i just started reading ‘Between the World and Me’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates, which has been on my to-read pile for a while now.

It is written in the form of a series of letters between him and his son and speaks into race in America and beyond.

This is another book well worth reading, especially as someone trying to understand more the race dynamics of our day and age.

This extract jumped out at me:

‘The black diaspora was not just our own world, but, in so many ways, the Western World itself.

Now, the heirs of those Virginia planters could never directly acknowledge this legacy or reckon with its power. And so that beauty that Malcolm pledged us to protect, black beauty, was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and The Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts” – first black five-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor – always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West was white.

This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when – only that I was already at Howard “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was “white,” and so Tolstoy “mattered,” like everything else that was white “mattered.” And this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilisation. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilised, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

Contrary to this theory, I had Malcolm. I had my mother and father. I had my readings of every issue of The Source and Vibe. I read them not merely because I loved black music – I did – but because of the writing itself. Writers Greg Tate, Chairman Mao, dream hampton – barely older than me – were out there creating a new language, one that I intuitively understood, to analyse our art, our world. This was, in and of itself, an argument for the weight and beauty of our culture and thus of our bodies. And now each day, out on the Yard, I felt this weight and saw this beauty, not just as a matter of theory, but also as demonstrable fact. And I wanted desperately to communicate this evidence to the world, because I felt – even if I did not completely know – that the larger culture’s erasure of black beauty was intimately connected to the destruction of black bodies.

What was required was a new story, a new history told through the lens of our struggle.’ [pg 43]

Wow. Sho. This stuff is so good.

Get hold of the book. Read the rest of it. Wake yourself up. And then share it with someone else.

[For more passages from Ta-Nehisi Coates and this book, click here]

Ta-Nehisi Coates