Coates apparently set out to write a book about writing but instead wrote a book about some of the things that haunt him. America. Imperialism. AparthCoates apparently set out to write a book about writing but instead wrote a book about some of the things that haunt him. America. Imperialism. Apartheid. Trump. Our refusal to look our history in the face.
It takes its name from the Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five song of the same name. I remember that song blowing off the top of my head when I was a teenager. A cry for justice and a cry of outrage.
It takes its shape from three trips Coates took, to Senegal, South Carolina, and Israel.
In Senegal, he grieved and wondered. A passage that will haunt me:
“We are, Black people, here and there, victims of the West—a people held just outside its liberal declarations, but kept close enough to be enchanted with its promises. We know the beauty of this house � its limestone steps, its wainscoting, its marble baths. But more, we know the house is haunted, that there is blood in the bricks and ghosts in the attic.� (59)
Always coming home. Never there.
In South Carolina, he went braced for a fight and instead got to celebrate. He sat with a teacher Mary Wood, who was teaching his book, Between the World and Me, at the risk of her job. She had learned the truth from bell hooks. "When she finished, she called her mother and said, 'this is why things are so fucked up.'" (104).
There were parents who condemned Between the World and Me because the injustices it cataloged made them feel bad, which they could not abide.
“We have lived under a class of people who ruled American culture with a flaming cross for so long that we regularly cease to notice the import of being ruled at all. But they do not. And so the Redeemers of this age look out and see their kingdom besieged by trans Barbies, Muslim mutants, daughters dating daughters, sons trick-or-treating as Wakandan kings. The fear instilled by this rising culture is not for what it does today but what it augurs for tomorrow—a different world in which the boundaries of humanity are not so easily drawn and enforced. In this context, the Mom for Liberty shrieking “Think of the children!� must be taken seriously. What she is saying is that her right to the America she knows, her right to the biggest and greenest of lawns, to the most hulking and sturdiest SUVs, to an arsenal of infinite AR-15s, rests on a hierarchy, on an order, helpfully explained and sanctified by her country’s ideas, art, and methods of education.� (109)
But allies stepped up. A sweet interlude, for all the statutes of confederate war heroes and book bans.
The third essay, which is the bulk of the book, concerns is trip to Israel. He starts with a vivid description of visiting the Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. (115-21). It includes, among so much else, The Book of Names -- the names of millions of victims of the holocaust, in man sized books. He details some of the stories and artifacts there, including the story of the Struma. The Struma carried 781 Jews out of certain death in Romania. They were turned away from the British Mandate. All but one died. (119). This will haunt me.
He goes on to catalog how he begins to see an analogy between Blacks in America and Palestinians in Israel. He describes their treatment as apartheid and makes a serious case for it; internal passports; residence permits; regularly being forced off their land and into small enclaves. I do not know enough to evaluate his conclusion, but I will say that those reviews I have read that have condemned Coates as anti-Semitic for reaching that conclusion have made no effort to refute it.
While he was there, he was guided for a while by Avner Gvaryahu and Yehuda Shaul of Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israeli military veterans who are horrified by the work they have done in the occupied territories. This section has a passage that I felt like a physical weight:
When I was young, I felt the physical weight of race constantly. We had less. Our lives were more violent. And whether by genes, culture, or divine judgment, this was said to be our fault. The only tool to escape this damnation—for a lucky few—was school. Later I went out into the world and saw the other side, those who allegedly, by genes, culture, or divine judgment, had more but—as I came to understand—knew less. These people, white people, were living under a lie. More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had—but not more of humanity itself. Most stunningly, I realized that they were deeply ignorant of their own country’s history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how far their country could fall. A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock. The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.� But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else. I could hear that same pain in Avner’s and Guy’s words. They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.
It ends with the mitzvah to save the world. (232)
So much will haunt me. “The late Jamal Khashoggi was fond of the Arabic proverb 'Say your word, then leave.'� (90). May we be forgiven.
Small glimpses into the life in and around the concentration camps we built when America forced more thaHaunting and elegant, full of grief and rage.
Small glimpses into the life in and around the concentration camps we built when America forced more than a 100,000 people to leave almost everything behind and live in concentration camps based on their race.
Each piece is short and each one packs a punch. The book carries the reader from Japanese folks coming to American through Pearl Harbor, registration, incarceration, internment, the draft, resistance, resettlement, the court cases and legal action that acknowledged the wrong, Michelle Malkin's horrible revisionist history, to the repeat of history we are teetering on the edge of.
The last lines of the book make me ache.
To be an American is a privilege I appreciate . . . and if there's one thing I've learned, its that American needs to unburden itself too.
