For recommendations on future material, suggestions on how to improve the club, or just a general rant, feel free to PM me. 
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Just started reading this. Lovely writing. Implying race isn't real? Plan to follow up with Beloved, The Invisible Man and The Color Purple.
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Aug 3, 2015 06:40
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The Politico review linked from the OP calls the brief 9/11 passage "monstrous." It's not. It's really good, it's Coates writing according to his injunction to "not struggle for the Dreamers [...] not pin your struggle on their conversion." Throw the rightwingers a giftwrapped bone that lets them dismiss the whole book out of hand, because it's not aimed at them anyway. But while the audience in this thread probably isn't too fazed by "insufficient 9/11 worship," presumably it's still a predominantly white audience, so before getting into specifics I'm curious how people react to it in a broad sense: given that the book is explicitly unconcerned with trying to "convert" white America, and given that formally it has an audience of one (his son), what do y'all think the point is? And re: "references and further reading" above, one very obvious/relevant one is Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow.
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Aug 3, 2015 10:25
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thehomemaster posted:Just started reading this. Switch out Color Purple for Native Son or Go Tell it on the Mountain
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Aug 3, 2015 13:16
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Grimson posted:But while the audience in this thread probably isn't too fazed by "insufficient 9/11 worship," presumably it's still a predominantly white audience, so before getting into specifics I'm curious how people react to it in a broad sense: given that the book is explicitly unconcerned with trying to "convert" white America, and given that formally it has an audience of one (his son), what do y'all think the point is? He had an interesting comment on twitter that more or less acknowledged he knew people would use it against him, but he felt it would be unfair to his own craft to ignore it. Personally, I think the point is how his personal tragedy and the intimacy of the injustice behind it ended up overshadowing the "national" tragedy at the time. 9/11 was a tragedy of the nation, but because of what happened to Prince, he could only feel antipathy towards the nation.
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Aug 3, 2015 13:20
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Just in case anyone really takes that Jim Lowry write-up seriously, you might look up who Jim Lowry is.
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Aug 4, 2015 01:03
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Switch out Color Purple for Native Son or Go Tell it on the Mountain Cheers.
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Aug 4, 2015 02:31
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thehomemaster posted:Implying race isn't real? This is actually a much older idea that Coates. It's actually pretty accurate both historically and genetically. Like Coates said, Jewish and Irish were both not "white" until it became socially convenient to label them so. In the same way the monolithic idea of the black race has just as much genetic diversity within itself as there is between it and other races. Skin color and facial features are actually remarkably insignificant genetic markers.
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Aug 4, 2015 13:05
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Switch out Color Purple for Native Son or Go Tell it on the Mountain Did you mean Notes of a Native Son? Not trying to be fussy 'cause it's an important distinction.
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Aug 4, 2015 16:02
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Mira posted:Did you mean Notes of a Native Son? Not trying to be fussy 'cause it's an important distinction. Nope I mean the Richard Wright one. He seemed to be doing novels so I recommended Go Tell it on the Mountain instead of Notes or The Fire Next Time. Really if anyone liked Between the World and Me you should read The Fire Next Time. Ta-Nehisi Coates based the epistolary style off of it.
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Aug 4, 2015 16:07
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Nope I mean the Richard Wright one. I actually think Black Boy is a pretty good companion piece to BtWaM. It is also an autobiographical novel that starts when Wright is a child and details how he comes to understand the world around him, eventually growing up and moving someplace safer and finding like minded people but never really escaping that fear or desire to change things. It is actually super distressing because he grew up in the south in the early 20th century, so he gets smacked around by his family and physically threatened by whites for asking really innocent questions or not answering quick enough, and it takes him awhile to comprehend and come to terms with this reality. I was reminded of the parts about feeling oppressed by his own relatives when I read Coates' description of his relationship with his own parents; how the fear over losing a child can lead parents to try and control that child, beat them, do basically whatever it takes to protect them. I unfortunately haven't read any Baldwin yet, I will have to put him on my list,.
