“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Between the World & Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a book-length exposition of racism in the United States.
True to the advice from Nietzsche above, he explores the topic not through philosophical musings but through the brutal lived experience.
Written as a letter to his son, Samori, the book is an archive of Coates’ personal life through the Black neighborhood.
Although Coates’ book is centered around his experiences growing up as a Black person in the United States, his words reflect every colonized nationality in history.
And what gets lost in the cold, dry words of history, sociology, and statistics is how much the legacy of racism still lingers on to this day.
Coates analyses how Black bodies are not their own but are still very much at the hand of their colonizers, despite how much the colonizers want to think otherwise.
He wants us to dig deeper into who the "people" are in Lincoln’s “Democracy is government by, for and of the people”?
Questioning the US’ claim of being the greatest nation on earth, Coates is skeptical whether the police who murder Black teenagers in the streets in broad daylight disproportionately truly go against the ideals of their nation. Or are they the proud progeny of the country’s history?
The US, or for that matter almost every empire on the face of the earth, has been built on blood.
Today, Israel continues to do the same with Palestinians; the only difference is this time the world has the internet to see everything. Every colonizer has a history of genocide.
That’s evident in Coates’ book when he describes his visit to Paris. He understands that being Black there is not the same as in the US, but that supposedly noble country is also built on the backs of Algerians.
All of this is to elicit the simple question: can racism be solved if only people are good at their intentions? Coates thinks the answer is "NO."
History has been unfair to the oppressed, and the unfairness continues its legacy. Black neighborhoods don’t have better schools because of being located in suburbs, which is a direct result of segregationist policies of a not-so-distant time.
The colonizers have to recognize this fact and admit that the problem is not only because of individual acts but also the history, policies and economics that remain hidden.
Admitting this can result in a broken dream, as Coates refers to continuously in his book. Most Americans and the colonizers try their hardest to avoid the question of systemic change, focusing only on “goodwill” and “good intentions."
They quote Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech “I Have a Dream," where he wants his children to be judged by their character, not by their skin, pointing to that as the goal.
But they conveniently leave out the fact that he also advocated systemic changes and reparations his whole life, and was hated by the racists all over the country in his time.
The US is terrified of its history. From whitewashing the narrative of Thanksgiving to anti-CRT mania, this fact has been vindicated. Similar stories have been told to justify the oppression of the natives here as well: the British were the civilizers of the savages here.
But, as promised, Coates forces us to focus on the daily effects of racism. He recalls the fear he saw in his elders, who got terrified when a child got lost while playing in the park.
He remembers his father saying, “Either I beat him or the police," which was a method of control so that children would be cautious of the world around them and not get killed.
He doesn’t want his son, Samori, to be “tough” or acquainted with the street attitude but can’t shake off the fear that one day he will lose him too, just as he lost his friend at Howard University due to police violence.
He talks about his wife and other Black women and realizes that, as whites couldn’t always bridge the gap between their world and his, similarly he couldn’t always bridge the gap between her world and his. And the bridges can only be traversed through communication and honest inquiry.
But that step is still far away for most Americans. Most of them are happy to include Black and Native people as tokens for diversity, without solving the root issue.
The recent George Floyd case can be an example. After the “Black Lives Matter” protests, many words such as police reform and diversity training were floating around.
Many corporations took a stand with this movement. But as usual, in the end, it was virtue signaling at the corporate and national level.
Keeping one or two Black mayors or a president cannot solve the historical legacy of racism. It has to take into account the legal frameworks that have disadvantaged Black people and the economic issues that have strangled them for decades.
Coates’ book is also significant to understanding how racism can be expressed subtly, which should be a lesson for everyone to be cautious while framing language.
Black History Month is a celebration of all oppressed races on the earth, every native culture that has been destroyed or lost because of imperial ambitions.
Coates searched his whole life to find a way to bridge the gap between his two worlds, how it should be and how it was.
He wants the bridge to vanish for his son so that he can live a true life on his own, in his true body, true self, in a truly free country, not a country free for one race of people.
Black History Month should be directed towards that goal so that every race and ethnicity can bridge the gap between them and their world.
Sadman Ahmed Siam is a student at the Islamic University of Technology.