Between Ta-Nehisi Coates & Me
The intersection of my 45th Reunion at Yale University and completing my reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me has led to some deep soul-searching. Two years into retirement from a teaching career in a wide variety of institutions (from elite Ivy League schools to New York City public high schools) I admit to a certain self-satisfaction in trying to fashion a career that was relentless In pursuing equity and social justice --- a personal passion initially driven by JFK’s “ask what you can do for your country” lo, those many years ago. But Coates’s book brought me up short when I had to face how shallow my thinking has been and just how deeply ingrained the pervasive white-European narrative is. This is not a confessional piece lamenting what a horrible, privileged liberal I have been. I believe I did some important and good work over the years, and think former students could attest to that. Nonetheless, beyond the old, “if I knew then what I know now,” it is far more serious than that --- and that’s what I’m writing about.
I started reading Between the World and Me in the San Diego airport on May 27. Having seen Ta-Nehisi Coates on several talk shows and having heard the buzz about the book, I thought I should read it (plus, it’s only 152 pages and might be read during a 6 hour flight to JFK). It took several days to finish it, though, because I kept stopping and reading passages aloud to Carol Marie (my wife, an equally dedicated educator) and we would discuss what I read, examining our efforts as white, privileged teachers, in addressing the issues Coates raises. In the end, I realized the overwhelming impact of the book was that, while believing myself a thoughtful and culturally sensitive teacher, I don’t have a clue. I had not given nearly enough thought --- deep, reflective thought --- to issues I somehow (arrogantly) believed I was “on top of.” Again, I think former students might say I’m being hard on myself, but hear me out.
A personal mantra during my years of teaching high school was that I hoped every student would be given the opportunities I had been afforded. Quite simply, I knew in the fall of 1967, when I started classes at (the all-male) Yale College, I had hit the lottery. And I also knew that being a white guy named Johnson played some part in that. Yale is far more diverse today. When we co-educated in 1969, with women transfers making ours the first co-educated class of Yale undergraduates, it became clear to me just how lucky I had been. One of those 1969 transfers was a woman who had been the Salutatorian of my public high school graduating class in 1967. Clearly, if women could have applied in the fall of 1966, I would not have been admitted. That’s how good fortune and opportunities have always fallen for me --- and I always wished the same for my students (including the $cholar$hip money, the great teachers, the loyal friends, and the supportive family).
Wherever I was & whatever I was teaching, race was always at the forefront of my curriculum. Working with privileged, white suburban kids, the message was “Given your advantages in society, what are you going to give back?” Working at Brown and Yale, my objective was to recruit and prepare as many educators of color as possible and raise the cultural consciousness of the Caucasian students. I created a course at Brown entitled “Critical Pedagogy and White Privilege.” When I tried to offer it at Yale --- students from two residential colleges wanted it as a “College Seminar” --- it was quashed by the Council of Masters (now called “Heads of College”), who deemed it inappropriate for Yale. Working in New York City high schools my last six years of teaching, 98% of my students were “of color” and I tried to impress upon them the importance of getting an education, leveraging power, and working to “uplift the race” (in the old, clichéd jargon). After reading Between the World and Me, I realize how much more I should have tried to do.
It’s not that I was not empathetic and sympathetic to the “situation” of black people in the United States. When confronted by someone complaining that “they” were now getting “all the breaks” (the “reverse discrimination” myth many Trump supporters subscribe to), I’d ask a simple question: Would you be a black person in America? If they answered, “yes,” (often saying they’d like to be Michael Jordan or Denzel Washington) I’d accuse them of lying and if they said “no,” I’d point out that they understood the odds against black Americans. While I think this is a fair question to easily confront a basic issue, I believe I’ve been too self-satisfied with my own cleverness while being too shallow thinking I understood why the answer is “no.”
And that’s where Coates’s book was revelatory. In what is, essentially, a letter to his 15-year-old son, Coates eloquently animates just how endemic and deep-seated U.S. racism is. While my question about “would you be . . .?” might evoke the obvious thoughts about being followed in stores or images of redneck hate, it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the daily struggle being black in America elicits. If I were still preparing history/social studies teachers I would insist that this be the first book assigned. Knowing my students of color may have already read it --- or would simply applaud someone who had put their daily experience into words --- I know the white students, no matter how well-meaning, well-educated, and progressive they might be, would need extensive discussion to process the book.