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Aug 4, 2015 17:41
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Guy A. Person posted:I actually think Black Boy is a pretty good companion piece to BtWaM. It is also an autobiographical novel that starts when Wright is a child and details how he comes to understand the world around him, eventually growing up and moving someplace safer and finding like minded people but never really escaping that fear or desire to change things. What I think is good about Beloved (or The Bluest Eye), Native Son, Invisible Man, and Go Tell it on the Mountain as good starting literature is that they are arguably the four strongest books each in their specific meditations on an element of blackness in America. Native Son wrestles with the elements of blackness that are seen in white culture as leading to criminality Invisible Man deals with the fluid nature of black identity in a white society Go Tell it on the Mountain deals with issues within black culture and specifically issues of deviance Beloved and Bluest Eye deal with issues of gender and aesthetics. Not to say these books are distinct in their themes, as there is a lot of overlap. Also, of course, its tremendously naive to think the black experience can be isolated into a handful of books. But, if one wanted to build a "black american" canon of fiction I would have to say those four need to go in first.
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Aug 4, 2015 17:58
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Oh sure, and I read Black Boy specifically because of how much I liked Native Son. I was just commenting on how both books are narratively and thematically similar, just separated by 70 years. I admittedly don't have much experience in this area, I'll need to read the others you suggested.
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Aug 4, 2015 18:25
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Yeah well I'm not black, nor American, so those books are the closest I'll get it! Anyway, I've been reading more and I really dig his style and voice. There's a some nice gems in there. I partiocularly like his opinions on schooling, and how he plays that against life on the streets. What he is describing closely resembles the movies, so I guess that's a point for Hollywood? Mel Mudkiper posted:This is actually a much older idea that Coates. It's actually pretty accurate both historically and genetically. Like Coates said, Jewish and Irish were both not "white" until it became socially convenient to label them so. In the same way the monolithic idea of the black race has just as much genetic diversity within itself as there is between it and other races. Skin color and facial features are actually remarkably insignificant genetic markers. True, I mean I know the idea. It's so very hard to divorce the logic of 'we are all the same' from what you see sometimes, but then what you see has been constructed by the media et al.
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Aug 4, 2015 20:51
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I'm up to the part where he visits Paris. It's hard to really disagree with anything he says. It's also hard to not sometimes read passages in the voice of Huey Freeman. It was really jarring to read him spend the first two-thirds of the book talking about how the struggle justifies itself and then have him say when he gets to Paris that he hadn't read Camus. So far it seems like, if there is any part of his argument that's debatable, it's his premise in the beginning that he's going to hold America up to its own exalted city-on-the-hill, ideal-of-the-world. "we're #1!", moral paragon ideals. Everywhere else in the book he's unflinchingly honest and realistic, but there, he's not -- and he knows it; he knows that ideal is at best aspirational and at worst a horrible lie and tool of oppression.
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Aug 4, 2015 23:08
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Everywhere else in the book he's unflinchingly honest and realistic, but there, he's not -- and he knows it; he knows that ideal is at best aspirational and at worst a horrible lie and tool of oppression. There are a lot of people who unironically believe America is a uniquely moral and just country in all of human history and it is, not unexpectedly, the same group of people who profit from black exploitation the most. What really struck me as particularly unique about his perspective in his insistence on using the term "bodies" and completely annihilating the spiritual. So much of what we are taught about black equality movements is always framed in the realm of the spiritual, and to completely renounce that and emphasize the black body as the sum total container of being makes a profound statement.
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Aug 4, 2015 23:34
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Mel Mudkiper posted:What really struck me as particularly unique about his perspective in his insistence on using the term "bodies" and completely annihilating the spiritual. Ah yes totally agree, it's powerful thw way he uses it. I mean, we are meant to be progressive thinkers, so it makes sense to divorce the issue from the religious.
