Slavery 1619 – 1863-> 244 years [The First shipment of 94 involuntary migrants from Africa arrived in Jamestown, VA in 1619 94 healthy men, women and children were bought and sold like chattel. By 1860's there were 4 million contributing to the wealth and power of the USA e.g. 4 million bales of cotton were produced annually. About the time the Constitution was adopted in the final state Rhode Island in 1790 about 4,000 bales of cotton were produced and 700,000 involuntary migrants from Africa were being bought and sold like one of the bales of cotton. VM
In September of 1864, as the American Civil War approached its conclusion, a slave-turned-soldier named Spotswood Rice wrote the following furious letter to his former owner, Katherine Diggs, and sternly warned her that she would soon be seeing him again: he was returning to Missouri, together with a thousand-strong army of black soldiers, to rescue his still-enslaved children. His anger is almost palpable.
Indeed, Spotswood Rice was reunited with his family some months later, although it's unknown whether a showdown with Diggs occurred. Interestingly, Mary, the daughter mentioned in the letter, was interviewed as part of the Federal Writers' Project in 1937.
Transcript follows.
(Source: National Archives, via Jeremy Higgins — click on the images below for larger versions; Image above, of Company E, 4th United States Colored Infantry in 1864, via Wikipedia.)
Resource Materials
A.1.
Civil War- Ken Burns
Sources: Source: National Archives, via Jeremy Higgins — click on the images below for larger versions; Image above, of Company E, 4th United States Colored Infantry in 1864, via Wikipedia.)
Transcript of Letter written by a slave Mr. Spotswood Rice who joined the 67th Regiment to Plantation Owner who held in captivity his daughter Mary
September3,1864
From:
Spotswood Rice To Kittey Diggs {Katherine}
“…you will then know how to talk to me I will assure that and you will know how to talkritetoo”
I received a leteter from Cariline telling me that you say I tried to steal to plunder my child away from you now I want you to understand that mary is my Child and she is a God given rite of my own and you may hold on to hear as long as you can but I want you to remembor this one thing that the longor you keep my Child from me the longor you will have to burn in hell and the quicker you’ll get there for we are now makeing up about one thoughs and black troops to Come up through and wont to come through Glasgow and when we come wo be to Copperhood rabbels and to the Slaveholding rebbels for we dont expect to leave them there root near branch but we think however that we that have Children in the hands of you devils we will try your virtues the day that we enter Glasgow I want you to understand kittey diggs that where ever you and I meets we are enemies to each other I offered once to pay you forty dollars for my own Child but I am glad now that you did not accept it Just hold on now as long as you can and the worse it will be for you you never in you life befor I came down hear did you give Children any thing not eny thing whatever not even a dollers worth of expencs now you call my children your pro[per]ty not so with me my Children is my own and I expect to get them and when I get ready to come after mary I will have bout a powrer and autherity to bring hear away and to exacute vengencens on them that holds my Child you will then know how to talke to me I will assure that and you will know how to talk rite too I want you now to just hold on to hear if you want to iff your conchosence tells thats the road go that road and what it will brig you to kittey diggs I have no fears about geting mary out of your hands this whole Government gives chear to me and you cannot help your self
2
The Americans: Daniel J. Boorstin. Published for the History Book Club by Random House 1965
Especially Chapter Four- The Rooted and Up-Rooted : Southerners- White and Black.
3
The Social Determinants of health – The Solid Facts- 2nd edition. Edited by Richard Wilkinson and Sir Michael Marmot
4
The Social Determinants of Mental Health- I Edition, Edited by Michael Compton and Ruth Shim
APA Publishing 2015
5
The CMS Equity Plan for Improving Quality in Medicare-CMS, Office of Minority Health, September 2015
6
Mental Health: Culture, Race, and Ethnicity: A Supplement to Mental Health: A Report of the Surgeon General.
