David Brooks: Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White

[summer]

NY Times

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.



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?

If I do have standing, I find the causation between the legacy of lynching and some guy’s decision to commit a crime inadequate to the complexity of most individual choices.



I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America.



In your anger at the tone of innocence some people adopt to describe the American dream, you reject the dream itself as flimflam. But a dream sullied is not a lie. The American dream of equal opportunity, social mobility and ever more perfect democracy cherishes the future more than the past. It abandons old wrongs and transcends old sins for the sake of a better tomorrow.



This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.



Maybe you will find my reactions irksome. Maybe the right white response is just silence for a change. In any case, you’ve filled my ears unforgettably.

[ESF]

I started reading this and thought, "huh, am I going to become a David Brooks fan now?"

Then I finished and it's back to the status quo.

Sorry, David. You are still a tool.

[LoveTrains]

I posted it in the other thread about 6 hours ago but I didn't get any bites.

ETA: I got a like from sfy. 
pandce.proboards.com/thread/462476/nehisi-coates-away-racial-slurs?page=2

David Brooks is still an asshole. In other news, the sky is blue. 

[ttt]

I got to the end and was like, wait, where's the rest? Surely that can't be the whole thing? Where's the part where he explains why he thinks the American dream isn't a lie? 

His entire argument seems to be "don't be a Debbie Downer."

[zoegirltx]

Jul 17, 2015 15:01:02 GMT -5 summer said:

NY Times

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.

See....when it starts like this, its assuming that many (some, any???) Americans are actually having race conversations.  And that there are more than a handful of "conscientious" Americans...
The rest is dribble.

[cookiemdough]

"By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future."

So basically let's bury our heads in the sand so the American Dream can live on?

[LadySusan]

Jul 17, 2015 15:04:16 GMT -5 ESF said:

I started reading this and thought, "huh, am I going to become a David Brooks fan now?"

Then I finished and it's back to the status quo.

Sorry, David. You are still a tool.

Yeah,  Brooks has achieved Bitch Eating Crackers status for me.  He's eloquent.  You almost don't notice that his response was stereotypical:

1) I'm white.  I had some feels.  Let's talk about them.
2) Yes, some white people are or were bad, but not all white people are or were bad.
3) Black people need to try harder.

It might be funny if the conversation weren't about how racism in America contributes to the deaths of black men.