David Brooks: Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White

[Ikhide]

 

Dear Ta-Nehisi Coates,

The last year has been an education for white people. There has been a depth, power and richness to the African-American conversation about Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings that has been humbling and instructive.

Your new book, “Between the World and Me,” is a great and searing contribution to this public education. It is a mind-altering account of the black male experience. Every conscientious American should read it.

There is a pervasive physicality to your memoir — the elemental vulnerability of living in a black body in America. Outside African-American nightclubs, you write, “black people controlled nothing, least of all the fate of their bodies, which could be commandeered by the police; which could be erased by the guns, which were so profligate; which could be raped, beaten, jailed.”

Written as a letter to your son, you talk about the effects of pervasive fear. “When I was your age the only people I knew were black and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid.”

But the disturbing challenge of your book is your rejection of the American dream. My ancestors chose to come here. For them, America was the antidote to the crushing restrictiveness of European life, to the pogroms. For them, the American dream was an uplifting spiritual creed that offered dignity, the chance to rise.

- David Brooks

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/07/17/opinion/listening-to-ta-nehisi-coates-while-white.html?referrer&_r=2

- Ikhide

 

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[kenneth harrow]

here is the rest of brooks's column.

Your ancestors came in chains. In your book the dream of the comfortable suburban life is a “fairy tale.” For you, slavery is the original American sin, from which there is no redemption. America is Egypt without the possibility of the Exodus. African-American men are caught in a crushing logic, determined by the past, from which there is no escape.

You write to your son, “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.” The innocent world of the dream is actually built on the broken bodies of those kept down below.

If there were no black bodies to oppress, the affluent Dreamers “would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism.”

Your definition of “white” is complicated. But you write “ ‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining).” In what is bound to be the most quoted passage from the book, you write that you watched the smoldering towers of 9/11 with a cold heart. At the time you felt the police and firefighters who died “were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

You obviously do not mean that literally today (sometimes in your phrasing you seem determined to be misunderstood). You are illustrating the perspective born of the rage “that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.”

I read this all like a slap and a revelation. I suppose the first obligation is to sit with it, to make sure the testimony is respected and sinks in. But I have to ask, Am I displaying my privilege if I disagree? Is my job just to respect your experience and accept your conclusions? Does a white person have standing to respond?

A facebook friend of mine posted this column, and the responses, including west's, it has occasioned.
i wrote on his page the following:
hey david, i enjoyed reading brooks's column, and didn't feel like punching him in the face afterwards. brooks is a centrist republican, and he convinced me he made a decent effort to read a book whole racial politics, and social politics, are relatively far from his own. other republican jerks would not have taken coates's text seriously, reflected on it, much less be moved by it. Brooks felt compelled to respond to it in a way that conveyed his divergent views. i really disagree with the response that says, brooks, i want to punch you in the face for giving your own take. i want it to be possible for people to talk to each other across difference. coates spoke. brooks responded. next you or i will respond, and than another after us. there is speaking that involves listening and disagreeing, and listening that refuses to consider the other's view. i thought brooks did listen. it's a lot, for me, that he did so. it's a place of beginning, i would hope; not a place of a final word. one last thing: brooks wound up with his own position--validating the american dream. it was a statement i believe we would strongly contest. but it was part of a dialogue, not a final word. i could imagine coates or others carrying on the dialogue, which i want to see happen.in a way, brooks was making that possible.

all of this is really to return to some of my past exchanges with kwame zulu shabazz where i felt urgently the desire to be able to dialogue with him over issues where we might be in disagreement. i believe in the dialogue, and in this space as a place where it is possible.
no doubt, we can do better than brooks and his interlocutors since we are not world-famous people writing columns to the millions, but talking amongst ourselves. we needn't agree, just talk.

ken

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-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
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