Flashing forward to my 45th Reunion, we (Carol Marie & I) were struck by how few people of color were there and how much it felt like 1916 not 2016. More than that, I was struck by thinking how my political activism and lifelong beliefs were forged in this crucible during the late 60s/early 70s. Helping create the first alternative high school in New Haven (The High School in the Community is still around!), working on the May Day protests in support of the Black Panthers and the Chicago 8, and tutoring in the New Haven schools, were all part of my formative experience at Yale. And, while I was proud to have been a member of the NAACP at age 15, participating in voter registration work, I never gave any deep thought to my own simple question’s answer: why wouldn’t I choose not to be a black person in America? Beyond the superficial, I never probed where Coates goes, thinking about how, when you are black in America, you can be harassed indiscriminately by the police, how you are always a suspect to the majority, how every day your every movement is scrutinized, and how your body is not yours --- your entire history, in fact, is based on that! While abolition may have come and gone, while Brown v. Board of Ed. may have been ruled, while civil rights and voting rights bills have been signed, one basic premise has not changed since 1619: black people are not equal, as all the recent violence --- Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddy Gray, Eric Garner, et al --- clearly highlights.
Three years ago, undercover NYPD officers gunned down a student who attended the NYC school where I taught. They claimed he had a gun. We knew that couldn’t be true and suspected the weapon “found” at the scene was a plant. The 15 year-old boy was shot 7 times, four in the back. A recent NY Daily News article, barely noticed, I’m sure, reported that the investigation of the shooting revealed that our student’s DNA and fingerprints were nowhere to be found on the gun in question. The officers weren’t suspended or disciplined --- then or now. As Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, that’s just the expectation. America barely blinks as another black kid is shot by police. Even when the video of the defenseless Laquan McDonald being riddled with 16 bullets on a Chicago street is released, we get several days of coverage and then move on. Is it any wonder people of color are skeptical about getting fair treatment, much less justice in this country?
If we confront our Nation of Incarceration, our disproportionate poverty rates, our “achievement gap,” can we really believe we are in the “post-racial” America some claim Obama has delivered? Yes, we have had eight years of a black presidency but that has wrought the Trump backlash, the Charleston shootings, the need for a Black Lives Matter movement, and a much keener awareness, for me, of ideas I should have been paying more, and closer, attention to far sooner.
As new stories emerge, almost daily, about “vacated” sentences for black men falsely accused, of privileged white rapists given 6-month sentences when blacks serve 15 to 25 years for the same offense, as the 24/7 news cycle reveal realities to white America that our black citizens have known for years --- the impact of Between the World and Me is all the more stunning. Left to reflect, I recognize my teaching was not hurtful but was not all it could have been. I was arrogant, believing I was far “cooler” than I was. I allowed a black student’s compliment (“Isn’t Bil Johnson the blackest white man you ever met?”) carry my feelings farther than I should have. The “blackest white man” is still a clueless white man --- and a perfect example of just how clueless whites are. Coates’s story about bumping into another black man at a baggage carousel and their exchanging a simple “My bad” and “You straight” was far more than a lesson in Ebonics. “And in that exchange there was so much of the private rapport that can only exist between two particular strangers of this tribe we call black.” (pp.119-120) It’s not only that white people can never be members of that tribe, it’s recognizing the larger issues Coates raises about an American “Dream” built on oppression and “plunder.” That blacks were slaves longer (by almost a century!) than they have been free is a stunning historical fact. I was born only two years after Jackie Robinson first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and five years before Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education. Watching George Wallace stand in the doorway of the University of Alabama to stop integration is a clear t.v. memory, as is the “I Have a Dream” speech. But I was never told I needed to be “twice as good” to get “half as much,” an adage that still holds true in black America. Missing the parallels between Emmitt Till and Trayvon Martin speaks to the historical blind spot we white people, and our media, have perpetuated.
“Race” (a social construct and not a biological category) has always been the Elephant in America’s living room. Between the World and Me makes it clear that it is a problem created by white people who insist black people must solve it. The irony is perverse. Those of us “who believe we are white” (Coates’s repeated phrase, adapted from James Baldwin) cannot ignore what this book clearly presents: the United States was built on the backs of oppressed peoples who were sold an unattainable “Dream.” What Coates makes abundantly clear is that the majoritarian culture built a world whose rules allow for their rationalizations while accepting the perpetuation of inequality; a world where “the police reflect America in all of its will and fear” (p.78), and that “Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man.” (p. 60) A brutally harsh critique that is flawlessly accurate.
Between the World and Me provides no answers for blacks or whites. It offers advice from a black father to his son, pulling no punches and painting a realistic picture of the American landscape, historically and presently. For white readers it provides a window to the world as it is, not how we’d like it to be, or hope it will be. Eight years of a black President has not changed the realities of black life in America --- in some ways, the intensity of racism may have increased!
Between the World and Me is direct and scathing, insightful and informative, eloquent and enlightening. So, read it, all of you "who believe you are white." Read it.
