On June 17th of this year, Dylann Roof walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina and shot nine people. The church was a historically black one, and the killer went to obvious lengths to identify his acts with a long history of organised racial hatred: he shouted racist epithets as he shot, and later told police that he hoped to start a race war. He had posed, in photos he posted online, with the flags of the Confederacy and of apartheid-era South Africa.
Some observers were reluctant to make the connection, though. Several Republican presidential candidates described the crime as a tragic, random act: Jeb Bush, for example, threw up his arms in rhetorical befuddlement, lamenting that he didn’t know “what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes”. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, suggested in an editorial that the killings were motivated by some “problem that defies explanation” and offered the questionable claim that these days, “the system and philosophy of institutionalized racism identified by (Martin Luther) King no longer exists.”
There are many people, you suspect, who might disagree with this, among them the activists of the Black Lives Matter movement, the family of victims such as Trayvon Martin, and the majority of the residents of Ferguson, Missouri. In the wake of the many high-profile acts of racially-tinged aggression in the US in recent years such a claim seems, to say the least, a little optimistic.
The optimists would do well to pick up a copy of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a memoir which doubles as a historical and sociological study of African-American existence in a country haunted by racial oppression. Coates is a prominent journalist who writes frequently on race (his 2014 essay The Case for Reparations presented a meticulous study of the persistence of racism in twentieth-century US institutions) and here he imbues historical analysis and social criticism with a powerful emotional weight.
The book was always going to be timely and has, unfortunately, become even more so (its publication date was brought forward after Charleston). It seems as if every passing week brings fresh horrors – the death of Sandra Bland, the violence in Ferguson on the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death in August – and Coates’s intervention (which Toni Morrison has called “required reading”) consequently has the feel of an urgent national address.
The book takes the form of a letter from the author to his son on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, a structure (borrowed from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time) that balances the personal and the political as Coates warns about the difficulties of growing up as a black male in an environment of pervasive, semi-conscious prejudice. He describes his own childhood on the streets of Baltimore, where he awoke to the ever-present, inescapable “gravity” of racism; his intellectual awakening at the historically black Howard University, where he struggled with competing ideas about racial identity; and his experiences of black fatherhood, with its specific cultural fears.
These fears bring together the book’s various strands and lend the writing its urgency, as the author attempts to pass on lessons and advice to the next generation. Chief among these lessons, and central to the book’s project, is the vision of racism as a tangible, visceral force rather than a vague abstraction: “You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”
Two police killings function as the book’s emotional anchors. The first is the senseless, sudden death of Coates’ college friend, a moment which awakens him to the constant and unpredictable physical threats to black life; the second is the more widely-known shooting of Michael Brown. Coates recalls his son’s tears when he heard that “the men who left (Brown’s) body in the street would never be punished” and explains his own troubling, deliberately pessimistic response: “I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay.”
The moment illustrates the author’s central project of looking squarely at a host of ugly truths and attacking the innocence of a culture that prefers to avert its eyes from them. Several key words recur throughout the work (“body”, “system”, “innocence”, “ignorance”, “eyes”, “plunder”) that emphasise the structural and habitual nature of prejudice and inequality and take careful aim at America’s myths about itself. The monologue offers, in stately and poetic prose, a damning analysis of power and privilege as well as the wilful blindness and amnesia required to sustain them. This is, above all, an argument for the urgent necessity of historical consciousness, addressed to a country traditionally captivated by the future: history, in Coates’ vision, is a white supremacist nightmare from which the U.S is still struggling to awake.
