September 18-24, 2020

In honor of Juneteenth 2020, I've committed to educating myself on systemic racism, discrimination, and bias. Every day from June 19, 2020 to June 18, 2021, I will read an article or book chapter, listen to a podcast, watch a movie or documentary, view a webinar, or do something substantive to educate myself in these areas. As part of that commitment, I will post to this blog each Friday with a list of what I've done over the past week as well as any pertinent thoughts or reflections.

Today's post covers the week of September 18-24, 2020.

 

Between the World and Me

This week's post has a single entry - the book Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It is written as a letter between Coates and his 15-year-old son Samori. Coates was raised in West Baltimore, attended Howard University, and currently lives in New York where he writes for The Atlantic. I am still processing much of what I read in the book - at different times while reading his letter, I felt anger, sadness, and hope. But mostly, I was left feeling even more curious about Coates, his perspective and his experiences. I imagine I will read more from him throughout my journey.

 

Here are a few passages from the book that I found moving or interesting:

 

"Americans believe in the reality of 'race' as a defined, indubitable feature of our natural world ... Race is the child of racism, not the father."

 

"I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard."

 

"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 us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?"

 

"Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body."

 

"That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being 'politically conscious' - as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as a ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty."

"My only Mecca was, is, and shall always be Howard University."

"The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books."

"It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own special Dream but would break all the dreams."

"Perhaps there had been other bodies, mocked, terrorized, and insecure. Perhaps the Irish too had once lost their bodies. Perhaps being named 'black' had nothing to do with this; perhaps being named 'black' was just someone's name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah."

"There was more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in the schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world."

"Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone."

"I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you."

"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. I resolved to hide nothing from you."

"The mother of the murdered boy rose, turned to you, and said, 'You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid to be you."

 

"... 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."

 

"We have made something down here. We have taken the one-drop rules of Dreamers and flipped them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people."

 

"I do not believe we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name."