lightreads

Between the World and Me

5/5. Part autobiography, part cultural essay, part history, part intimate family letter.

I am not going to do this justice today (I am sick. Again. Again). So straight out, this is the most extraordinary book I've read in a while. It is a letter to his son, and walks that line of intimacy while also acknowledging the performativity of, you know, being a published book. It is a memoir of coming to intellectual and racial consciousness, and a study of white-on-black violence, and a distillation of several years of his thinking, as will be familiar to his regular readers. I read this very purposefully not trying to analogize it. Like a lot of people, my experience of other kinds of oppression has made it easier to start getting my head around racial oppression, but that only gets you so far and at a certain point, you've got to stop drawing lines and start confronting the thing as it is. I passed that point a while ago, though I didn't realize it in a timely fashion.

So I deliberately read this while working to read it as just itself: a book about race. A book, very specifically, about the violence in racism, the purposeful and systematic destruction of black bodies.* Which worked until it didn't, until about three quarters of the way through when he told a story of responding with sudden, unexpected rage to a white woman's microaggression. And it was just – that moment when you get so angry, and you know, you know your anger will do nothing, that the people around you will do anything to not hear you, and you know your anger is actually counterproductive because of that, because they have made it counterproductive for you to be anything other than silent and accepting, and that just makes you madder, and you are just a tiny cog in the bigger machine that is eating people, this microaggression is one of millions and it doesn't fucking matter, except it's also everything.

Yeah, I don't know, I couldn't just read this book as about race then. Which is a disservice to it. But also why it is so good.

Anyway. Yeah. Read it.

P.s. The audiobook is read by the author, and in my opinion, that adds a great deal to the text.

*There is an argument to be made that racism – the program of destruction of the black body (by police, prisons, poverty) – can be analogized to ablism – the program of destruction of the disabled body (by doctors, institutionalization, and poverty). Go find a news article about a parent killing their disabled child. Go on, they're very easy to find. It happens all the time. Go see if the parent got convicted of murder, let alone even charged. Go read the justifications. Take the temperature of the article. Come away with that sense, unspoken but clear, that it wasn't really murder, that you can kind of understand, how much pressure that parent must have been under, how awful for everyone. Go on, I'll wait. Thus are lives discounted. So yeah, the analogy can be made, and has been I'm sure, by better scholars than I. But I'm realizing more and more that it's of limited help. Violence may be violence, but context is not context is not context.

...

And there's the last book by a man I'll be reading for a year. Hell of a way to go out, too.