Can Reading and Writing Overcome "The Beast Side?"
D. Watkins's The Beast Side has a lot in common with Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me. Both grew up in Baltimore during the 1980s crack and gang years. Neither were violent people although both share the story of their one violent act. Unlike Coates, Watkins became a drug dealer. Both were saved by reading and writing, as well as the resilience they learned in their communities.
Both have stories so extreme as to seem surreal, but I saw the same things when crack and gangs took over my neighborhood, even though I viewed the tumult through the eyes of a thirty-something, white mentor. My young neighbors, like Watkins and Coates, did not have the buffer of white privilege or the experience born of already surviving their teens and twenties. My young friends were thrown into violence and oppression that most Americans would find inconceivable.
As much as I'd like to play basketball with Watkins and Coates, and see if I could match their trash talk, I'd never try to compete with their brilliant prose styles. Coates synthesizes the language of social science and journalism with the best of African-American writers such as James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. Watkins's humorous prose is infused with the wit and poetry of the street.
Coates goes in depth into the police shooting of his friend, Prince Jones, in order to explain how and why, "Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all of the fears that marked it from birth." Watkins focuses on the growing casualty count of African-American young men recently killed by police and his much longer list of deceased friends.
Coates celebrates "black strivers" and describes a Howard University reunion as "a Can Reading and Writing Overcome "The Beast Side?" | John Thompson: