Talk politics.

Ta-Nehisi Coates 2015 book Between The World And Me is a stirring account of contemporary black life in America. Coates addresses the book to his son Samori but it might have been addressed the white America. Not because it speaks to that America but because it offers a glimpse into the world of black Americans, or at least one version of that world, that seemingly few outsiders understand. Coates’ version of black America is a place where black bodies are in a constant state of peril from the police, youth violence, and the racialized structures of the world around them.
Coates recounts his youth in West Baltimore struggling with gang violence, police brutality, and a stultifying education system that admonished him to “make something of himself” and escape the reality of black life in Baltimore. He felt assaulted by the world around him, and most of all by an education system that seemingly ignored the structures of racism he saw around him. He rejected mainstream American culture as a literal and figurative assault on his body. The threat to black bodies, by youth violence, the police, and education, demonstrated the fragility and precarious nature of being black in America.
It was at Howard University, an historically black college in Washington D.C., that he felt his intellect opened to the possibility of the nuances of race in American history. What was he after? Black heroes? Proof that black people were strong and capable of determining their own future? Of rising out of poverty and oppression to places of honor and power? He wouldn’t find it in the past. The people of the past were not on the earth to serve as martyrs for progress. No, black success or progress would not make right the suffering, or happiness, of generations of enslaved people. Similarly, Coates grapples with the condescension of emphasizing the “first black X” in history. The first black Major League baseball player, the first black president, etc. All masks for the myth of progress. In searching for heroes in history Coates sees deception rather than inspiration.
Coates portrays a deep darkness within America. A place not disloyal to its claims of promoting equality and freedom, but rather all too true to them. Equality and freedom made possible by the oppression of black people.
Coates writes with unashamed rage. He doesn’t fear being labeled an angry black man because he believes he has something very real to be angry about. And in addressing his book to his son Samori, and in his openness about his life and his rhetorical skill, he creates a remarkable level of empathy with his reader. I thought of Oscar Handlin when I read Coates. And like Handlin’s The Uprooted in which Handlin eschews academic procedure in order to speak for the experiences of an aggregate immigrant, Coates speaks for more than just himself. He speaks for black people in the aggregate. And he does so in a way that non-black people will understand. At least in part. Coates understands that no one who hasn’t lived his life can understand all of what he says. Not even Samori.
But for all of the empathy he creates, and all of the eloquence with which he portrays the perils of black life in America, like Handlin, Coates often relies on cultural assumptions rather than critical analysis. His portrayal of middle class white America is a caricature rather than an insight, as he portrays white people stumbling through life with little understanding of race and even less understanding of racism and white supremacy.
The middle class in general, and the white middle class in particular, has borne the brunt academic scorn since the radicalization of higher education beginning in the 1960s. The rise of the new social history, as well as labor history, African American history, and gender history, have shone a long burning spotlight on the lives of marginalized people and in doing so have added invaluable chapters to our understanding of history. However, they have also been all too quick to fall into the trap of searching for heroes and villains in the past. Heroizing the marginalized people, predicated on a desire for contemporary social change, often means making caricatures like the vapid white suburban housewife, or the worker drone husband in the gray flannel suit.
Coates might remind these historians that he himself saw the trap of searching for heroes and villains in the past. He would, I think, be all the more powerful in expressing this message because he himself has not entirely found his way out of that trap.