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Dec 12, 2020joe_strnad rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
This is a must read. Coates tackles the issues of race in the US. Tracing the issues of today back through Civil Rights, Jim Crow, Reconstruction, the Civil War, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. However, this book is deeply personal as his teenage son is the intended audience. We are lucky enough to see Coates bare his heart and share his life and experiences with the reader. He must write this for his son, in an attempt to explain why the killers of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin walk free. Coates also criticizes those who accept the rules of whiteness and who attempt to emulate it for their own profit and security. "The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing. And it became clear that this was not just for the dreams concocted by Americans to justify themselves but also for the dreams that I had conjured to replace them. I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself. " Coates is criticizing the illusion of the "American Dream." (At first I thought he meant MLK's I-had-a-dream speech. But he is attacking the very ideal of American exceptionalism.) "A society almost necesarily begins every success story with the chapter that most advantages itself, and in America, these precipitating chapters are almost always rendered as the singular actions of indiviudals... This is also a myth. On intolerance and hate: "I am black and have been plundered, maybe I would take another human's body to confirm myself in a community. Perhaps I already had. Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed by the tribe." "The spirit and soul are the body and the brain, which are destructible - that is precisely why they are so precious." "Black-on-black crime is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting... To yell 'black-on-black crime' is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding." "l saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intend on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do."