentally and emotionally). It makes them incorporate Blackness (on the positive side, as a tool for struggle) but also the logic of White supremacy and the internalized racism that Fanon diagnosed so well. And the most frightening thing is that this prison traps infinite stories, from the distant past to the present day.
The book also questions the neoliberal project that has shifted the analysis of inequality from economic exploitation processes to the field of psychological and moral behavior. It asks how does race, as a discourse that legitimizes difference, work in neoliberalism? One of the proposed approaches is to guarantee fair and equitable access to the opportunities and goods that the market offers and, in this sense, to strengthen the fight wherever discrimination occurs. But we know that justice isn’t ideal and hasn’t helped to determine who is or isn’t worthy of a dignified life. If Black people’s lives in America are shaped by the effects of psychic and physical violence on their daily experience, then it cannot be reduced to pain.
What I treasure most about this book is precisely the wound of racism as something always present and the sharpness of Coates’ description, revealing the illusion of the Dream, rejecting the American myths that perpetuate white supremacy and its immense constraints, yet opening the possibility of imagining a new country.
What can be done? This book asks. We can question and fight. His trip to Howard University, which he calls Mecca, makes him question the world around him. And he explains to his son that fighting is the only thing he can pass on to him. Struggle is what you can control, albeit a strange form of control. Black people can control their place in the battle without knowing if someday they may win. But even though they have to manage and live with countless tensions and justifications on a daily basis, it’s not worth encouraging despair. Things will have to change.
A short biographical note on the author. His father, William Paul Coates, is the founder of Black Classic Press, a publishing house focusing on Black life and significant authors and books about people of African descent. His mother, Cheryl Waters, was the family’s financial support and encouraged little Coates to write from an early age. Thus, he grew up in an environment which allowed for social advancement. This upbringing helped him reflect on the Black condition beyond the narrow classist reading, yet discrimination is still there.
