Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates in South Africa, Part 1

As I’ve written in the past, one of the great pleasures I take in traveling abroad is to get a break from American culture and politics. Despite our frequent assertions of how exceptional we are as a nation, the truth is that much of what happens in the US too often bogs down deep in either silliness or scariness…or both together. I really wanted that break on this recent trip through Rome, Cape Town and London…from all of it: Trump, Ashley Madison, Iowa, Deflategate (if air pressure falls out of a football in the forest but nobody sees it, did it really happen?). However, in the weeks leading up to my departure, I was inundated with calls to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ provocative new book Between the World and Me.  The estimable Toni Morrison called it “required reading.”  One of the public men I admire most, Jon Stewart, gave the book his blessing in one of his final interviews. UVA assistant professor Jack Hamilton, reviewing the book for Slate, wrote, “White Americans may need to read this book more urgently and carefully than anyone, and their own sons and daughters need to read it as well.”
I got the urgency...so much so that despite my wish to leave America behind, I couldn’t resist downloading this book--steeped as it was in America--onto my Kindle. I did manage to avoid reading it on the long flight over, and avoid reading it again in Rome, but once we touched down in South Africa, where the inter-racial experience mirrors America’s much more closely than we will ever dare acknowledge, reading Coates’s book not only became irresistible, but logical and compelling as well. And I didn’t just "read" it; I read it carefully as Hamilton suggested. As a result I came away with notes that nearly match the (albeit) brief length of the book itself. I want to share some of those notes over the next 2-3 Nobby posts. Some of my notes merely add to the praise that’s already been heaped on Between the World and Me or otherwise affirm Coates’s view of things; some are highly critical. Knowing how things can sometimes easily get lost in exposition, before I get to explaining my criticisms of the book, I want to bullet point areas of agreement:Those critics who praise the writing are right…it’s smooth as jazz and crystal clear.Coates is right when he says the nation is still plagued by racial discord no matter how much wishful thinking we engage in that it is not so.The legacy of slavery…followed by 20th century Jim Crow laws, which replicated in many ways South Africa’s brutal system of apartheid…has made the black experience in America appreciably more different and difficult than that endured by any other ethnic group.Although most parents of all races worry about the safety and well being of their children once they step outside the doors of home, black Americans have the special burden of worrying that their children not only won’t be protected by the law, but will be victimized by it.American history, as taught in our schools, has largely been more focused on covering over the unpleasant aspects of the country’s treatment of minorities, immigrants, and outsiders of various stripes in the interest of promoting what Coates calls the “Dream” of advancement and equality for all.   I have little argument with any of that, and I'd say anyone who does hasn't taken advantage of the voluminous evidence that supports it. But what first piqued my more critical antenna about the book was this passage where Coates begins to explain how the dreams of his father, a  former captain in the Black Panther Party, influenced him:

"…I compared the Panthers to the heroes given to me by the schools, men and women who struck me as ridiculous and contrary to everything I knew. Every February my classmates and I were herded into assemblies for a ritual review of the Civil Rights Movement. Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. The black people in these films seemed to love [sic] the worst things in life—love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire-hoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them in to the streets. They seemed to love the men that raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality."

Throughout his book, Coates freely engages in reading the intentions…the inner thoughts and feelings…of wide swaths of “other” people. Most often it is whites, but here it is blacks and not just any blacks, but blacks like John Lewis, who took to the streets of segregated America time and again to confront the violence of State authority armed with nothing more than personal dignity and faith in a righteous cause. Coates demeans them as “ridiculous” and based on nothing more than his taste for hyperbole claims that they loved the brutality they encountered and endured.
These American martyrs to the cause of freedom had their counterparts in South Africa…the massacred students of Soweto Township, Steve Biko, and thousands of beaten and murdered nameless others. As the suffering of the American Civil Rights workers was eventually redeemed by passage of the Civil Rights Bill and elevation of Martin Luther King Jr. to American icon, the South African martyrs were ultimately redeemed by the establishment of a majority rule state and elevation of Nelson Mandela from State prisoner to father of his country.
It is typical of social/political movements to divide between moderates and radicals…soft-liners and hard-liners. Reminders of Mandela’s triumph over his own “Pantherism” to become a monumental figure for racial reconciliation and healing can be found all over South Africa. There is no attempt to suppress Mandela’s youthful hard-line history when he was not averse to using violence to advance the cause of black liberation from white domination. But there is a definite attempt to extol his post-imprisonment incarnation as Africa's greatest embodiment of Ubantu—a philosophy indigenous to the continent that teaches that we are all bound up in and defined by each other’s humanity.
Coates makes clear that in the American divide between moderation and militancy…between Martin and Malcolm, he is a Malcolmite. He writes:

"Malcolm was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver…He would not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better man for you. He would not be your morality. Malcolm spoke like a man who was free…."

Yes, he did speak like that. But Nelson Mandela--like Martin Luther King-- lived like a man who was free…free of his hatreds…free to rise above vengeance…free to embrace his enemies as part of his own humanity. Despite the considerable validation of King and Mandela's careers, Ta-Nehisi Coates seems determined to pass on a dubious legacy of anger and resentment (and no little fear) in this book addressed to his son. 

Next week: Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates in South Africa, Part 2