Tag: prince jones

Black Lives Matter 2

Last weekend ushered in our country’s 245th year of independence from Britain. “Independence” and “Freedom” are two of our country’s rallying cries (as well as the names of the two space shuttles that nuked that earth-killing meteor in the Bruce Willis classic Armageddon.) Well, America is still independent of foreign rule, but is it free? Was it ever, or has that just been a dream?

Like many of my tribe struggling to fully understand the Black Lives Matter movement and the abuses perpetrated on Americans of color that are excused or ignored, I reached for a book. Several sources suggested Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015 Random House), so I started with that. I’m glad I did—this is easily the best book I’ve read on any subject in a long time.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a MacArthur Fellow and a Pulitzer-nominated writer. He’s a sometime contributer to the Washington Post, the Atlantic and the NY Times, and my friend Jon E. reports he’s also the writer of the Black Panther graphic novels.

I didn’t know that he was also a poet, but I thought he must be as soon as I started reading his book. His command of the language, and his care with every word he uses, made me think of Margaret Atwood. I was hooked from the first page.

Between the World and Me is an exploration of Coates’s world as a black man in America, written as an extended letter to his son Samori. The book is thoughtful, deeply personal, and true. By true, I don’t mean this is a history or objective analysis of the black American experience (although it is full of references to real, well-known events that revolved around Coates in his life). It is Coates’s own story of his experiences and beliefs, and it is made powerful by the effort he makes to speak only the truth as he knows it to his son.

A central theme of the book is the systematic authorized brutality on black men and women in this country by police and others. The title refers to the separation he and his fellow black Americans feel from the “real world” of the American Dream. The anecdotes he tells of casual or planned violence done to black men and women start when he was a child in Baltimore in the 1980’s, and continue up to the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown in the 2010’s. It was chilling to read these stories, and realize how little has changed in forty years.

Coates’s thesis is that not only is this brutality accepted or ignored by most of those living the American Dream; it is that the American Dream itself requires this brutality in order to exist. His struggles with the American Dream, first to reach for it, then to build a better alternative to it, and finally to transcend it, form the story arc, and his message to his son is that he, too, must find a way to look beyond any dream and understand the reality of his life.

Between the World and Me has won several awards, including the National Book Award in 2016. It was not without critics, including some that found it too pessimistic, ignoring the progress that had been made (this book was released in the sixth year of Obama’s presidency). But I think those critics forgot that the book was his own story, not the country’s. And in this post-Obama world, his more fatalistic view of black people’s “progress” seems to have worn better than his critics’.

I’ve written enough about this great book. I should let the author speak for himself.

On police reform in 2015:

At this moment the phrase “police reform” has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people.

On the pervasiveness of sanctioned violence and murder in the American Dream:

[My mother] knew that the galaxy itself could kill me…. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of “race,” imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.

On the harm that the American Dream causes even to those privileged to enjoy its benefits:

The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.

And on his message to his son:

I have never asked how you became personally aware of the distance [between black men and women, and the world of the American Dream]. Was it Mike Brown? I don’t think I want to know. But I know that it has happened to you already, that you have deduced that you are privileged and yet still different from other privileged children, because you are the bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country. What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility. It is your responsibility because you are surrounded by the Dreamers. It has nothing to do with how you wear your pants or how you style your hair. The breach is as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows. The breach allows for the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers, the enslaved from the enslavers, sharecroppers from landholders, cannibals from food. . .

Do not accept the lie. Do not drink from poison. The same hands that drew red lines around the life of Prince Jones drew red lines around the ghetto. — I did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not want you forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness.

Thanks for listening,
Dorn
July 6, 2020

BLACK LIVES MATTER