The Terrible Price of Fearing for Your Child's Safety- A Very Personal Response to "Between the World and Me"
This review essay was originally written for "Jewish Currents"
Let me say at the outset that I cannot be objective in reviewing Ta-Nehisi Coates new book, "Between the World and Me," which is addressed to his 15 year old son, who burst into tears when learning that the Ferguson Grand Jury refused to indict the police officer who killed Michael Brown. I have a 11 year old bi-racial granddaughter who is the light of my life- she is beautiful, smart, athletic with a great future. But when Michael Brown was killed, the first thought that came into my mind was “Thank God she is not a boy.” No grandfather should think such thoughts, but those are the thoughts Black parents have to think every day. Because as Coates reminds us, Black bodies, for as long as we have been a nation, have littered the pathways that whites have walked toward their version of “The American Dream,” and even today, the life of a Black person can be snuffed out if he or she is in the wrong place and the wrong time and those who do the killing will rarely be punished.
The image of America as a nation whose progress has been built on the exploitation and murder of Black people is not going to win any popularity contests in mainstream political discourse. There are historical works, such as Edward Baptist’s "The Half Never Been Told," which provide concrete evidence for such an argument, with a tone that is less confrontational, and with a less pessimistic vision of the American future.
But what Coates does, with unmatched clarity, is to describe how Black parents, and children, and entire communities have been traumatized by the fear that Black life is cheap and could be sniffed out at the drop of a hat with little recourse from the law because the law is complicit in its devaluation. And he does so in a way that may be more effective than an historian or a sociologist presenting data because he takes us into the mind of a parent terrified for the life of their child, a perspective any parent can readily identify with
Here is how Coates describes this fear to his son. There is no distance in his writing. Just imagine what it takes to address your own child this way:
“I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely when you leave me and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age, the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid….
“It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their puffy big coats and full length fur collared leathers, which was their armor against the worlds. . . . I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear and all I see is them girding themselves against the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered around their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps . . . .
“I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were With A Brooklyn Accent: The Terrible Price of Fearing for Your Child's Safety- A Very Personal Response to "Between the World and Me":