The Atlantic’s Coates evokes spirit of James Baldwin
Being black or brown or anything other than white in a country like Canada, it can be difficult to not feel like you’re living two lives. You are hyperaware of perception and the ways in which imagination can be used against you and how the narratives of others are often completely at odds with what you know to be true about yourself.
There are moments of peace with friends, and maybe family, the people for whom you don’t have to preface certain thoughts, ideas and cultural references. But to be a Canadian citizen and a “minority” means accepting a bipolar existence as fact.
Writing specifically about the African-American experience, pre-eminent thinker W.E.B. Du Bois termed this phenomenon of multiple social identities as “double consciousness.”
More than a century later, black people and immigrants still navigate life in western societies in this way. Today we have a term for how one’s language and behaviour may shift between social settings: it’s called “code switching.” Post-racialism can only really make sense when these lines are blurred; when white is not default and multiplicity isn’t deviant. To be able to be black or brown and Canadian without being made to feel insane is the goal.
The work of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic and burgeoning public intellectual, gives weight to this modern political identity. For many, Coates’s name, and news of his new book Between the World and Me, inspires excitement, curiosity and a knowing nod. His work, which can be divisive, is crucial reading for people of all races, particularly at a time when the U.S. especially is blithely exposing its own deep-rooted violence toward the black citizenry.
Perforating double consciousness is at the root of this, his second book and an epistolary memoir written for his son, Samori. Early in his education, Coates was preoccupied with establishing a narrative that centralized his own very real experiences of being black in the United States, while reanimating centuries of narrative, mythology and history that had been rendered invisible by the construction of racial hierarchy.
Coates looked for his own Leo Tolstoy because, he writes, “Tolstoy was ‘white,’ and so Tolstoy ‘mattered,’ like everything else that was white ‘mattered.’? It was an attempt at heaving the overwhelming evidence (Malcolm X, rap music, the 16th-century Central African ruler Queen Nzinga, Howard’s thriving black quad) at a world that erased or siloed knowledge as form of power.
So while this book does address many of the contemporary issues covered in his essays and journalism for The Atlantic — such as economic and social inequity and police brutality — its underlying thesis, and maybe the only actionable solution other than outright revolution, is that we need to consolidate our consciousness. It is important for racialized people — particularly black people living in white, Western societies — to ensconce themselves in mirroring communities for both intellectual refuge and emotional sustenance. Not to hide, but as fortification against inescapable oppression. “I would not have you descend into your own dream,” Coates writes to his son. “I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”
This is not a book for those who need to be convinced of the magnanimous depths of racism. It’s intended to reinforce what Samori already knows on account of being his father’s son — what he knows about the colour of his own skin, and about white men who kill black men going free.
It is difficult reading, but that’s what makes it necessary. Coates lays out the foundation for statesanctioned violence that has persisted in hunting down and criminalizing black people for hundreds of years, and in doing so he illuminates the idea that double consciousness is just a symptom of a society in which one group — the historically oppressed — is just waiting for rest to catch up to the fundamental truth of “civilization.”
This book dismantles the intense isolation that accompanies double consciousness as if to say, “you are not alone with these thoughts.”
It builds on the work of the African-American intellectual canon, from Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X to Mobb Deep. And it also exposes Coates’s weak spots:
He writes about overcoming his early homophobia, while reviews from some critics, such as Buzzfeed’s Shani Hilton, have singled out his continued blind spot toward the experiences and perspectives of black women.
But he wouldn’t be who he is — a reluctant beacon of modern black thought, a font of communal vitriol and empathy — without being somewhat of a masochist, the thinker-out-loud unafraid to be right and wrong.
What James Baldwin did for one generation — exposing the forces that continue to atrophy large swaths of society — Coates attempts for his son, but in 2015 he is one voice corroborating a larger idea.
I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.