June 10, 2016
The intersection of my 45th Reunion at Yale University and completing my reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me has led to some deep soul-searching. Two years into retirement from a teaching career in a wide variety of institutions (from elite Ivy League schools to New York City public high schools) I admit to a certain self-satisfaction in trying to fashion a career that was relentless In pursuing equity and social justice --- a personal passion initially driven by JFK’s “ask what you can do for your country” lo, those many years ago. But Coates’s book brought me up short when I had to face how shallow my thinking has been and just how deeply ingrained the pervasive white-European narrative is. This is not a confessional piece lamenting what a horrible, privileged liberal I have been. I believe I did some important and good work over the years, and think former students could attest to that. Nonetheless, beyond the old, “if I knew then what I know now,” it is far more serious than that --- and that’s what I’m writing about.
I started reading Between the World and Me in the San Diego airport on May 27. Having seen Ta-Nehisi Coates on several talk shows and having heard the buzz about the book, I thought I should read it (plus, it’s only 152 pages and might be read during a 6 hour flight to JFK). It took several days to finish it, though, because I kept stopping and reading passages aloud to Carol Marie (my wife, an equally dedicated educator) and we would discuss what I read, examining our efforts as white, privileged teachers, in addressing the issues Coates raises. In the end, I realized the overwhelming impact of the book was that, while believing myself a thoughtful and culturally sensitive teacher, I don’t have a clue. I had not given nearly enough thought --- deep, reflective thought --- to issues I somehow (arrogantly) believed I was “on top of.” Again, I think former students might say I’m being hard on myself, but hear me out.
A personal mantra during my years of teaching high school was that I hoped every student would be given the opportunities I had been afforded. Quite simply, I knew in the fall of 1967, when I started classes at (the all-male) Yale College, I had hit the lottery. And I also knew that being a white guy named Johnson played some part in that. Yale is far more diverse today. When we co-educated in 1969, with women transfers making ours the first co-educated class of Yale undergraduates, it became clear to me just how lucky I had been. One of those 1969 transfers was a woman who had been the Salutatorian of my public high school graduating class in 1967. Clearly, if women could have applied in the fall of 1966, I would not have been admitted. That’s how good fortune and opportunities have always fallen for me --- and I always wished the same for my students (including the $cholar$hip money, the great teachers, the loyal friends, and the supportive family).
Wherever I was & whatever I was teaching, race was always at the forefront of my curriculum. Working with privileged, white suburban kids, the message was “Given your advantages in society, what are you going to give back?” Working at Brown and Yale, my objective was to recruit and prepare as many educators of color as possible and raise the cultural consciousness of the Caucasian students. I created a course at Brown entitled “Critical Pedagogy and White Privilege.” When I tried to offer it at Yale --- students from two residential colleges wanted it as a “College Seminar” --- it was quashed by the Council of Masters (now called “Heads of College”), who deemed it inappropriate for Yale. Working in New York City high schools my last six years of teaching, 98% of my students were “of color” and I tried to impress upon them the importance of getting an education, leveraging power, and working to “uplift the race” (in the old, clichéd jargon). After reading Between the World and Me, I realize how much more I should have tried to do.
It’s not that I was not empathetic and sympathetic to the “situation” of black people in the United States. When confronted by someone complaining that “they” were now getting “all the breaks” (the “reverse discrimination” myth many Trump supporters subscribe to), I’d ask a simple question: Would you be a black person in America? If they answered, “yes,” (often saying they’d like to be Michael Jordan or Denzel Washington) I’d accuse them of lying and if they said “no,” I’d point out that they understood the odds against black Americans. While I think this is a fair question to easily confront a basic issue, I believe I’ve been too self-satisfied with my own cleverness while being too shallow thinking I understood why the answer is “no.”
And that’s where Coates’s book was revelatory. In what is, essentially, a letter to his 15-year-old son, Coates eloquently animates just how endemic and deep-seated U.S. racism is. While my question about “would you be . . .?” might evoke the obvious thoughts about being followed in stores or images of redneck hate, it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the daily struggle being black in America elicits. If I were still preparing history/social studies teachers I would insist that this be the first book assigned. Knowing my students of color may have already read it --- or would simply applaud someone who had put their daily experience into words --- I know the white students, no matter how well-meaning, well-educated, and progressive they might be, would need extensive discussion to process the book.
