Toni
Morrison calls this book required reading, and it is. Even if it first
germinated before the many police murders of African American boys and men over
the last year, it could not have entered the cultural scene at a more fateful
moment.
The
book takes the form of a letter from Coates to his son, overflowing with
mingled anger, despair, and love, about the experience of growing up in a
country where our foundational heritage is the ongoing freedom of whites to kill
blacks with impunity. This injury is complemented by the insult of hundreds of
years of rank economic injustice extending back to the origins of our
“exceptional” political experiment, conceived, with due respect for their good
intentions, by slaveholding white men.
To
define whiteness, Coates uses the provocative phrase “people who believe they
are white,” by which I take him to mean that there is a negative part of some
of us that needs to feel superior to, and therefore also fearful of, some
“lower” order. No peak without a
valley. The pain caused by this illusory mis-identity is unfathomable. Nina
Simone wanted to become a classical pianist, but was turned down by the Curtis
Institute of Music for being the wrong color. That she became a jazz and blues artist of astounding
virtuosity did not change how the initial blow echoed outward through her lifelong
experience of American racism, driving her move to Europe and Africa, but finally
driving her raving mad (watch her film bio, “What Happened, Ms. Simone?”).
After
the latest mass shooting in San Bernardino, the African-American president of
the United States spoke from the Oval Office trying to calm the fears of
citizens anxious about the random terror of ISIS. He appealed to our best
tendencies: “We were founded upon a belief in human dignity that no matter who
you are or where you come from or what you look like or what religion you
practice, you are equal in the eyes of God and equal in the eyes of the law.”
While acknowledging
the reality of terrorism, he cautioned against separating Muslims and
non-Muslims into a stereotypical “us and them.” Because “us and them” sadly
forms a big chunk of our only partly-acknowledged heritage, Obama was
immediately attacked by presidential candidates of the opposing party with the
fear-mongering version of our national identity—our superiority over some
“lower” order, now a Muslim “other” as well as a black “other.”
The
violence of this ongoing exceptionalism, built upon so much insufficiently
processed history, continues to assume grotesque forms: the Senate cannot even
pass a bill forbidding people on terrorist watch-lists from buying weapons,
because the National Rifle Association is so powerful. What are the roots, if
not raw fear of the “other,” of this white obsession with the Second Amendment?
At
my Ivy League college fifty years ago, the hundred or so young white men with
whom I shared meals were served by a phalanx of young black men in white coats.
Did we speak a friendly word to them? Did we see them as people with the same
potentialities as ourselves? We did not.
Now
I have become part of a family where I have four mixed-race adoptive
grandchildren. My love for them is just as fierce and fearful as Ta-Hehisi
Coates’s for his son. Suddenly it is of more than academic interest that the
oldest of my four is approaching the adolescent moment when he will start to
look dangerous to the police.
The
knotted heritage of our nation cannot be loosed by the descendents of slaves
who endured it and endure it still. Instead the knot must be newly owned by those
who have too long disowned it: can we who think we are white emerge from the dreamy
pretension of our effortlessly assumed privilege? Can we admit that our
perverted form of exceptionalism has cut a swath of destruction not only through
our national history but also through such diverse haunts of otherness as
Vietnam and Iraq?
Those
who think they are white came wherever they are now, by free migration not by
slave ships, out of the common pool of all humans from the savannas of Africa.
In that shared origin story may reside some hope of post-racial—or
post-religious for that matter—interrelationship among equals. Meanwhile we have
Coates’s authentic cry of the heart from which to learn and grow.
