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227 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
He went back to Baldwin, who posed the great paradox that would haunt him to the end: Who among us would integrate into a burning house?Where I come from, the white public has an extraordinary penchant for stealing the movement, language, all the etcs of a people you could ever imagine, from the black public. A word will come into a circle of white friends to use and lose and abuse, a segment of communication dehumanized as "slang" that will never be whole so long as it is spoken by those who aren't black. White pop stars want the dreadlocks and the body type and the lips and voice and skin, but god forbid they risk said oranged up skin in the ongoing political mutilation that is misogynoir. This book's going on a decade old and filled to the brim with what Buzzfeed and co. like to take and bleach and present to the majority white audience as brand spanking new, never before seen cool and hip and catchy except, of course, in the communities you're stealing it from. The communities you pressure cook just enough to hold them tight and suck up what squeezes out.
She knew that I had no idea how close I was, would always be, to the edge, how easily boys like me were erased in absurd, impractical ways.Where I come from, it took me two decades and counting to recognize the mainstream as poison and the law as propaganda. The simple fact of the matter is, when you're not target practice from day one, it's a lot easier to devote your learning curve to the exigencies of upper middle class ideologies and render social justice a hobby. A fad. You take the deadbeat black fathers in stride without looking at the deadbeat white fathers who keep killing them. You don't contest the concept of the angry black woman or the sizeable presence of white supremacists in US first wave feminism. When you have that as a possible existence, your values will be different, your instincts will be different, hell, you'll have an easier time understanding the emotive motivations of dead people from across the ocean than those of the living right next door.
Among the Conscious, a man is only worth his latest reading. Each page pulled you farther out of slumber, and among the most enlightened it was not uncommon to hear an entire conversation composed of footnotes.Ta-Nehisi Coates is a reader. It shows as much in the books he references as the diction he spools, one word in ten of minimal familiarity yet intriguing engagement, the breed of mix usually evoked by aged literature or contemporary in translation. The Hobbit style map of Old Baltimore is a good indication of what is to come: a daydreamer fed on bloodshed both fantastical and not, where honor could very well be the talk of Tybalt and Mercutio had both come from a background that reeks of systematic enslavement and more than a little genocide. This is not a life that takes anything for granted: not Christian morals, not familial structure, not members of a community that have survived to the age of eighteen and beyond. This is not an education that'll get you that A or that pass or that four point oh, which makes the achievement of such standardized bullshit of credentials that much more profound.
All the truly living, at least once, are born again.I still don't feel the need to pick up Between the World and Me anytime soon, but that's alright. Coates is good, but I already got his less modern kind in Native Son, and a 21st century account of anti-blackness in the US that doesn't touch on black women issues or black LGBT issues or black mental illness issues to a serious extent can only go so far. The public's reception of him still gives me hope, though. Memoirs outside the white straight and narrow are always a gift.
"The greater world was obsessed over challenger... But we were another country, fraying at the seams."Most of Coates' challenges were navigating the violence of his neighborhood while also being smarter than his schooling (he would often get bored and simply not do the work.) He is three years older than me but he describes competing in the Olympics of the Mind, so I like to think of us on opposite sides of the country, practicing for those games. Between the World and Me talks about his Howard University ("Mecca") years, but this book shows how amazing it is that he even got in.
To be Conscious Man was more than just the digestion of obscure books that happen to favor your side. It was a feeling, an ingrained sense that something major in our lives had gone wrong. My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot. (p. 54)His father's advice after Coates knocked into a teacher (leading to a school suspension):
Son, you’re growing into a big man. You’re going to have to be more conscious of yourself. You are not a mean kid, but because of your size you will do things that will be seen as a threat. You need to be conscious especially around white people. You are big, and you are a young black man. You need to be careful about what you do and what you say. (pp. 172-173)Or,
We are the walking lowest rung, and all that stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit. We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us (p. 177)Young blacks, older blacks, will likely read this memoir very differently than I did. I had difficulty with the language and referents of his first chapter, as this old, white woman is not really Coates' target audience. By Chapter 2, I was able to read and understand his poetic language better. A young, Conscious black would be able to decode Beautiful Struggle more fully and more rapidly than I did.