A Sense of Doubt blog post #1437 - BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME - a book review and reflection for study
It's time to talk about race. Again.
I am creating this entry to put down some thoughts of my own but also to share resources with students for their work.
As I have shared recently on this blog, I wrote an assignment for my students to reflect on college and race -- two seemingly different subjects but ones with many intersections -- in a letter-style format, much like Ta-Nehisi Coates' excellent, National Book Award winning Between the World and Me.
Since I am proud of my assignment, I chose to post it to my blog a couple of weeks ago:
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1425 - Essay One - BTWM Letter.
But race and racial issues, as well teaching Between the World and Me, is not a new issue for me. I started teaching BTWM at WMU in Michigan, right after Ta-Nehisi Coates visited and spoke at the university. And so, for years, I have been writing on this subject with content that relates to issues raised in BTWM or that I like to riff on, such as my rap (which is also a riff) on music, race, and the debt we owe African people brought to American to be slaves (and eventually made "American" though not quite in the same manner or regard as "those who believe themselves to be white" as Coates writes).
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1390 - A Debt Not Paid - Appropriation and the Co-Opting of Modern Music
Without permission, though I assume it's okay, I copied the entire training for LCC employees on diversity and put it in this blog entry as I felt it would illuminate this discussion the work my students are doing in their essays: A Sense of Doubt blog post #1436 - Diversity at LCC.Farther back, there's other good instances. I have a "race" and a "racism" category, which can be accessed via the right side menu, but two notable writings are this one from my recent work and republished an article about Philando Castille’s murder with some commentary by me.
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #371 - I am not afraid of the police; but maybe you should be
As well as this one from three years ago and my t-shirts blog and focuses on the Trayvon Martin case.
T-shirt #118: WWKD: What Would Kirk Do?
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME
Some other issues that have come up in class discussions over the years are racial profiling/police brutality, “street” knowledge or wisdom of streets, awakening to diversity, race as a social construct to perpetuate racism (question on that item), bigotry as fear of difference, etc.
I have always suggested the students look up some facts to discuss institutional racism, such as investigating how many CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are white men.
In teaching this work, I have always tried to encourage all of my students -- regardless of their "race" -- consider the issue of white privilege, but especially those students who have been "deceived" as Coates claims into believing that they are "white."
In so doing, I shared an excerpt from the book White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, -- WHITE FRAGILITY - PDF -- and the very well known article, that actually was written by someone teaching for a women's studies department (as I did)
White privilege Unpacking the invisible backpack with notes for facilitating
In the article, Peggy McIntosh compares the idea of "white privilege" (which Coates calls "The Dream," a very different "dream" from that of MLK, Jr.) to the idea of male privilege (often called "the patriarchy" in women's studies classes), and the comparison is quite apt.
After her powerful and thought-provoking list of how white privilege manifests itself in people's lives, she re-defines it as unearned dominance, advantage, and entitlement.
These unearned social benefits are so normal, and so much the status quo, as to seem virtually invisible by those benefiting. Those who enjoy these benefits often resist the acceptance of the situation or have any idea of even how to be sensitive to it let alone do something about it. The resistance to admitting what, for ease and simplicity, we would call "white privilege" is very much like the resistance men have to male privilege, to the pervasive reality of violence against women and the characterization of our society as a "culture of rape." Especially young men (and not exclusively young white men, often just the opposite), very much resist the idea that their "dreamworld" of sex, naked women, and provocative play could be taken away, as evidence by "gamergate," which I wrote about (or shared content about) four times (fully and officially):
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #277 - Sexists, Humans, and Anita Sarkeesian
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #652 - The Plight of the Bitter Nerd
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #708 - No Girls Allowed - The Fragility of Gaming Culture - BITCH MAGAZINE
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1322 - Trilogy - Chat Music podcast, Blur's Parklife, Sexism at Riot Games
It's this resistance that people need to work through, and it could be painful.
One thing the Dean at LCC said to me is to encourage students to try on an ideology, like taking a pair of shoes home and wearing them around the house to make sure they fit right and are comfortable. It's a rule with shoes though. There is no "breaking in shoes." They either feel right from the start or they don't. But ideologies are not shoes. Initial resistance to ideology may be natural and more part of the grieving process of letting go of something valuable and meaningful if not incredibly beneficial. Think of it like wealth or love. Giving it up is a painful process of learning to live all over again with less money or without the loved one.