Chapter 2 Culture Counts: The Influence of Culture and Society on Mental Health
7
ANRV296-PS58-09 ARI 21 November 2006 18:3
Race, Race-Based Discrimination, and Health Outcomes Among African Americans
Vickie M. Mays, Susan D. Cochran, and Namdi W. Barnes
8
Constructing Inequality
City Spaces and Architecture of Citizenship
Susan Bickford
Political Theory, Vol 28, No 3, June 2000, 357-376
9
Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life, Brief Edition, Fourth Edition David Newman - DePauw University. Especially Chapter 11, Architecture of Inequality- Race and Culture.
10
Medscape Psychiatry > Strakowski on Psychiatry Racial Disparity in Mental Illness: Advice for Clinicians
Stephen M. Strakowski, MD, PhD July 02, 2015
11
Response of COHE/ CTMCHP to RFI- Soliciting Input into the NIH. Science Vision for Health Disparities Research Issued by NIMHD
B. BOOK REVIEW
1a
‘Negroland’ by Margo Jefferson
By Donna Bailey Nurse GLOBE CORRESPONDENT SEPTEMBER 05, 2015
While a student at University High in Chicago in the early 1960s, Margo Jefferson was introduced to the essays of James Baldwin. The future New York Times drama critic and Pulitzer Prize winner was struck by passages in “Notes of a Native Son’’:
“ ‘One must say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds.’
‘One’: a pronoun even more adroitly insidious than ‘we.’ An ‘I’ made ubiquitous. ‘Our’: say it slowly, voluptuously. Baldwin has coupled and merged us in syntactical miscegenation.’’
Jefferson devotes the first chapters of her memoir to explaining the secret of that group’s success, which has a lot to do with the privileges their light skin bestowed. Like Betsey Keating, for example, who was freed by her master before giving birth to his five children. He died leaving money to educate his black sons, setting them up for the future.
She also tells of a biracial slave named Frances Jackson Coppin whose aunt purchased her freedom. Eventually Frances was able to work, save money, and attend Oberlin College. These mostly mixed-race blacks became teachers, writers, artisans, and abolitionists. They were careful to intermarry, establishing a color line between themselves and darker members of the race.
Jefferson herself is a descendant of slaves and slave masters from Kentucky, Virginia, and Mississippi, individuals who clawed their way into the elite milieu she calls Negroland. “In Negroland we thought of ourselves as the Third Race,” Jefferson writes, “poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasions.”
“Negroland” is quite a title, celebrating an era when “Negro’’ was in vogue, while slyly asserting the word’s Uncle Tom properties. Negroland sounds like Neverland, or maybe Disneyland, any fantastic, childish realm outside reality. And indeed, Jefferson’s tone is playful; her voice witty and detached, as if she were speaking from both inside and outside her own black story.
This arch tone eventually gives way to a jazzy bebop line that conveys the sweet security of a happy, privileged childhood. (Privilege is a word that crops up again and again.) Jefferson was born in Chicago in 1947 to the head of pediatrics at the nation’s oldest black hospital and his socialite wife. This glamorous couple raised their children in the better black neighborhoods, enrolling them in enriched programs at overwhelmingly white schools and in extracurricular activities like drama, music, and dance.
The mother’s goal for the daughters was culture and cultivation, beauty and feminine grace. And above all achievement, not for its own sake, of course, but for the goal of winning the right, light mate to perpetuate the third race.
From childhood on Jefferson participates in dramatic productions like “The King and I,’’ “My Fair Lady,’’ and “Iolanthe.’’ While simultaneously, the mind of the critic evolves. She absorbs the running commentary on black people around the house and in magazines like Ebony, Look, and Life. Though why she ultimately chooses journalism over drama is not made clear.
At one point this supremely balanced woman questions her mental state, meditating on Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf.’’ Only for Jefferson the rainbow is no longer enough. This curious chapter seems to interrogate seminal moments in black women’s writing: the scene in “Beloved’’ when Baby Suggs clutches a patch of pink and the image of Celie seeking solace in the color purple. Jefferson asks: At what cost to black women come these scraps of joy? The idea of a truly equal feminism gives her hope.
