HAF book club: January poll and discussion

[Sandra Craft]

Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani:  Inspired by James Baldwin's 1963 classic The Fire Next Time, Ta-Nehisi Coates's new book, Between the World and Me, is a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today...[a] powerful and passionate book...  [written as a letter from father to son]

Genesis: The Scientific Quest for Life's Origin, by Robert M. Hazen
Life on Earth arose nearly 4 billion years ago, bursting forth from air, water, and rock. Though the process obeyed all the rules of chemistry and physics, the details of that original event pose as deep a mystery as any facing science. How did non-living chemicals become alive? While the question is (deceivingly) simple, the answers are unquestionably complex. Science inevitably plays a key role in any discussion of life's origins, dealing less with the question of why life appeared on Earth than with where, when, and how it emerged on the blasted, barren face of our primitive planet.

The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf
The acclaimed author of Founding Gardeners reveals the forgotten life of Alexander von Humboldt, the visionary German naturalist whose ideas changed the way we see the natural world—and in the process created modern environmentalism.

Levels of Life, by Julian Barnes
Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, this is a book about "ballooning, photography, love, and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart". 

Miss Leavitt's Stars: the untold story of the woman who discovered how to measure the universe, by George Johnson. 
The sub-title says it all.

[Sandra Craft]

I'm glad to see "Between the World and Me" is in the top running -- I've been wanting to get to that finally.

[Davin]

Looks like that is the one we're going to be reading. I'm looking forward to this one.

[Sandra Craft]

Looks like that is the one we're going to be reading. I'm looking forward to this one.

Me too, I've read a lot of good reviews.

[Sandra Craft]

Well, I finished it and what I understood of it I generally agreed with and I think I would have agreed with most of it except the rather poetic style of Coates' writing had me sometimes questioning if I really understood what he meant.  Have no idea whether this is an expression of my white privilege or my lifelong struggle with nuance or both.  Probably both.

Coates provides a worm's eye view of growing up under the constant threat of violence from both within and without, and shows how even the violence in the home and neighborhood can be traced to the psychological and physical violence of systemic racism.  As with most worm's eye view of things, it can be a gut-wrenching experience and I can see how many people who've never experienced anything like it could truly find it impossible to believe.  Altho I think that anyone, however otherwise privileged, who's endured an abusive childhood will readily recognize elements of it and be able to extrapolate what a family can do to a despised relative to what a whole society can do to a despised group.

This book is written as a letter to his teenage son, as he tries to explain his experiences in life, many of which he has come to understand only because of his son's birth:

"Now at night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our American generations, took me.  Now I personally understood my father and the old mantra -- 'Either I can beat him or the police'.  I understood it all -- the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch.  Black people love their children with a kind of obsession.  You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.  I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made.  That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket.  It was only after you that I understood this love, that I understood the grip of my mother's hand.  She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human  but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of 'race', imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods.  The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed.  The typhoon will not bend under indictment."

And this:

"So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason.  All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys and black girls to 'be twice as good', which is to say 'accept half as much'.  These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket.  This is how we lose our softness.  This is how they steal our right to smile.  No one told those little white children, with their tricycles, to be twice as good. [actually, white girls are told that in reference to our rights compared to those of men]  I imagined their parents tell them to take twice as much.  It seemed to me that our own rules redoubled plunder.  It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered."

You see I did have a quibble there.  Another quibble I had was in Coates' description of an incident that occurred when he and his then 4-yr old son were walking thru a crowd, and a white woman pushed his dawdling son out of the way.  Naturally enough he yelled at her for it (what parent wouldn't) and the flack started to fly:

"I turned and spoke to this woman, and my words were hot with all of the moment and all of my history.  She shrunk back, shocked.  A white man standing nearby spoke up in her defense. I experienced this as his attempt to rescue the damsel from the beast.  He had made no such attempt on behalf of my son."

I've come up against that before, people of color taking offense at what they see as the white knight rescuing the damsel.  I kind of understand where it comes from (white folks ganging up on us again, white women being spared any consequence for bad behavior) but on the other hand it seems to me a perfectly normal reaction being villainized. 

In this case, while the woman was unquestionably in the wrong for pushing a little kid and deserved to be called on it, the man defending her didn't necessarily see what had caused the problem between her and Coates.  There was a crowd, 4-yr olds are well below eye level and he probably didn't look around until the shouting started and only knew that a man was yelling at a woman, not why.  It's a leap to assume he was defending the woman in preference to the kid, and if Coates explained to the man why he was angry he doesn't mention it in this account.

But that isn't even my main problem with the anger over white men defending white women -- in every case I've read about, the man was defending someone (whether a stranger on the street or a colleague) he believed was being unjustly treated and isn't that something we would all do, or at least we hope we'd do under the circumstances?  Surely Coates would come to the defense of a black woman being targeted by some random angry white man? 

In any case, I consider this one of those difficult but must read books, like Elie Weisel's "Night". 

[Davin]

I finished this at lunch today.

I had a problem getting by all the body ownership stuff in the first half of the book. The author seemed to really want to drive that home. So much that is seemed like being discriminated against based on race removes most of the blame for bad behaviors. I see that there is plenty of blame to go around, but once one is an adult, they are responsible for their own actions. There is understanding to be had for making bad decisions in bad situations, and that should be taken into consideration. However to absolve people of blame, or to never say that one understands the circumstances but the bad choices results in more harm... or pretty much anything other than essentially saying, "they come from systematic racism, so their choices aren't really theirs."

That might be my white privilege showing. I've made bad decisions in bad situations, and they were my decisions. If due to my situation I have only a few bad options and I choose the worst, that's partly on me. If I choose the best of the available options and it still turns out bad for me, that's on things outside of my control.

I agree with the book on most other parts. Until the systemic racism is corrected, we can't expect people to pay into a system that cheats them out of what they are entitled to.

Otherwise, I liked the book. It was a detailed view of racism that didn't pull any cheap shots and didn't hold back. It invoked feelings all over the board.

Like Sandra Craft, I also found parts to be so vague that even after re-reading them I still didn't understand what the meaning was.