Between the World and Me Audio CD – Unabridged, September 8, 2015

Every new month brings with it a flood of new names forever lost to this life, here and now. Trayvon, Brown, Garner, Tamir, Emanuel 9, and Sandra, with innumerable names before and many more to come. True tragedies. Unspeakable evils.Those who bear the inhumane weight of racism seemingly burst with grief constantly. How can a human endure such relentless onslaught? The truth of being a person of color in America, is that this country was not built for all. This country was, though, built on the backs and bodies of black lives."Whites" that benefit from white supremacy and privilege don't want to understand the insidious cost of an empire with a history (and ongoing reality) that diminishes and devalues non-"white" persons and cultures.I've read "Between the World and Me" in the wake of Sandra Bland's murder. "Suicide!" some will vehemently counter. No, Sandra was murdered.I will never know the struggle to survive that a woman, a black woman, has to daily endure, moment by moment, her whole life long. Being non-white, non-male, non-evangelical, non-heterosexual, and non-abled bodied is a constant struggle in the empire of America.Sandra Bland never had a day of her brief life where she did not have to struggle against a history and future always set against her. I'm not saying I know what precisely ended Sandra's life, the specific mechanism of her death, but I do know that she was murdered. All black lives are daily being murdered by the "white" empire of America.Race is a construct. It is true that we, whatever shade of hue, all are human. But, some constructs of race are fuel and plunder for the militant machinery of empire.Coates explains,"Plunder has matured into habit and addiction [for "white" America]; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline."Coates also contrasts dreamers and strugglers.Dreamers want to be "white". The dream of equality is really a desire to be "white"; that is, to benefit from this empire, instead of being churned by empire, one has to be white. Coates does not quite say it like this. This is my interpretation of his term, "dreamers".Strugglers have awaken from the dream, and strugglers just want to live their brief lives, they only desire to be human. Strugglers are under no dreamy illusion that they will ever fully be equal in this empire. The empire of America is not interested in or built for equality. Empire is built for and by domination. Again, this is my interpretation of Coates, and not his words.Coates writes (and lives) with an immediacy of the here and now. His writing style is hauntingly poetic and sobering. He doesn't use the phrase, "black lives matter," but he is clear that his physical body matters. His son's life matters. His book is a memoir for his son's benefit-- a matter of life and death.Coates' own awakening from the temptation to dream, and to succumb to illusion, is born out of a grounding revelation that his life, his physical body, is all he gets.Coates explains:"I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us—Christians, Muslims, atheists—lived in this fear of this truth. Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional."Practically too, Coates exposes some often touted anthems of the white empire of America:“'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. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return."Some further contextual reflections as I read "Between the World and Me":White privilege serves white supremacy, the social construct [of my] "whiteness" hides in the cloak of normalcy, "it is what it is", left unquestioned & unexposed for what it really is, a sinister systemic evil.Someone recently asked me "What if what happened to Sandra Bland was about a 'black' officer and a 'white' civilian?"Police brutality is perpetrated and experienced by various persons of all constructs of race. But, what happened to Sandra is not as frequent of an experience for "white" persons. Officers operating from a position and system of white supremacy (even officers of color) are extra cruel, historically speaking, toward persons of color.Consider that our present moment in history is not far removed from slavery followed by segregation, then by Jim Crow, then by the unsettled civil rights struggle, and then still yet by an uphill climb for minorities. An African American person in his forties might only be two to three generations from slavery.This country, with all of its history, is only 4-5 generations old (depending on how one accounts for a generational span of time), that's a pretty young country. And, if an unfolding history ebbs and flows, like a pendulum swinging forward and then slightly backwards, then true progress is slow.So, to answer the hypothetical (fantasy) question (switching the race roles of the Sandra Bland injustice), considering that African Americans are about 13% of USA population, and that black officers are a lesser percentage of the USA police force, then the frequency of "black" officer violence against "white" civilians is far less frequent then the more frequent way around. Plus, history has largely not been kind to minorities in this country.Back to Coates, even as a person of faith (clergy), I too sense in my own self that perhaps this physical life is all we get. And, to survive is to struggle; to know any degree of joy is a struggle.And, if one is a person of color (non- "white"), then the history and ongoing reality of the American empire will always be against them.

