Play Book Tag discussion

For me, this book’s power comes from its emotional core. Written in the form of a letter to the author’s 15-year-old son, it avoids any attempt to gloss over or sanitize the dangers and injustices that Ta-Nehisi Coates believes his son will face as a black man in America. Near the start, Coates reflects on his son’s grief over the decision not to indict the police officer who shot Michael Brown:

"I came in five minutes after, and 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. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it."

The book's main thesis is that the violence faced by black people is not an anomaly that can be easily addressed, but a feature built into the structure of U.S. society: "a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker." The focus is on the unjust social structures underlying even violence without a surface connection to race: "'Black-on-black crime' is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel." In the face of these systemic problems, Coates doesn't offer false hope or solutions, but rather exhorts his son to struggle for equality "not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honourable and sane life".

Coates' observations grow out of his lived experience, so it doesn't feel entirely appropriate for me, as a white woman who's only been in the U.S. for two years, to critique his conclusions. I've led a sheltered life; he, on the other hand, reports that "When I was eleven my highest priority was the simple security of my body. My life was the immediate negotiation of violence – within my house and without." I don’t feel equipped to judge his perceptions, but I will mention a couple of statements that I found particularly hard to relate to. The first was his reference, following James Baldwin, to "people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white" (expanding on the claim that "race is the child of racism, not the father"). This initially felt jarring to me, but did make more sense after he gave the example of the Irish as a group who had been classified first one way and then the other. In this context, I could better understand his assertion that "perhaps being named 'black' was just someone's name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah." The other was his teenage self's rejection of the heroes of the non-violent civil rights movement as "ridiculous" - although this is placed in the context of the tough atmosphere he grew up in ("How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?"), and he later describes how he sees them differently as an adult.

This short book was a very quick and absorbing read. For me, it did a great job of providing a window into an entirely unfamiliar experience of life, made horribly relatable through the focus on a parent's viewpoint. As well as the format of the book as a letter to his son, Coates includes reflections on the deaths of several black men, reflecting on the losses experienced by their families. One of these passages stayed with me, I think because of the poetic way that Coates writes:

"Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him, sent flowing back to the earth."