READING TA-NEHISI COATES BY THE LIGHT OF A BURNING CITY

I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World And Me in the fall of 2016 and rejected both the text and its author. Coates’s tone felt too venomous to be constructive, roiling with an anger that frightened me, that set my hackles on the defensive. I much preferred the measured and cool voice of James Baldwin, whose anger translated into something far more cerebral, less poetic and visceral. Coates wrote from the heart. He opened his jugular ink well and released the terror held in his Black American body. The fact that Coates, like James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, wrote his book as an instruction manual for a teenage boy on navigating the American experience shocked me all the more. It was too violent. Too reactionary. I highlighted one particular episode, somewhere towards the middle of the book, of Coates sharing beers on a New York City rooftop with friends as they watched the smoke from the Twin Towers rise. He explained his inability to feel sorrow for first responders on the ground. He could not grieve anyone in uniform injured or killed in their work. At the time, in fall 2016, I read this episode and imagined Coates celebrating the death of first responders, holding out a toast to their demise, and, in his telling this story here, I saw him instructing his teenage son to do the same. Based on this reading, I wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates off for good and widely pronounced his depravity. Plenty of Black voices in the struggle could be trusted -- for instance, James Baldwin, who is so cognitively tidy with his rage -- but not Coates. Avoid Coates at all costs. 

My initial response to Between The World And Me echoes a typical Caucasian response to minority experiences. Caucasian men often have similar responses to female narratives, including Caucasian women, perhaps even women they know personally. And that response is not as evil or hate-filled as it is born of experiential ignorance and a lack of humility. When I look back at who I was in 2016, I do not see myself as evil or hate-filled. In fact, several key factors in my life -- several points along the course of my own relational and emotional narrative -- illuminate the opposite of evil and hatred in my heart. Looking back, even just three and a half years ago, I see in myself a man eager for social and spiritual unity. A man who sought to digest various narratives, who invited the voices of minority men and women into his spaces and consciousness. I identified as a Black Lives Matter advocate, a feminist, and an ally for LGBTQ compassion. I had even, in the summer of 2015, sacrificed familial intimacy fighting for the honor of Black America. And for these reasons, I refused to be the antagonist Coates railed against. I was a good dude. I was “Woke”. Really, Ta-Nehisi, let me buy you a beer. I can show you.

We are taught as young readers to find ourselves in the books we read. This, it turns out, may be terrible advice. Reading books (or consuming any art-form) in an effort to see ourselves in someone else’s work often leads us to read with colonizing eyes, forcing ourselves into narratives not meant to contain us. In response, we often grow hostile or defensive to stories that do not immediately reflect our own realities. I approached Ta-Nehisi Coates this way three years ago. I did not know how to read his story as his story. I did not know how to allow Coates his own perspective as a Black man from Baltimore apart from my own White upbringing in South Arkansas. Also, I could not read Coates’s emotional admissions without the filter of my own racial activism, and so I responded defensively. I fought against him. I exalted my efforts towards “Wokeness” above his experience of Blackness, taking offense that this chump would dare be angry at an America I had already hoped to change. In attempting to see myself in the book I was reading, I built a wall of anger to match the author’s and, sadly, infatuated with my own internal reactions, I failed to hear Coates’s voice altogether. This was an unfair response on my part. It was irresponsible reading. Worse, it was irresponsible humanity. 

Ten days ago, George Floyd died beneath the knee of a Minneapolis police officer. In response, America has been set ablaze. Literally, riots have erupted, causing great destruction to major cities. Figuratively, the nation has flamed with a multitude of reactions, even towards or against the reactions themselves. The news of one more Black man dying in the streets at the hands of law enforcement certainly demands a response. Within the Black community, the response has centered around the repetitive nature of such crimes. However, in the White community, responses have proven complex enough -- politically, theologically, economically, relationally -- to become divisive. But when I think back to my own response towards Ta-Nehisi Coates three years ago, I realize that, for some of my White brothers and sisters, they simply cannot read the death of George Floyd apart from themselves and their own experience. They do not know cognitively and have not experienced personally the fraught history between their own community and flawed authority. They have not felt the crushing heat of marginalization. They cannot fathom that while, yes, people die in this country everyday and while, yes, all lives do matter, few White people have ever questioned how their bodies do or do not fit into the prevailing American narrative. This inability to participate in George Floyd’s death apart from themselves leads many to respond in callous, cavalier, even antagonistic ways. 

I want more for my friends and family -- hell, I want more for myself -- than this. And I want more than this because God created us with the capacity for a deeply abiding unity, one that allows us to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. I am incapable of doing so as fully as I am made able when I fail to engage my neighbor as a complete and not-me individual. I cannot witness George Floyd’s death and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s advice as the unique monuments they are as long as I comb the text of their lives for evidence of myself. As if I need such validation. As if their existence were a stage-light to my own. No. The essence of unity is the fullness of one being colliding with the fullness of another being. For this reason, I want more for Floyd. I want more for Coates. I want more for my community at every shade and hue. Ironically, in giving the fullness of my heart’s attention to them, I gain more in the long-run. This is the divine mystery of humility, which is the gravitational force of unity.

I reread Coates’s Between The World And Me again this week, and I found it to be a very different book than remembered. Coates’s pain and anger made more sense to me now. His battered down, tough-love advice to his son felt more righteous and wise. Even the scene from the New York City rooftop, his beer bottle shrouded with the soot of fresh history smouldering before him, was painted with a touch of confessed shame that made my heart ache. And by finally allowing Coates to tell his story, I felt an empathy that shattered me as much as anything I’ve witnessed in real-time this past week. The biggest difference was my handing Coates the microphone instead of a mirror. In doing so, I encountered a different book this time around. Except that, and oddly enough, not one blot of print had changed.

- June 4, 2020