The government was wrong to single us out for exclusion based solely on our race. It was wrong then, and it would be wrong now.
And whenever we see America turn against a people because of their race, or their religion, or their whatever, we won't just stand by. We won't just go along.
I will speak up.
I will see that every person gets a fair hearing.
Stop repeating history.
Never again is now.
I will be the friend we didn't have when we needed one the most.
It happened to us. We refuse to let it happen again. (287)
A good history book masquerading as a “you’re wrong about� text, I suspect because those are popular than history books. Reminds me just how bad BaronA good history book masquerading as a “you’re wrong about� text, I suspect because those are popular than history books. Reminds me just how bad Baron von Mises was....more
Searing little book by someone who has tried to struggle herself into existence within a system that denies her existence to her. Cathy Park Hong was Searing little book by someone who has tried to struggle herself into existence within a system that denies her existence to her. Cathy Park Hong was born to immigrants -- refugees? -- from Korea who came here in the wake of our country's imperial adventures there. As we do not welcome the strangers we help create and she grew up bullied, shamed, beaten, and enrolled in America's constant struggle between the values it expresses and the lived reality it creates.
"Minor Feelings" refers to the cognitive dissonance between the world America proclaims and the world we make. As she puts it:
“Minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance. You are told, "Things are so much better," while you think, Things are the same. You are told, "Asian Americans are so successful," while you feel like a failure. This optimism sets up false expectations that increase these feelings of dysphoria. (56)
and
Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest. When minor feelings are finally externalized, they are interpreted as hostile, ungrateful, jealous, depressing, and belligerent, affects ascribed to racialized behavior that whites consider out of line. Our feelings are overreactions because our lived experiences of structural inequity are not commensurate with their deluded reality. (57)
Hong recognizes that she has been enrolled in America's traumas and dramas just by being here. For example:
When I hear the phrase “Asians are next in line to be white,� I replace the word “white� with “disappear.� Asians are next in line to disappear. We are reputed to be so accomplished, and so law-abiding, we will disappear into this country’s amnesiac fog. We will not be the power but become absorbed by power, not share the power of whites but be stooges to a white ideology that exploited our ancestors. This country insists that our racial identity is beside the point, that it has nothing to do with being bullied, or passed over for promotion, or cut off every time we talk. Our race has nothing to do with this country, even, which is why we’re often listed as “Other� in polls and why we’re hard to find in racial breakdowns on reported rape or workplace discrimination or domestic abuse.
It’s like being ghosted, I suppose, where, deprived of all social cues, I have no relational gauge for my own behavior. I ransack my mind for what I could have done, could have said. I stop trusting what I see, what I hear. My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish. (35)
I feel that in my bones.
Of course, knowing there's something wriggling at the end of the fork and knowing what to do about it are very different. She doesn't give any solutions. She's describing the problem:
I have to address whiteness because Asian Americans have yet to truly reckon with where we stand in the capitalist white supremacist hierarchy of this country. We are so far from reckoning with it that some Asians think that race has no bearing on their lives, that it doesn’t “come up,� which is as misguided as white people saying the same thing about themselves, not only because of discrimination we have faced but because of the entitlements we’ve been granted due to our racial identity. These Asians are my cousins; my ex-boyfriend; these Asians are myself, cocooned in Brooklyn, caught unawares on a nice warm day, thinking I don’t have to be affected by race; I only choose to think about it. I could live only for myself, for my immediate family, following the expectations of my parents, whose survivor instincts align with this country’s neoliberal ethos, which is to get ahead at the expense of anyone else while burying the shame that binds us. To varying degrees, all Asians who have grown up in the United States know intimately the shame I have described; have felt its oily flame. (86-87)
and
We have been cowed by the lie that we have it good. We keep our heads down and work hard, believing that our diligence will reward us with our dignity, but our diligence will only make us disappear. By not speaking up, we perpetuate the myth that our shame is caused by our repressive culture and the country we fled, whereas America has given us nothing but opportunity. The lie that Asians have it good is so insidious that even now as I write, I’m shadowed by doubt that I didn’t have it bad compared to others. But racial trauma is not a competitive sport. The problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical.
Most white Americans can only understand racial trauma as a spectacle. (78)
A powerful selection of essays. I'm glad I read it.
(I forgot to write down the page number, but I did write down this quote as well:
"Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist." Saw someone pull that move today on twitter. Sigh.)