And so, "whiteness" comes under full academic scrutiny:
On whiteness, a course at University of Wisconsin: Madison:
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/30434/
A class to be taught next semester at the University of Wisconsin Madison called “The Problem of Whiteness” aims to “understand how whiteness is socially constructed and experienced in order to help dismantle white supremacy,” the course description states.
“Whites rarely or never questioned what it is to be white,” Assistant Professor Damon Sajnani, who will teach the course, told The College Fix in a telephone interview last week. “So you go through life taking it for granted without ever questioning or critically interrogating it.”
For Sajnani, one way to solve this is to offer “The Problem of Whiteness,” an analysis of what it means to be white and how to deal with it as a “problem.”
My friend Erica Ahmed shared this article:
http://www.vox.com/culture/2016/11/7/13502322/sellout-paul-beatty-booker-prizeIn the end we found it impossible to ignore the impassioned pleas of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, a controversial municipality whose very existence is often denied by many (mostly privileged white males). Others state categorically that the walls of the locale have been irreparably breached by hip-hop and Roberto Bolaño’s prose. That the popularity of the spicy tuna roll and a black American president were to white male domination what the smallpox blankets were to Native American existence. Those inclined to believe in free will and the free market argue that the Lost City of White Male Privilege was responsible for its own demise, that the constant stream of contradictory religious and secular edicts from on high confused the highly impressionable white male. Reduced him to a state of such severe social and psychic anxiety that he stopped fucking. Stopped voting. Stopped reading. And, most important, stopped thinking that he was the end-all, be-all, or at least knew enough to pretend not to be so in public. But in any case, it became impossible to walk the streets of the Lost City of White Male Privilege, feeding your ego by reciting mythological truisms like “We built this country!” when all around you brown men were constantly hammering and nailing, cooking world-class French meals, and repairing your cars.
The Sellout, for which Paul Beatty just became the first American writer ever to win the Booker Prize, is both blisteringly funny and blisteringly furious.
And, this organization: http://www.eracce.org/
I was about to take this training before I moved out West. I need to find a similar thing here.
ABOUT US
ERACCE exists to eliminate structural racism and create a network of equitable Antiracist institutions and communities.
MISSION
The mission of ERACCE is to dismantle systemic racism and build antiracist multicultural diversity within Southwest Michigan institutions by providing education, networking, technical assistance and supportive resources to the region. We define Southwest Michigan as including Allegan, Barry, Van Buren, Kalamazoo, Calhoun, Berrien, Cass, St. Joseph, and Branch Counties. We also support and collaborate with antiracism work in other regions of Michigan as we are able.
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| https://slate.com/culture/2015/07/between-the-world-and-me-by-ta-nehisi-coates-reviewed.html |
And this...
FROM BRAIN PICKINGS:
The Terror of Kindness: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Overriding Our Cultural Conditioning and Living Beyond Fear
“We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope,” James Baldwin said to Margaret Mead in their forgotten, acutely timelyconversation about race, forgiveness, and the crucial difference between guilt and responsibility. And yet when trauma, injustice, and cultural conditioning smear our vision with blood and tears, we begin to lose sight of this essential, life-affirming truth.
That’s what Ta-Nehisi Coates, a Baldwin-plus of our time, addresses in a beautiful passage from the altogether stirring Between the World and Me (public library).
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Photograph: Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times)
Coates reflects on the transformative experience of his first visit to Paris — a perspective-reorienting pilgrimage he made from West Baltimore, by way of Harlem, as soon as he received his first adult passport:Loneliness — particularly the loneliness familiar to those of us who are immigrants or alien in any other way, the kind that comes from being in a culture but not of it — is a paradoxical emotion, stretched between longing and fear: we long for inclusion, acceptance, and equal belonging, but fear we’d be hurt, rejected, or violated in the vulnerable-making act of making our longing manifest. The fear takes over — especially if it carries the momentum of previous violations, be they personal or inherited — and erects a protective wall that only further separates us from the very thing we long for.It occurred to me that I really was in someone else’s country and yet, in some necessary way, I was outside of their country. In America I was part of an equation — even if it wasn’t a part I relished. I was the one the police stopped on Twenty-third Street in the middle of a workday. I was the one driven to The Mecca. I was not just a father but the father of a black boy. I was not just a spouse but the husband of a black woman, a freighted symbol of black love. But sitting in that garden, for the first time I was an alien, I was a sailor — landless and disconnected. And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before — that I had never felt myself so far outside of someone else’s dream.
