As I read Ta-Nehisi Coates' book, Between The World and Me, all I could think about was myth. Through his blog at The Atlantic and in this book, Coates' work has always been about dismantling myth and confronting uncomfortable truths. In his mind, myth can be and often is dangerous.
American history can be myth. Many have a simplistic view of history, one with good guys and bad guys, and the good guys always win. Essentially, American history, as it plays out in the mainstream, is an action movie.
But in real life, the good guy doesn't always win, and sometimes the good guy can do some pretty horrendous things.
Coates' book is a letter to his 15-year-old son, who is upset that Darren Wilson won't be held criminally accountable for fatally shooting Michael Brown on Aug. 9, 2014, an incident that helped sparked the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. Coates doesn't offer comfort. He believes his job as a father isn't to comfort but to clearly delineate for his son what the world is, not what he hopes it would be.
It's again his attempt to strip away myth and lay bare the truth of America's founding on white supremacy. For all the good of the U.S. Constitution and American democracy, it is severely limited, in Coates' mind, by the persistence of racism that is indelibly entrenched in Amerian soil.
And Coates doesn't have much hope that things will get considerably better anytime soon, if ever.
Suffice it to say, Coates' book is a downer, for the most part, with slivers of hope and happiness in his exhortation to his son to continue struggling and in his description of his time at Howard University.
There's no doubt that Coates' take is based on his specific experiences. Some have criticized Coates for his unrelenting bleakness.
I actually don't mind. Coates is a writer and he doesn't owe you or anyone else a happy ending. He is not required to make you feel good. Let's not forget that Biggie Smalls' first record, "Ready to Die," ends with Biggie committing suicide.
His is a personal tale of his journey as clear-eyed as he can write it about what it means to be a black man today. His book is at times eloquent and at times exhausting.
Some have compared him to James Baldwin. Coates set up that comparison from the beginning because he was trying to approximate something in the styyle and substance of what Baldwin achieved in The Fire Next Time.
It doesn't take anything away from Coates to say Coates is no Baldwin nor should he be. Coates should be allowed to stake his own claim.
Truth is, Coates didn't knock me out with this book. Maybe that's because nothing contained within its pages particularly shocked me. Some of what he said only confirmed what I have experienced as a black man. But I'm not a father and I didn't grow up in Baltimore so our experiences are at points, similar, and at points, vastly different.
As short as it was, the book often ran the danger of being repetitious. I got tired of seeing "body" and "plunder" so many times. Those words lost their poetic effectiveness after awhile.
It was the theme of cutting away myth that spoke to me most powerfully. You see the origin of that motivation duirng his time at Howard, where he shifted from his obsession with Afrocentric texts, such as Chancellor Williams' The Destruction of Black Civilization to a more nuanced understanding of African and African-American history sparked by the challenge of his Howard University professors.
His takeaway is that history is not designed to make you feel good. You have to grapple with some hard things. There were great African civilizations, but some of those kings and queens we praise did some despicable things. Just as many of those Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson, created a marvelous document in the U.S. Constitution, but also owned human beings as property.
One major criticism I've seen of the book is that it minimizes black women. This essay is a pretty good summary of that critique. I think, for me, it comes down to the space we allow for black women to tell their stories.. That space is often narrow. It is also about the ways in which we continually priortize the experiences of black men over that of black women.
Coates is considered one of the most eloquent voices on the issue of race. But there are other voices out there who don't get the big platform a writer for The Atlantic gets. Kiese Laymon and Brittney Cooper and Candice Marie Benbow and Roxane Gay are doing some dynamic work. I want those voices to get a wider platform because if you think you're in the know because you just read Coates, you are seriously mistaken. That's another myth that needs to be dismantled.
Some myths are good. Some of my favorite are the Greek myths I obsessed over as a child. The stories were filled with nuanced characters and melodrama. These were superhumans who found themselves confounded and twisted by flesh-and-blood concerns. The myths could reveal a truth that is not based solely in fact.
But other myths just muddy the water. Those are the myths that Coates has dedicated himself to excavating, ripping apart and throwing away. Because if you can't see the cracks in the walls, you won't know that the house needs fixing.
