Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates in South Africa, Part 2

I asked this man in Cape Town if I could take his picture. He said yes. Then he asked if
I would take the same picture with his camera. I said yes. It was not a great moment
in inter-race relations. It was just one of those very small moments in human relations
that take place everywhere millions of times a day. Imagine that. 


One day walking alone in Cape Town, with the majesty of Table Mountain to my left, I came upon a woman who seemed quite mad. She had a water jug she was trying to fill from the pounding Atlantic surf to my right. The waves kept knocking her back onto the shore where two apparently feral dogs were waiting to growl and snarl at her. There were two people watching her struggle…one, down on the beach, a surprisingly neatly dressed young woman with a suitcase; the other from the promenade up ahead of me, a boy in his late teens who looked quite at home. Then appeared a jogger in her late 20s in colorful gear and wearing ear buds. She paused for no more than a few seconds before charging the snarling dogs and chasing them off the poor woman who was down on all fours wrestling with the sea...her defiant jug...her swirling dress…the universe itself perhaps.
On the day this scenario unfolded before my eyes I read the following passage in Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me:

“You were almost five years old. The theater was crowded, and when we came out we rode a set of escalators down to the ground floor. As we came off, you were moving at the dawdling speed of a small child. A …woman pushed you and said, "Come on!" Many things now happened at once. There was the reaction of any parent when a stranger lays a hand on the body of his or her child.

Indeed, there is a common reaction of most any parent when a stranger lays a hand on the body of his or her child. And such incidents seem to be more common as more people feel entitled to intervene in the lives of others, even strangers. I’ve seen a few instances at malls where strangers admonish parents in controlling their children. Just recently the nation got amped up over incident of a restaurant manager screaming at parents for failure to discipline their child. Somewhat related, we had the equally notorious incident of the Maryland couple who were charged with child neglect after a stranger reported to authorities that they were allowing their kids to walk home from a local park alone. These interventions…even of the “good Samaritan" variety…are fraught with unseen consequences (as I’ve learned from personal experience). Closer to Coates’s story…a son-in-law got into it with another parent who attempted to discipline our grandson at a kids' birthday party.
So far…so good, I’d say. We’re all in this together and can share our stories as part of the mosaic of human experience. But not so much for Ta-Nehisi Coates. As he admits, he’s really not interested in sharing in anyone else’s morality. Here’s where he goes with his story…First off, the offending woman is white (a fact I edited out of the passage above to make this point). Let’s proceed and take all of the facts of this encounter as he describes them. In other words, let’s grant that the woman pushed his son and didn’t just nudge him…or genially tap him on the shoulder. But after the raw facts, we have to accept Coates’s interpretations of individual behaviors, which include his opinion that the woman “was pulling rank” (and what he means by that is asserting her white privilege); also, he asserts, she would not have dared to lay a hand on his son back in hisneighborhood. That’s followed by his imagining that the man who came to the woman’s defense when Coates started yelling at her was attempting “to rescue a damsel from a beast.” And then he makes this leap into the mind of this woman he’s just barely met under the worst of circumstances:

“Had I informed this woman that when she pushed my son, she was acting in the tradition that held black bodies as lesser, her response would likely have been, “I am not a racist.’ Or maybe not. But my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration.”

And finally, there’s this take-away from the entire incident that he offers his son in reflecting on the threat made by the man who came to the woman’s rescue:

“’I could have you arrested,’ he said. Which is to say, “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and chocked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.”

My son-in-law is half Jewish. The only way he could have made his encounter with the parent who disciplined our grandson remotely this preposterous would have been if he had invoked the Holocaust and charged the other parent with anti-Semitism.
One of the sharply satirical memes Stephen Colbert’s late, lamented show left us with was his defense against being labeled a racist by declaring that he didn’t see color--you say you’re black…I believe you…but I really don’t know because I don’t see color…people say I’m white…I don’t know...am I? I would like to navigate my way through this post without making myself the butt of that particular joke, but wholly emboldened by Coates’s fully colorized view of the world, I will attempt to add what we liberals like to call nuance to this subject.

Many (many!) years ago when Lorna was working as an elementary school teacher, she was given a student teacher to mentor from the local college…Dartmouth, if you must know. For three weeks running, her reports to me at home on how poorly the girl was doing steadily escalated. One day I went to the school to pick up Lorna and got to meet her student teacher for the first time…she was black. Lorna had never mentioned her race in all her lamentations about how ill-prepared the girl was for the classroom…and for good reason…race had no discernible connection to her vocational failings. Her race would matter only to someone trying to makes a racist point…and by racist I mean making a judgment on someone primarily based on the person’s race. For instance, if you hear this story and say, “Well that’s affirmative action for you,” that's racist. And to drive the point home I should add that sometime shortly before or after Lorna’s experience, I also took on a student teacher from Dartmouth who was also not a good fit for classroom teaching…a white male, so affirmative action didn’t have a damn thing to do with it.
Back to the beach. The woman flailing around in the surf trying to collect water in a jug was black…as was the girl with the suitcase and the boy on the promenade. The jogger, however, was so blondie white that in a darker time she could’ve been a poster girl for the apartheid vision of strength and beauty. To me her intervention on behalf of the hapless woman in the water was a small example of the Africn Ubantu spirit of recognizing your humanity in the humanity of others. It said nothing about the moral superiority of her race, nor did the inaction of the others at the beach that day say anything about their moral inferiority. In fact, if I were to impose intentionality on the other two who did nothing to help the woman, I would say the young girl was preoccupied by the journey she was obviously just beginning or ending, and the boy looked to me as if he’d seen the pathetic woman’s behavior before…perhaps she was a relative…even his mother...and her battle with the seas and barking dogs was part of her daily routine.
There are lots of places to go when studying human behavior. When our first instinct is to filter our observations through race, we immediately limit the possibilities to discover our humanness in others and increase the chances of finding bigotry, prejudice, and hate where they may not really exist. In his book, Ta-Nehisi Coates seems intent on narrowing his son’s view of the world rather than broadening it, and that seems like an odd choice for a man of letters to make.


Next week: Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates in South Africa, Part 3