Between the World and Me

I will confess right away: I am afraid to write a complete and truthful review of Coates's Between the World and Me. I will begin easily enough. Coates has written an important and disturbing book, one which I am glad to have read and which I think (maybe) all Americans should read. It will and should be read for decades to come. Maybe it will become part of the conversation that leads to a solution to our national disease and horror.

There, that wasn't difficult. But now it becomes not so easy. As a moderately-well-educated, somewhat left-of-center, well-intentioned male person who thinks I am white, I understand that it is not legal for me to criticise Coates. I understand that I am expected to squee and bubble about how TNC is my favorite author of all time and I want to have his babies Oh My God! (Full disclosure: I come to Coates's book with built-in prejudices, not because of anything about him, but because of his gushing adoring fans. Gushing adoring fans generally give me hives. That is why I never got into Apple products. I already have a God; I don't really need Steve Jobs to fill that rôle.)

So let me just get it out in the open. The man's writing sometimes annoys me to no end. “Mr. Coates,” I want to say to him, “I hate to tell you, but I'm just not all that interested in your ‘black body,' beautiful and sacred though it may be.” I understand that he is making a point, and I think I understand his intended meaning, but after the tenth or twentieth repetition I was desperate for him to just drop it. Write “me” or “him” or “them” or “pickled purple armadillo snout” – anything but “black body” one more time.

The repetition was annoying, but more importantly, it obscures what might be a serious philosohical naïveté. Coates is a vocal and thorough-going materialist, repudiating “magic” and any such nonsense as a “soul.” The entirety of a person's identity, in his philosophy, is the physical. What unaware people would call the ‘mind' or ‘soul' is only chemicals and electricity. Fair enough. This is certainly the prevailing philosophy among moderately-or-more-educated, left-of-center Americans, and it may very possibly be true. But, if it be true, or to a person who believes it to be true, there is no “person” to “have” a body. The body is all there is to the “person.” So I wanted to beg Coates several times, “Please stop talking about yourself as if you have a body. Since your ‘black body' is all there is to you, to your son, to all those beautiful bodies at The Mecca, please use that construction one time and then just say ‘me' or ‘him' or ‘them.' You are not a ‘person with a black body,' by your philosophy. You are a black body; only that and nothing more. Be aware and consistent. And please be less repetitious.”

I am grateful that Coates allows me to be a “person” who thinks he is white. I am happy to be a person, not only a body, but i think he did not mean it as a kindness. It is obvious that I am the enemy and nothing more.

He emphasizes that people who think they are white are no group, no tribe, and have no meaningful identity or cultural claims other than as oppressor, but black bodies form a tribe, no matter how disparate. He at least implies that people who think they are white do not get credit for achievements by other people who they think to be white, but black bodies seem to get credit for the accomplishments of the global tribe of black bodies. I find it difficult to take this seriously.

It seems that he considers people who think they are white to be essentially different beings than black bodies, almost like separate species. Since I, a person who believes myself to be white, know myself to be human, I am left wondering what black bodies are if they are something essentially different. I turn aside from this line of thought as being utterly repulsive, but it seems to be the only path Coates wants to leave open to me.

Coates bears within his black body many generations of reasonable anger and fear. I understand that, and I read him with consideration for it, but I believe that only catastrophe can come as a result of speaking of people who think they are white and of black bodies as essentially different. Destruction of every body is the only outcome I can imagine.

[Deep sigh. Now what? I have so much to say, positive and negative. I think I will cut it short, but first this...]

I am gay. My entire life people have said about me, “You're really straight, but you've chosen to live a homosexual lifestyle.” (What does that even mean?) “You were molested by a man when you were young. You don't remember because you have repressed the memory.” I have been told “Since you can't reproduce more of your kind, you want to recruit our sons to be like you.”

All my life people and black bodies have chosen to pretend they know my thoughts, my motives. They have presumed to treat me as an interchangeable member of the class “Queers,” sub-class “Faggots.” They have chosen to do that, and I have chosen to call them on it.

I am thinking of the escalator incident, when the woman who thinks she is white rudely moves his son out of the way. That was surely inexcusable and she needed to be called on it. I think maybe it makes the world a better place when people get called on their rudeness. But Coates then puts thoughts into her head, ascribes motives to her, and he does so with a high degree of confidence. There is no “perhaps.” He thinks he knows. He calls her a racist and declares her motive to be racist, and he preëmtively denies her the chance of self-defense. Maybe she is a racist. Probably she is. Most people who think they are white and quite a few black bodies do harbor some anti-black racism–this is scientifically provable and a really sad thing. But neither Mr. Coates nor I know. And even if his guess about her racism is correct, he does not know her motive in that particular instance. He denies her full humanity and tosses her into a group, knowing nothing about her thoughts or motives. He treats her much the same way straight people treat queers. He treats her in much the same way people who think they are white treat black bodies.

And here is the problem I have with this incident. The one time I witnessed something similar it was a black body who picked up a young girl who thought she was white. The black body, a man, lifted her off the ground by a couple of inches and moved her two feet to the right so he could pass her by. I did not kick him out of the library for the day, but maybe I should have. Given his history, if he had been a person who thought of himself as white I might have done so. In fact, I probably would have.

So what to make of that? The rude woman who thinks she is white is reduced to a representative of an ongoing oppression of black bodies, but what about the rude black body? Unless we are to treat them as separate species, we must give each the honor of being respected as an individual, with unknown thoughts and desires and motives.

Mr. Coates's fear and anger are reasonable and justified. But if that is all there is, and if that fear and anger dehumanize people who think they are white and even other black bodies (the way Coates dehumanizes the cop who killed Prince and all the 9/11 first responders) then I think it is Doom for all of us. Coates gives us nothing but fear and anger, and he uses those emotions, legitimate though they are, to destroy the humanity of almost everybody.