I am a white male in my 30s. Written as a letter to his 15 year old son, this is a memoir of being black in America by a 39 year old man with a life wholly different from mine.
I point this out not to argue that this book has nothing to offer me, but to acknowledge that I am coming to this book with a different set of tools – a different language, even. The context I use to make sense of the world around me is different from that of Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is, perhaps, best exemplified by his repeated usage of the phrase “people who think of themselves as white.”
This phrase not only bewildered me, but prevented me from fully comprehending his message. It wasn’t until I Googled it and read the James Baldwin essay from which it originated that I realized how much of this book went over my head. “What it means to be white” brings with it a host of meanings about how we identify both ourselves and one another. Without understanding this basic phrase, I don’t think it’s possible to understand this book. I don’t think it’s possible, in fact, to understand the black experience.
I am not white because of my skin, I am white because my ancestors needed to create a “white race” so that American slaves (also known as “blacks”) could be given a name. They were the other, held in bondage due to their skin color, with chains passed down from one generation to the next like it was part of their DNA. Prior to American slavery there was no “white race”. People were Irish, or German, or Norwegian, or Russian. Prior to American slavery, there was no “black race”. American slavery created the white race, just as it created the black race.
So we call ourselves “white”, but that is only a recent creation. We have divested ourselves of our community so that we could subjugate others. And, in so doing, we have lost our ability to define who we are. We just call ourselves “white”.
This was, perhaps, embarrassingly revelatory. I have a degree in anthropology, so the idea that race is a purely cultural concept instead of a scientific one isn’t new to me. But what James Baldwin argued (and Ta-Nehisi Coates reiterates) has shaken the foundation of what I perceive race to be. And given what I know, or should know, about human culture, I’m ashamed that it’s taken me this long to see it from this angle.
Which is no easy thing to admit. I like to think of myself as a fairly intelligent guy, well-versed in history and reasonably comfortable acknowledging my privilege. But I was not ready for this book, and, having read it, I can’t say I grasped everything he was going for. But the error here is mine, not his. In essence, I lack the framework to fully embrace what he’s saying, here. It’s not that I am ignorant of American history, nor that I’m ambivalent to white culpability in the broken promise of our national mythology, but if the very language Coates uses to express himself is unfamiliar to me, how can I even begin to grasp the truth he has clearly explicated for the world?
I’m not going to give this book a rating because I don’t feel like I’m qualified. But I do plan on doing the reading I should’ve done before picking this book up. And I think no higher testament can be paid a book than to say that it has opened your eyes to the amount of work you have left to do. I do highly recommend this, however, to anyone prepared to take it in.
Great review! I must admit that I want to get better at reading diversely where authors are concerned. Even when I read books with diverse protagonists, the authors tend to have exactly the same cultural and racial background as myself, i.e white and from the Western world. I think one of my reading goals for next year has to be to broaden my horizons more with regards to this – to read at least one book a month by someone whose cultural, religious and/or ethnic background is different from my own.
I’ve intentionally been doing that this year. I mostly read history books last year, and realize I only read one or two books written by women. So I’ve done better on that score.
But, going forward, I want to incorporate more ethnic diversity into my reading. I think, giving all that’s going on in America right now, that is vital.
This is an insightful and fantastic review. I taught it to my ENGL 1002 students this last spring, and they had a lot to say and reflect on. My sole African-American student sent me a personal email talking about HIS own experience with blackness, which differed from Coates’ in that he grew up affluent and in the suburbs. It opened my eyes to think about “blackness” individually and not use blanket terms or ideas when thinking about others whose experience differed from mine.
That’s such a difficult think when talking of race. The terms are inherently meaningless, but utterly necessary to have a conversation.
I love how Coates acknowledges that his conception of what it means to be black is vastly different from that of his son’s, but that they are irrevocably tied together by the communal tragedies of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the countless other victims of our society.
It really drives home that this isn’t just a class thing, and it’s not just a product of black youth cultural, and it’s not just a product of an era. It’s that our society does not value the black body.
I can really appreciate this review. You’ve articulated many of the reasons I’m hesitant to pick this book up. I say reasons, but really they’re excuses.
“But I do plan on doing the reading I should’ve done before picking this book up.”
What other books are you thinking about reading? I’d be really interested to read your reviews when you get to them.
The first three authors that sprang to mind were Frederick Douglass (who I haven’t read since college), James Baldwin, and Malcolm X.
But Coates names quite a few here, and I’ll have to do more research to find out how who strongly influenced his perspective.
I’m currently reading Kindred by Octavia Butler.
This book may be the single most important thing I’ve read in the past 2 years.
I’m a white lady in my 30s, and I can appreciate how disorientating this book was for you. I wasn’t quite as put off balance, probably because my best friend of 24 years is black. I grew up in a highly diverse area, and my high school was 97% black (they published the stats every year). It also doesn’t hurt that I was introduced to the newness of the invention of ‘white’ during my undergraduate U.S. History II course, with a most fantastic black professor.
I live now in a very pale area. I have been too timid to share this book, even though I bought a copy for that exact purpose. It sits on a shelf. I think I need to move it downstairs onto my coffee table so that I can lure others into picking up this slim volume, because I need to start speaking up about what matters. So much of what is racism in this country is denied by so many because they do not understand the vast differences of experience, and the cultural and institutional ramifications of the historic divisions. Good on you for reading this and really letting it wash over you, and for continuing to educate yourself. Its what we can all do.
That’s really good that you looked up a phrase that nagged at you. I didn’t do it with this book, but I really recognized and identified with so many elements in this book to a certain extent. I’m not black, but I am still a minority who grew up in America, so the idea of color being a label imposed on us by the “ruling race” in order to separate and divide is something I have always been aware of. But I wasn’t really aware of the black intellectual movement underpinning that phrase. I might check James Baldwin.
If you can locate it, “Learning to Be White” by Thandeka is a very useful exploration of the making of whiteness.