With an eye to that divisive fear, Coates addresses his young son:
I wanted you to have your own life, apart from fear — even apart from me. I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next. I think of your grandmother calling me and noting how you were growing tall and would one day try to “test me.” And I said to her that I would regard that day, should it come, as the total failure of fatherhood because if all I had over you were my hands, then I really had nothing at all. But, forgive me, son, I knew what she meant and when you were younger I thought the same. And I am now ashamed of the thought, ashamed of my fear, of the generational chains I tried to clasp onto your wrists. We are entering our last years together, and I wish I had been softer with you. Your mother had to teach me how to love you — how to kiss you and tell you I love you every night. Even now it does not feel a wholly natural act so much as it feels like ritual. And that is because I am wounded. That is because I am tied to old ways, which I learned in a hard house. It was a loving house even as it was besieged by its country, but it was hard. Even in Paris, I could not shake the old ways, the instinct to watch my back at every pass, and always be ready to go.A few weeks into our stay, I made a friend who wanted to improve his English as much as I wanted to improve my French. We met one day out in the crowd in front of Notre Dame. We walked to the Latin Quarter. We walked to a wine shop. Outside the wine shop there was seating. We sat and drank a bottle of red. We were served heaping piles of meats, bread, and cheese. Was this dinner? Did people do this? I had not even known how to imagine it. And more, was this all some elaborate ritual to get an angle on me? My friend paid. I thanked him. But when we left I made sure he walked out first. He wanted to show me one of those old buildings that seem to be around every corner in that city. And the entire time he was leading me, I was sure he was going to make a quick turn into an alley, where some dudes would be waiting to strip me of … what, exactly? But my new friend simply showed me the building, shook my hand, gave a fine bonne soirée, and walked off into the wide open night. And watching him walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear. What I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible.
Complement this particular fragment of the thoroughly terrific Between the World and Me with psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor on how kindness became our forbidden pleasure and Baldwin onfreedom and how we imprison ourselves.
HT Tara Brach
Review: ‘Between the World and Me’ at The Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater
https://dcmetrotheaterarts.com/2018/04/11/review-between-the-world-and-me-at-the-kennedy-center-eisenhower-theater/ |
| Marc Bamuti Joseph and Jason Moran (top) during Between the World and Me at the Kennedy Center. Photo courtesy of Jati Lindsay |
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s son, Samori, was 15 when his father wrote a book addressed to him, Between the World and Me. Before that book won the National Book Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, it was a heartfelt message to a boy whose father knew he could be shot dead for no reason except he was black. The pain and pride, the anger and anguish, the hope and helplessness Coates feels at this unjust prospect flow through the book like a flooding river of tears.
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| Ta-Nehisi Coates |
Throughout Between the World and Me, Coates refers to people, especially Americans, who “believe they are white.” At the very beginning, he tells of a TV news host in DC who For me reading the book, through welling eyes of my own, was to experience a writer whose graceful command of language and cut-to-the-root political insight left me humbled and in awe. Coates is often compared, aptly, to James Baldwin, whose voice, especially in The Fire Next Time, resounds through Between the World and Me. And—of particular importance to me—Baldwin and Coates both articulate what it means to be white, with a conscience and clarity I almost never find in the work of white writers.
wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to the question is the American believers themselves. The answer is American history.
Baldwin makes a similar point in an essay titled “On Being White…And Other Lies”:
America became white—the people who, as they claim, “settled” the country became white—because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjugation. No community can be based on such a principle—or, in other words, no community can be established on so genocidal a lie. White men—from Norway, for example, where they are Norwegians—became white: by slaughtering the cattle, poisoning the wells, torching the houses, massacring Native Americans, raping Black women.