Among other things, “Negroland’’ is a veritable library of African-American letters and a sumptious compendium of elegant style. The stunning photo on the cover features a glamorous woman in white gloves, a sparkling bracelet, and a gold braid suit. We have only a partial view of her face — only an impression. Which is a good way to describe Jefferson’s unusual prose style throughout. She paints her rich inner and outer landscape with deft, impressionistic strokes. It’s a technique that disrupts convention — which is her privilege after all.
B. 1 b.
Negroland
By Margo Jefferson
256 pages; Pantheon
Available at: Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | iBooks
In her powerful memoir and social history, Negroland, Margo Jefferson identifies and deftly explores the tensions that come with being a part of America’s black elite. Jefferson recalls her childhood in Chicago as a member of the “Third Race,” the upper-class black folk who are inhabitants of “Negroland”: “a small region of Negro America where the residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.” They were a different kind of black, never quite fitting anywhere but among themselves. “Inside the race we were the self-designated aristocrats, educated, affluent, accomplished; to Caucasians we were oddities, underdogs and interlopers.”
We meet Negroland antebellum founders, many of whom rose from slavery to become professionals and leaders. Jefferson writes of the civic organizations and leaders. Jefferson writes of the civic organizations that sealed membership in this world, among them the Divine Nine Greek organizations, the Boulé, and Jack and Jill. Using short riffs alternating with longer meditations, she reveals all that it takes to be a citizen of this rarefied group, including the emotional costs of seeking “Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment.”
Negroland is at its searing best when Jefferson turns to her own life and the pressure of being not only excellent and black, but the right kind of black, preferably with skin that is café au lait and a nose like Lena Horne’s that doesn’t flare too much. Equally revelatory are her descriptions of moments when the protective bubble of Negroland is punctured—for instance, when her family travels to Atlantic City and a white hotel clerk, seeing they are black, demotes them to a sub-standard room.
Jefferson also documents her struggle with depression, made more difficult because giving in to it was “a privilege Good Negro Girls had been denied by our history of duty, obligation and discipline. Because our people had endured horrors and prevailed, even triumphed, their descendants should be too strong and too proud for such behavior.”
What emerges is a unique remembrance of a black girlhood shielded by advantage yet expose to bigotry. Negroland exists to this day, but in a culture where it’s necessary to insist that Black Lives Matter, its borders are far from secure.
— Roxane Gay Read more: http://www.oprah.com/book/Negroland#ixzz3kzvPczZd
B. 2
Review: 'Black Man in a White Coat,' by Damon Tweedy
NONFICTION: African-American doctor’s intimate, powerful memoir about the complex intersection of race and health.
By JOSEPH P. WILLIAMS Special to the Star Tribune
SEPTEMBER 5, 2015 — 2:00PM
Given the disparities African-Americans face compared with whites in overall well-being, in treatment by doctors and in treatment of themselves, Dr. Damon Tweedy, an African-American, has built his new memoir on a bleak truth: Being black in America can be hazardous to your health.
Ostensibly a memoir about his journey from working-class roots to Duke University’s elite medical school and into the highly esteemed medical profession, his new book, “Black Man in a White Coat,” is fundamentally a ground-level look at the complex intersection of race and health.
In just under 300 pages, Tweedy lays out what’s pretty well known, at least to anyone who’s paying attention. Studies show that African-Americans tend to die at a substantially earlier age than whites; they’re more likely to suffer from debilitating, chronic and often fatal illnesses — diabetes, hypertension, HIV and AIDS and cancer.
At the same time, other studies show, black patients routinely get unequal treatment in the majority-white medical profession that’s sworn an oath to treat anyone who needs it. Taking that oath as a black doctor in a predominantly white profession, Tweedy writes, means solving the complicated Rubik’s Cube of racism in medicine and in America; a patient’s life can hinge on the result.