Truth vs. ProofDear Ta-Nehisi Coates,Allow me to experiment with a literary device by writing a review of your book, "Between the World and Me," just as a letter or an ordinary email. Once upon a time near the beginning of the 19th century, mathematicians began seeing mathematics itself as a collection of self-consistent stories until Kurt Gogel comes along in 1931 with his Incompleteness Theorems, injecting uncertainty at the very heart of mathematics and proving not all of the stories in mathematics are self-consistent; nor, are without contradictions; and that there are true statements in mathematics which mathematicians will not be able to prove.In "Between the World and Me" your stories within a story reach me as brilliantly, though brutally self-consistent in that they are anchored and rooted in one of the most, if not the most inhumane systems known to man: The American system of chattel slavery. I celebrated the fact that yours is a work of nonfiction but wept since, I dare say, most of your 'Dreamers' would simply apologise for their ignorance, or would be programmed to read it as fiction, at best faction, a risky presumption in these days of Mark Bauerlein's "The Dumbest Generation," that many would even read a difference between fiction and faction at all.Speaking of non-fiction, tending to your blackness, as your son surely knows by now, requires full consciousness 24/7, unlike ministering a garden. Giving credit to your 'Dreamers,' Black men of an African Diaspora are targeted around the world. In a remote Swiss village - higher up from Leukerbad, the village upon which James Baldwin’s “Stranger in the Village” is based -my traveling companion -- Maximilian Anton Lindbuchler known variously as Afro German or a Brown baby and I -- were asked by village elders to present our tails. The crispness of our German, even in dialect, put paid to their titillated excitement and expectation of a freak show.Your literal focus on the destruction of the black body was at once profoundly real and terrifying. Who would have predicted this 21st century face of Jim Crow-ism and virtual re-enslavement in which American police departments, the new slave overseers, so freely exercise their endowed authority -- as they always have -- to destroy black bodies. If the greatest reward of this confrontation with naked American brutality is that it has freed you from ghosts, then, possibly, the spirits of Emmett Louis Till and countless other spirits have been set free, not to mention the spirit of Amiri Baraka, the poet, who, when he eulogized James Baldwin, said that Baldwin's spirit was the only truth which keeps us sane.Now if you ask for my 2 cents worth, Atheism served as a masterful tool to help you sculpture the truth of America's heinous atrocities towards black people into some sort of relief, like the massive founding fathers at Mt. Rushmore. Notwithstanding, though it would appear Martin Luther King, Jr. with his Dreams and Barack Obama, an icon of Hope, suffer the God delusion, one wonders whether Werner Heisenberg, a founder of quantum theory, and a Nobel Prize winner in Physics, was deluded when he wrote, “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” I expect both Malcolm and Baldwin would be happy with this insight, but especially Baldwin since Baldwin is so beautifully driven by love.In writing this email, I, too, thought I'd do what I thought Jimmy might do, and I, too, am over-the-moon you've received such a literary endorsement from the esteemed Nobel laureate, Tony Morrison. Your syntax and your uncompromising approach to the truth of American history is what makes you, in my view, Baldwin-nesque. It doesn't surprise me one iota that you may have left your home shores in a maelstrom of controversy generated by what I call America's backstabbing, throat-cutting, jaw breaking polemical insanity -- a violence in the use of language that is beyond measure, black and white.My sons say you're already in Paris, on the other side of what I now, through reading call, the Black Atlantic because of the number of Black bodies deposited in her depths. I have stories to share about meeting Jimmy at the famed Cafe Le Deux Magots and about meeting Malcolm X in Cairo upon his return from Mecca, not Howard. :) I've encountered several young African American ‘wanna be’ writers who sat at Baldwin's feet in Paris and whom Baldwin wasted no mantra time in saying, "If you wish to write, you must read. Full Stop." Happily, you were passed the mantle, but may I add, it would be unwise for others to expect you to be James Baldwin. Only James Baldwin can be James Baldwin.I'm now seriously reading in Quantum Physics to learn of the elusive subatomic particle, the Higgs boson, which has come to be known as, 'the God particle,’ and to explore whether there is a quantum consciousness that connects us all. I reckon I’m in search of proof for another likely truth. Like you Ta-Nehisi, I grew up knowing only black folk, and I think I owe Benjamin Elijah Mays, for whom I served as a tour guide at the Pyramids of Giza, a more rigorous, cogent, proof-like explanation for why so many prepared for an afterlife. Besides, it was Mays would encouraged me to make the world my country and mankind, my countryman.Should you feel a need to be surrounded by the sounds of English, then jump on the Euro Star at Gare du Nord. I can meet you at St. Pancreas, London, but give us some notice as I'd like for you to meet my sons and my friend, William Jones, whom I call: the Professor Emeritus of Blackness.bon Après-Midi,Joseph F Towns III.