She doesn't give any solutions. But reading this, I thought a lot about the fact a Black friend of mine told me once that white people created this unjust society and white people need to fix it. I think about that a lot. ...more
I have not read this book since before Obama was president and John Roberts was Chief Justice. The world seemed so different then. I would have said iI have not read this book since before Obama was president and John Roberts was Chief Justice. The world seemed so different then. I would have said it was a truth universally acknowledged that America was born a rich tapestry of utopian ideas of dystopian practices but we were, by acknowledging the dark truths, becoming better.
But now a substantial portion of my fellow citizens are absolutely dedicated to denying that our nation was built on other people's lands using other people's sweat and blood. They want to pretend we have, as a nation, lived up to our creed because we have removed the most racist of our laws.
This book, patiently, with dignity and grace, gives lie to that. I suspect it would be banned by the anti-critical race theory legislation that has infected so many states.
This passage particularly grabbed me:
For too long the depth of racism in American life has been underestimated. The surgery to extract it is necessarily complex and detailed. As a beginning it is important to X-ray our history and reveal the full extent of the disease. The strands of prejudice toward Negroes are tightly wound around the American character. The prejudice has been nourished by the doctrine of race inferiority. Yet to focus upon the Negro alone as the "inferior race" of American myth is to miss the broader dimensions of the evil.
Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode. Our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.
Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations. This is in sharp contrast to many nations south of the border, which assimilated their Indians, respected their culture, and elevated many of them to high position.
It was upon this massive base of racism that the prejudice toward the nonwhite was readily built, and found rapid growth. This long-standing racist ideology has corrupted and diminished our democratic ideals. It is this tangled web of prejudice from which many Americans now seek to liberate themselves, without realizing how deeply it has been woven into their consciousness. (141-42)
I had not remembered at all his story about a gas chamber being used in a southern state in the 1940s. (129). They installed a microphone so they could hear the condemned die. The first person so executed said, as the chamber filled with deadly gas "save me, Joe Lewis," over and over again. This will haunt me.
A short little book that can be read in a few hours. It should be. The text begins with the author deciding to go to jail and ends with a clarion call for reparations. Well worth the time....more
Essays ranging from the brilliant (The Shape of the Narrative of Lord of the Rings) to painful (all the stuff about her parents). She was a wise and cEssays ranging from the brilliant (The Shape of the Narrative of Lord of the Rings) to painful (all the stuff about her parents). She was a wise and curmudgeonly lady who gave us so many good things. ...more
Takes on the idea that nationality is a foundational part of identity. But like so much about identity, it is because we believe it is. Existence precTakes on the idea that nationality is a foundational part of identity. But like so much about identity, it is because we believe it is. Existence precedes essence, absolutely, but the forces that perpetuate themselves shape the way we exist. Sometimes that's torture.
I like his description of the west creating and believing the myth that it's Plato to NATO. (201). I'm startled to learn that Pushkin was the great grandson of an African slave Peter the Great adopted as his godson. (108).
He lost a lot of credibility with me with this: "Did Bertrand Russell have a better life than Mozart? The only sane answer is that Russell was a better philosopher and Mozart a better musician." (178). No. Sir Bertrand Russell had a much better life than Mozart.
Ultimately, this book was dissatisfying. I agree with the central thesis. But so what? Nationality is a recent social construct. Nationalities are formed in opposition to something other. National self images are often full of self deceptions and outright lies. All true. But nationality is also a social construct with tremendous, identity shaping, impacts. Read some Foucault if you want a little deeper dive.
Rages against injustice with outrage and humor. The pages turned. Gave me the warm feeling of recognition. No solutions other than “don’t elect racistRages against injustice with outrage and humor. The pages turned. Gave me the warm feeling of recognition. No solutions other than “don’t elect racists� which seems a good place to start....more
This book begins with Andrew Solomon, then seven, learning about the Holocaust. (1). He kept asking his father questions about how such a thing could This book begins with Andrew Solomon, then seven, learning about the Holocaust. (1). He kept asking his father questions about how such a thing could happen without getting a satisfactory explanation. "Pure evil" was the answer at least. In response, Solomon asked "Why didn't those Jews just leave when things got bad?"
His father responded "They had nowhere to go."
"My notion of absolute safety at home crumbled then and there. I would leave before the walls closed around the ghetto, before the train tracks were completed, before teh borders were sealed. If genocide ever threatened midtown Manhattan, I would be all set to father up my passport and head to some place where they'd be glad to have me." (1-2).
It ends with brutal homophobia in Ghana, brutal homophobia and anti-Romani prejudice in Romania, and the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. While the text does not make it explicit, Solomon's drive to travel -- to have a way to escape -- has not save hundreds of thousands of people who have died in my lifetime because they live in places where a critical mass of people and power do not want them.