The tone is set with an anecdote from his first year at Duke when Tweedy, an insecure public-college graduate, feels the sink-or-swim pressure to compete with med school classmates from privileged Ivy League backgrounds. One of a relative handful of black students, Tweedy feels the sting of racism on the first day of his first class when an elderly white professor thinks he’s a janitor and asks him to change the classroom’s light bulbs.
In med school, Tweedy volunteers at a rural free clinic, where a long line of poor African-American patients haven’t seen a doctor since the last time the monthly clinic was open. As an intern, he witnesses a condescending debate between white caregivers about a pregnant black crack addict. The big picture emerges in an Atlanta emergency room, where he sees how the everyday stress of race and poverty, coupled with a lack of access to quality health care (and subtle bias in treatment), helps to perpetuate disparities between blacks and whites.
At the same time, Tweedy writes of his own “physician, heal thyself” moments.
He acknowledges personal biases treating black and white patients. A personal health crisis forces him to make serious lifestyle changes — something, he writes, not enough African-Americans do to avoid getting sick in the first place. Yet the good doctor also knows he has privileges many don’t, such as a fully stocked neighborhood supermarket and a gym. A visit to a white doctor for a weekend-warrior sports injury gives him firsthand experience with the unequal treatment others received.
Tweedy’s prose isn’t dull, but it’s not flashy, either; readers shouldn’t expect drama ripped from an episode of “Grey’s Anatomy,” and his self-reflection can get a bit distracting. He does, however, make a powerful case on how, in the era of Obamacare and the nation’s first black president, race can still determine who gets sick and lives, or dies.
“By putting human faces on these serious dilemmas,” he writes, “I hope to contribute to a much-needed public dialogue on improving the health of black people.”
Joseph P. Williams, a former assistant managing editor at the Star Tribune, is a senior news editor for U.S. News & World Report in Washington, D.C.
Baker & Taylor
"One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans. When Damon Tweedy begins medical school,he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than whites." Black Man in a White Coat examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of most health problems in the black community. These issues take on greater meaning when Tweedy is himself diagnosed with a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care"--
McMillan Palgrave
One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans
When Damon Tweedy begins medical school,he envisions a bright future where his segregated, working-class background will become largely irrelevant. Instead, he finds that he has joined a new world where race is front and center. The recipient of a scholarship designed to increase black student enrollment, Tweedy soon meets a professor who bluntly questions whether he belongs in medical school, a moment that crystallizes the challenges he will face throughout his career. Making matters worse, in lecture after lecture the common refrain for numerous diseases resounds, "More common in blacks than whites."
Black Man in a White Coat examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural, and economic factors at the root of most health problems in the black community. These issues take on greater meaning when Tweedy is himself diagnosed with a chronic disease far more common among black people. In this powerful, moving, and deeply empathic book, Tweedy explores the challenges confronting black doctors, and the disproportionate health burdens faced by black patients, ultimately seeking a way forward to better treatment and more compassionate care.
B. 3.
NYT
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me’
By MICHELLE ALEXANDERAUG. 17, 2015
For the past several years, I’ve greeted Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essays and blog posts for The Atlantic with nothing short of gratitude. As an African-American, he makes me proud. There is no other way to put it. I do not always agree with him, but it hardly matters. In a media world populated with pundits, so-called experts and public intellectuals driven by ego and familiar agendas, Coates’s voice stands nearly alone — a black man raised in the streets of Baltimore who narrowly escaped the violence that lurked around every corner and dodged the clutches of the prisons and jails that were built for him, and who now speaks unpopular, unconventional and sometimes even radical truths in his own voice, unfiltered. He is invariably humble, yet subtly defiant. And people listen.