Flashing forward to my 45th Reunion, we (Carol Marie & I) were struck by how few people of color were there and how much it felt like 1916 not 2016. More than that, I was struck by thinking how my political activism and lifelong beliefs were forged in this crucible during the late 60s/early 70s. Helping create the first alternative high school in New Haven (The High School in the Community is still around!), working on the May Day protests in support of the Black Panthers and the Chicago 8, and tutoring in the New Haven schools, were all part of my formative experience at Yale. And, while I was proud to have been a member of the NAACP at age 15, participating in voter registration work, I never gave any deep thought to my own simple question’s answer: why wouldn’t I choose not to be a black person in America? Beyond the superficial, I never probed where Coates goes, thinking about how, when you are black in America, you can be harassed indiscriminately by the police, how you are always a suspect to the majority, how every day your every movement is scrutinized, and how your body is not yours --- your entire history, in fact, is based on that! While abolition may have come and gone, while Brown v. Board of Ed. may have been ruled, while civil rights and voting rights bills have been signed, one basic premise has not changed since 1619: black people are not equal, as all the recent violence --- Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddy Gray, Eric Garner, et al --- clearly highlights.
Three years ago, undercover NYPD officers gunned down a student who attended the NYC school where I taught. They claimed he had a gun. We knew that couldn’t be true and suspected the weapon “found” at the scene was a plant. The 15 year-old boy was shot 7 times, four in the back. A recent NY Daily News article, barely noticed, I’m sure, reported that the investigation of the shooting revealed that our student’s DNA and fingerprints were nowhere to be found on the gun in question. The officers weren’t suspended or disciplined --- then or now. As Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, that’s just the expectation. America barely blinks as another black kid is shot by police. Even when the video of the defenseless Laquan McDonald being riddled with 16 bullets on a Chicago street is released, we get several days of coverage and then move on. Is it any wonder people of color are skeptical about getting fair treatment, much less justice in this country?
If we confront our Nation of Incarceration, our disproportionate poverty rates, our “achievement gap,” can we really believe we are in the “post-racial” America some claim Obama has delivered? Yes, we have had eight years of a black presidency but that has wrought the Trump backlash, the Charleston shootings, the need for a Black Lives Matter movement, and a much keener awareness, for me, of ideas I should have been paying more, and closer, attention to far sooner.
As new stories emerge, almost daily, about “vacated” sentences for black men falsely accused, of privileged white rapists given 6-month sentences when blacks serve 15 to 25 years for the same offense, as the 24/7 news cycle reveal realities to white America that our black citizens have known for years --- the impact of Between the World and Me is all the more stunning. Left to reflect, I recognize my teaching was not hurtful but was not all it could have been. I was arrogant, believing I was far “cooler” than I was. I allowed a black student’s compliment (“Isn’t Bil Johnson the blackest white man you ever met?”) carry my feelings farther than I should have. The “blackest white man” is still a clueless white man --- and a perfect example of just how clueless whites are. Coates’s story about bumping into another black man at a baggage carousel and their exchanging a simple “My bad” and “You straight” was far more than a lesson in Ebonics. “And in that exchange there was so much of the private rapport that can only exist between two particular strangers of this tribe we call black.” (pp.119-120) It’s not only that white people can never be members of that tribe, it’s recognizing the larger issues Coates raises about an American “Dream” built on oppression and “plunder.” That blacks were slaves longer (by almost a century!) than they have been free is a stunning historical fact. I was born only two years after Jackie Robinson first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and five years before Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education. Watching George Wallace stand in the doorway of the University of Alabama to stop integration is a clear t.v. memory, as is the “I Have a Dream” speech. But I was never told I needed to be “twice as good” to get “half as much,” an adage that still holds true in black America. Missing the parallels between Emmitt Till and Trayvon Martin speaks to the historical blind spot we white people, and our media, have perpetuated.
“Race” (a social construct and not a biological category) has always been the Elephant in America’s living room. Between the World and Me makes it clear that it is a problem created by white people who insist black people must solve it. The irony is perverse. Those of us “who believe we are white” (Coates’s repeated phrase, adapted from James Baldwin) cannot ignore what this book clearly presents: the United States was built on the backs of oppressed peoples who were sold an unattainable “Dream.” What Coates makes abundantly clear is that the majoritarian culture built a world whose rules allow for their rationalizations while accepting the perpetuation of inequality; a world where “the police reflect America in all of its will and fear” (p.78), and that “Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man.” (p. 60) A brutally harsh critique that is flawlessly accurate.
Between the World and Me provides no answers for blacks or whites. It offers advice from a black father to his son, pulling no punches and painting a realistic picture of the American landscape, historically and presently. For white readers it provides a window to the world as it is, not how we’d like it to be, or hope it will be. Eight years of a black President has not changed the realities of black life in America --- in some ways, the intensity of racism may have increased!
Between the World and Me is direct and scathing, insightful and informative, eloquent and enlightening. So, read it, all of you "who believe you are white." Read it.
June 10, 2016