Along the way we touch on murderous oppression in South Africa, a lovely safari in Zambia, a partially failed trip to Antarctica, and much much more.
I liked it. I'm impressed that so many of the pieces were written for travel and leisure magazines. But it always felt like the author was right at the verge of saying something deep and powerful about the world and our American place in it, and he never actually did.
Powerful little book. Explores the consequences of the fact that racism arose to justify treating people as things. Elegant and disturbing. Well worthPowerful little book. Explores the consequences of the fact that racism arose to justify treating people as things. Elegant and disturbing. Well worth the time....more
This is a woman who got Wil Wheaton to collate papers for her. Not papers that need collating. She just wanted to see him collate papers.
Most of the This is a woman who got Wil Wheaton to collate papers for her. Not papers that need collating. She just wanted to see him collate papers.
Most of the essays are laugh out loud funny. They are punctuated by bits about just how hard it is go get good mental health care (and sometimes winter heat) in this country.
Would have made a great bus book for the later busses, when people don't mind if you're laughing. ...more
Gorgeous collection of meditations on the Black experience in the USA focused on food. Lots of fascinating essays. Not many recipes. Definitely not veGorgeous collection of meditations on the Black experience in the USA focused on food. Lots of fascinating essays. Not many recipes. Definitely not vegan....more
Asserts that we live in a world of argument and interpretive communities, not of flesh. Pity this busy monster. There is no way to the hell of a good Asserts that we live in a world of argument and interpretive communities, not of flesh. Pity this busy monster. There is no way to the hell of a good universe next door.
This is not a book about winning arguments. It describes some that won, for a time -- Satan in the garden, the Glorious Revolution, Lawrence v. Texas, Trump in 2016. Seems to suggest that if you can go to pathos, go to pathos. Ethos and logos only have a shot in small, bounded, communities. He might be right.
The prose is beautiful. "[T]here can never be a 'clean' inauguration of a state, an inauguration that is innocent of illegitimate force. There is always a bleeding head (and beneath that, another), no matter how many pieces of paper have been piled on top of it in an effort to erase it from history. Moreover, as Harvell reminds us in the poem's [An Horation Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland, 1650] closing lines, a state founded by a declaration without ground can maintain itself only by endlessly shoring up its nonfoundation." (94-95).
But the content . . . I've seen the good ideas in his previous books. As for the rest? I can't say it's just classical liberalism that seems profoundly irritated that holocaust denial and intelligent design have been banished from the interpretive community. But I can't say that it's not. ...more
A time capsule from the pre-Trump time. I read most of these essays in their native format, back in the day. Today, they feel weirdly cramped. Like thA time capsule from the pre-Trump time. I read most of these essays in their native format, back in the day. Today, they feel weirdly cramped. Like the author had needful things to say but pulled the punch to avoid alienating her readers. To avoid triggering the action that would lead to the last four years.
She didn't know about President Trump back in those (comparatively) halcyon times. She didn't know about COVID-19. Or even Cosby. But she knew about racism, anti-immigrant fever, sexual violence, the power of stories, the heartbreak of stories, our weird relationship with patriarchy-reifying cultural tropes, and white-supremacy reifying respectability politics. She knew "For ever step forward, there is some asshoel shoving progress back." (167) So maybe she did.
A great last line: "I am a bad feminist. I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all." (318). Me too. ...more
Has some gems in it. "Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it." (22). "Myths are compost." Has some gems in it. "Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it." (22). "Myths are compost." (55) "And now I'm occupying the awkward zone that one finds oneself in between receiving one's first lifetime achievement award and death, and I realize that I have much less to say than I did when I was young." (192-93). "I found a dog by the side of the road who rescued me." (384).
But as a Gaiman fan who counts the fact hugged me once as one of my life time achievements (and Larry Tribe likes something I wrote), I'd read almost everything, and some favorite bits of nonfiction I'd like to go back to aren't in here. That was disappointing.
Probably a great bathroom book. Not a great bus book.
7/18/2021 I liked it better the second time, maybe because I'm getting better at skipping essays about things I know nothing about. The last two essays, one about a refugee camp, the other about Terry Pratchett, then dying, are more searing than I remember. There is a lot of insight about loving and about telling stories in the shadow of death.
Begins and ends with rage. The rage of a man who knows we should better, and knows we aren’t. I read it in two breathless sittings, reading large passBegins and ends with rage. The rage of a man who knows we should better, and knows we aren’t. I read it in two breathless sittings, reading large passages out loud to my husband and my dogs.
He could have structured this book to leave me warm and comfortable, delighted that there is another humanist out there, and one who can speak such poetry. He didn’t.
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