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| Joe Morton during Between the World and Me at the Kennedy Center. Photo courtesy of Jati Lindsay. |
Coates began writing Between the World and Me shortly after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. Samori was born into the same world, a place where the boy’s black body could at anytime be destroyed in order to sustain someone’s belief in himself as white. Between the World and Me is propelled by Coates’s purpose to tell his son as much truth about that contingency as he can—knowing full well that, as he writes to Samori, “I can’t save you.”
The passion on the pages of the book became searingly and exhilaratingly present in the Eisenhower Theater at Kennedy Center when eight illustrious black artists read passages from it to a packed house Sunday afternoon. It seemed an audience not only of fans but of seekers, listeners eager and prepared to be moved and inspired by the truths they knew Coates had told.
The readers, all superb vocal artists, brought a full range of emotions and declaration from dirge to poetry slam. They included superstar tap dancer, choreographer, and actor Savion Glover; Hip Hop playwright Marc Bamuthi Joseph, librettist of the opera We Shall Not Be Moved; Emmy Award–winning actor Joe Morton (Scandal); actor/arts collaborator Greg Alverez Reid; rap artist Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter of The Roots; Broadway and film actor Pauletta Pearson Washington; This Is Us’s Susan Kelechi Watson;and 12-time Grammy Award–nominated singer Ledisi.
On a raised platform were a pianist (Jason Moran), a guitarist (Mimi Jones), and a drummer (Nate Smith) who intermittently enhanced the readings with exquisitely sensitive jazz accompaniments. These were composed for the occasion by Kennedy Center Artistic Director for Jazz Jason Moran, who also conducted. The full stage was emblazoned with projections designed by Tal Yarden with Five OHM Productions that began subtly situating the storytelling with indistinct patterns and became steadily more and more powerful, culminating in a furious montage of headlines about black bodies felled.
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| Ledisi (left) and Black Thought during Between the World and Me at the Kennedy Center. Photo courtesy of Jati Lindsay. |
The passages chosen followed Coates chronologically from his youth in Baltimore, to his days at Howard University (and its yard called The Mecca), to his becoming a writer, to his meeting Samori’s mother, to their home in Brooklyn… The black body is a recurring theme. The essential below is another, meaning being the one who must be taken down by one who believes himself white. And a portion of the narrative from the book is told of Coates’s dear friend from Howard named Prince Jones who, Coates learned as he was writing the book, was shot and killed by a cop. Thereafter Coates pays a visit to Prince’s mother, Mrs. Jones, in a passage that aches with grief and courage.
The program was developed and directed by Kamilah Forbes, a friend of Coates’s from their days at Howard and now executive producer of New York’s Apollo Theater, which produced the performance in collaboration with the Kennedy Center. The show was first performed a week before at the Apollo. Now arrived in DC, the entire endeavor represented an extraordinary convergence of institutional resources and artistic talents, all focused on sharing the experience of a text so personal yet so political that it seemed to coalesce every heart in the house.
Surely this fine project should have a life beyond this brief run. I can even imagine that stripped down to its soul, simply the language and the writing, this beautiful adaptation of Between the World and Me by Lauren A. Whitehead could be done in readers’ theater productions on campuses across the country for years to come.At the very end, after the cast and musicians had been vigorously applauded, names began to appear projected on the set. The audience getting ready to leave the theater instead stopped still, stood hushed, somberly watching and reading as countless names scrolled upward, names upon names of black bodies shot down, names Coates knew his son could be among, black bodies some there could have known. It was a powerful tribute to a collective sorrow that as yet knows no end.
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| Cast of Between the World and Me at the Kennedy Center. Photo courtesy of Jati Lindsay. |
Thanks for reading.
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- Days ago = 1303 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1901.27 - 10:10
NOTE on time: When I post late, I had been posting at 7:10 a.m. because Google is on Pacific Time, and so this is really 10:10 EDT. However, it still shows up on the blog in Pacific time. So, I am going to start posting at 10:10 a.m. Pacific time, intending this to be 10:10 Eastern time. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. But I am not going back and changing all the 7:10 a.m. times. But I will run this note for a while. Mom, you know that I am posting at 10:10 a.m. often because this is the time of your death.
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