So when I heard that Coates had been inspired, after rereading James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time,” to write his own version for the current era, I was overjoyed. As a civil rights lawyer, activist, legal scholar and mother of three black children, I could not wait to read what Coates had to say to black young people at this moment in our history, a time when many are struggling to make sense of how frequently black lives can be destroyed legally through incessant police violence and mass incarceration. I imagined that Coates’s new book would make plain for young people what is truly at stake in the struggle and disabuse them of the prevailing myths that breed complacency, defeatism or inaction. That was what “The Fire Next Time” did for me many years ago (and still does, every time I return to it).
I had to read “Between the World and Me” twice before I was able to decide whether Coates actually did what I expected and hoped he would. He did not. Maybe that’s a good thing.
“The Fire Next Time” was first published in 1963, a time when the prevailing racial order was being challenged by young activists on a scale and with a fervor not seen since the Civil War. The first several pages of the book are styled in the form of a letter to Baldwin’s 15-year-old nephew, offering advice about how to navigate the world he has been born into with black skin. Baldwin implores his nephew to awaken to his own dignity, humanity and power, and accept his responsibility to help “make America what it must become.”
“Between the World and Me” carries a very different message, though it is also written in the form of a letter to a black teenage boy. The boy is Coates’s 15-year-old son, who — like Baldwin’s nephew — is trying to make sense of blatant racial injustice and come to grips with his place in a world that refuses to guarantee for him the freedoms that so many others take for granted.
“I write you in your 15th year,” Coates states in the early pages. “And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. . . . I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself.”
One of the great virtues of both books is that they are not addressed to white people. The usual hedging and filtering and softening and overall distortion that seems to happen automatically — even unconsciously — when black people attempt to speak about race to white people in public is absent.
But here we reach a fork in the road. Baldwin, in writing to his nephew, does not deny the pain and horror of American notions of justice — far from it — but he repeatedly emphasizes the young man’s power and potential and urges him to believe that revolutionary change is possible against all odds, because we, as black people, continue to defy the odds and defeat the expectations of those who seek to control and exploit us.
Coates’s letter to his son seems to be written on the opposite side of the same coin. Rather than urging his son to awaken to his own power, Coates emphasizes over and over the apparent permanence of racial injustice in America, the foolishness of believing that one person can make a change, and the dangers of believing in the American Dream. “Historians conjured the Dream,” Coates writes. “Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories”; Dreamers are the ones who continue to believe the lie, at black people’s expense. In what will almost certainly be the most widely quoted passage, Coates tells his son: “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”
Little hope is offered that freedom or equality will ever be a reality for black people in America. “We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.” If his son held out any hope that the emerging racial justice movement on the streets of Ferguson, New York City or Baltimore or beyond might change hearts and minds, Coates seems determined to quash it. “Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: To awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white . . . has done to the world. But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness.”
Still, Coates urges his son to struggle. “Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. . . . But do not struggle for the Dreamers. . . . Do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle for themselves.” He says this even as he notes that the Dreamers are actively building the deathbed for us all. Technology has freed the Dreamers “to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself.”
I will confess that after the first reading of “Between the World and Me” I was disappointed. Initially I was enthralled by Coates’s characteristic brilliance and insight, as well as the poetic manner in which he addresses his son. I found myself highlighting so much of the text it seemed the whole book was gleaming yellow. But by the end, I was exasperated. Under what conditions could Coates possibly imagine that the Dreamers would wake themselves up or learn to struggle for themselves? When in the history of the world have the privileged and powerful voluntarily relinquished their status or abandoned the tactics that secured their advantage, without being challenged, fought, confronted or inspired to do so by some remarkable example? As Frederick Douglass observed long ago, “Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never did and it never will.”
On the second reading, my frustration diminished. I came to believe that the problem, to the extent there is one, is that Coates’s book is unfinished. He raises numerous critically important questions that are left unanswered.
The biggest question for Coates is rooted in the hidden connection between the American Dream as lived in the suburbs and the violence that ruled his daily life growing up in Baltimore. “Fear ruled everything around me, and I knew, as all black people do, that this fear was connected to the Dream out there, to the unworried boys, to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns nightly beamed into our television sets. But how? Religion could not tell me. The schools could not tell me. The streets could not help me see beyond the scramble of each day. And I was such a curious boy.”
