An impressionistic, personal take on What It Means To Be Black in America Today. Coates is clearly has an incredible gift as a writer, and actually I think that’s part of the problem. This is not a book of sociological facts but rather the phenomenology of blackness. And with that phenomenology comes the attendant problems of seeing the world through the eyes of one person. Coates is an atheist who fixates on the “plunder of the black body” precisely because he cannot countenance any higher reality in which this plunder might be redressed. The arc of history is not long: there is simply no arc, there is no bending towards justice. His fatalism can transmute into nihilism at points (e.g. the famous 9/11 passage). But in a sense it is fitting: this is not a book for you or me, it is a book for his son. And he would be remiss as a father to salve his son’s fear with a Christian hope that he himself does not possess.
I think his voice is an important one to listen to. But I am wary that the people who need to think about these things will fixate solely on the emotive aspects of what Coates is saying to the detriment of the more productive things that can be addressed. It’s comforting in a way, to listen to his words as a kind of bloodletting, because it makes you feel like you are a Good Person just merely for listening to his words. The plunder of the black body: it is an evanescent thing, both nowhere and everywhere at once. Therefore like air you can forget it is even present, it has no materiality in your everyday transactions, save for what you see on the news. Yes, it is slavery, it is redlining, it is Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice and Michael Brown. But what you remember is Coates’s poesy.
Of course he didn’t mean this, but by being so lyrical, personal, and emotive,
Between the World and Me accidentally does I think function as a salve for
the Dreamers, as he would call them, who might feel a tinge of guilt about
their dreaming and their inaction. There is no call for concrete action in this
book, only the projection of pain and suffering into beautiful words. And that
is in itself an important thing! To turn pain into art is a timeless human
activity. But it only goes so far, and it is less about changing the world so
that the pain is ameliorated but rather to express this pain and communicate
it, to make it alive to others. And what beautiful pain, beautiful words, does
Coates wring out of his blackness. And maybe this will inspire action in
others. I am pessimistic: thus the liberal conscience, having read Coates, has
achieved Awareness, and can move on to the next problem with which it can be
Aware.