As Coates grew older, attending high school and later Howard University — his personal “Mecca” — the questions sharpened and evolved. When a college friend, Prince Jones, was shot to death by a member of the Prince George’s County Police Department, Coates was overcome with a rage that radicalized him, and new questions flowed. The political apparatus that conspired to deprive Jones of his life was run by black people, a fact he struggled to understand. “The officer who killed Prince Jones was black. The politicians who empowered this officer to kill were black. Many of the black politicians, many of them twice as good, seemed unconcerned. How could this be?”
Reading the book the first time, I imagined that Coates would eventually answer these important questions for his son. He would spell it out — make it plain — the way he does so well in his essays, articles and blog posts. He would carefully define the Dream and delineate the difference between the nearly universal dream that parents have for their children — the dream of good heath, security, quality education and the opportunity to fulfill their potential and make a meaningful contribution — and the insidious Dream that is destroying the lives of children in Baltimore and threatening human existence on the planet itself. I imagined that Coates would explain what it means, exactly, to choose the Struggle over the Dream, and why so many black people, like those in Prince George’s County, find themselves lost in the Dream.
Reading the book the second time, I held no expectation that the big questions would be answered. I knew they wouldn’t be. It seemed that Coates was doing for his son what his own father had done for him: demand that he wrestle with the questions himself. The second time around I could see that maybe, just maybe, this is what is most needed right now — a book that offers no answers but instead challenges us to wrestle with the questions on our own. Maybe this is the time for questioning, searching and struggling without really believing the struggle can be won.
And yet I cannot pretend to be entirely satisfied. Like Baldwin, I tend to think we must not ask whether it is possible for a human being or society to become just or moral; we must believe it is possible. Believing in this possibility — no matter how slim — and dedicating oneself to playing a meaningful role in the struggle to make it a reality focuses one’s energy and attention in an unusual way. Those who believe we are likely or destined to fail — because the Dreamers hold all the power and our liberation is up to them — can easily tell themselves they are “in the struggle” when they show up at a rally with a sign or go on Twitter or Facebook to rant about the police, then do no more. When meaningful change fails to come, they can say, “We tried, but of course nothing happened.” But those who are in it to win it, and who believe in their own power and understand their responsibility to use it wisely, cannot so easily lie to themselves about the utility of random or halfhearted gestures of resistance, rebellion, organizing or consciousness-raising. Greater precision of thought and action is required.
Coates clearly knows the importance of avoiding vagueness or generalization about critical aspects of black experience. In one of the most moving passages of the book he reminds his son: “Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own; whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods. . . . ” He goes on to describe, in stunningly sensitive detail, what slavery means for this particular woman born in a country that celebrates freedom and yet will whip her, rape her and sell her children from an auction block. He admonishes his son that he “must struggle to remember this past in all its nuance, error and humanity.”
Over the years, Coates has repeatedly taken President Obama to task for speaking in the most general terms about what is needed to remedy what ails ghettoized communities, while speaking with great specificity about the alleged moral failures of black people. It seems highly unlikely, in view of all this, that Coates does not appreciate what is lost by failing to describe the Dream with particularity and by declining to offer guidance to his son about what it means, exactly, to embrace the Struggle at this moment in time. Surely the Struggle must mean more than questioning reality at every turn, if there is any hope of breaking once and for all the history and cycle of racial oppression in America.
Perhaps Coates hasn’t yet discovered for himself the answers to the questions he poses in “Between the World and Me.” But I suspect that he is holding out on us. Everything he has ever written leads me to believe he has more to say. He may imagine that we are better off figuring out for ourselves the true nature of the Dream and what it means to be engaged in meaningful Struggle. But I believe we could only benefit from hearing what answers Coates may have fashioned for himself. Whether you agree or disagree, one of the great joys of reading Ta-Nehisi Coates is being challenged in ways you didn’t expect or imagine.