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Aug 5, 2015 00:23
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Mel Mudkiper posted:There are a lot of people who unironically believe America is a uniquely moral and just country in all of human history and it is, not unexpectedly, the same group of people who profit from black exploitation the most. Oh yes! But are those people the intended audience of this book? Does that matter? Maybe he just feels the point needs to be made regardless. quote:
Yeah, that's a good point. I think I was paying so much attention to the parallels with Camus to realize how strongly his atheism, focus on immediate physical struggle, etc., should be read in comparison with the passages about rejection of black spirituality.
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Aug 5, 2015 00:31
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Oh yes! But are those people the intended audience of this book? Does that matter? Maybe he just feels the point needs to be made regardless. I think the question of audience here is an interesting one. There are excerpts that seem very intended for people who share his beliefs, others that are for people who have never thought about race before, some for blacks who have never lived in poverty, and others for seemingly no audience outside of his need to give voice to his ideas. It genuinely reads like a complete reflection of lifetime's struggles with race more than a specific treatise to any particular group or goal.
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Aug 5, 2015 00:35
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Mel Mudkiper posted:What really struck me as particularly unique about his perspective in his insistence on using the term "bodies" and completely annihilating the spiritual. So much of what we are taught about black equality movements is always framed in the realm of the spiritual, and to completely renounce that and emphasize the black body as the sum total container of being makes a profound statement.
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Aug 5, 2015 01:03
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Grimson posted:Yeah - the "black bodies" terminology is another thing that's certainly older than Coates, but his usage in a steadfastly atheist/materialist framework gives it a very different resonance. Ordinarily you'd be talking about objectification - people being reduced to their bodies - but here Coates insists upon that reduction himself, rather than identifying it as an evil. I am not sure its so much a reduction of Coates as a person to simply his body, but instead an expansion of what the idea of a body constitutes. He seems to be using body not as a reduction, but as a way to force people to confront that the entirety of a person is a biological extension of the body that they inhabit. There is no "self" beyond the material. When a black man is gunned down, its not simply his shell being destroyed. The absolute totality of his being is annihilated. He doesn't want to diffuse the evils of violence with any sense of spirit or soul. To lose the body IS to lose the self. He suggests as much when talking about his ambivalence towards the heroes of nonviolent resistance vs. his admiration of the militant activists. Suggesting the destruction of the body is morally commendable is horrifying because it is placing a lesser value on one's own being.
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Aug 5, 2015 01:09
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Mel Mudkiper posted:He suggests as much when talking about his ambivalence towards the heroes of nonviolent resistance vs. his admiration of the militant activists. Suggesting the destruction of the body is morally commendable is horrifying because it is placing a lesser value on one's own being.
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Aug 5, 2015 01:41
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Grimson posted:And in addition to placing lesser value on one's own being, it can also be an obstacle to grasping the full magnitude of the horror suffered by people in the past, as he emphasizes with the injunction not to view those people as part of a narrative leading up to the present vantage point. They weren't players in a historic drama with a coherent moral arc - they were their bodies, and their bodies were exploited and destroyed. Great point. One of the privileges of being white is that, for me at least, it's easy to see progress in terms of history because it doesn't affect me personally. Take gay marriage. I could never honestly feel the need for change as passionately as an LGBT person because I think I saw it as something that would inevitably happen. But that idea ignored the fact that there were people right now suffering from the injustice and the assumption it would eventually end was meaningless as a remedy to that suffering. I think about the recent neo confederate talking point that slavery would have naturally ended eventually. It is telling that these people honestly see the fact that at least a whole nother generation of people would have lived in perpetual bondage as somehow morally neutral. The reality of their suffering as a contemporary reality was nullified by the assumption of eventual progress. It's sickening. It is important for those, like myself, in a privileged position to be reminded that the ideas we hold are not ethereal. If we fail to act now, that is a group of people forced to suffer materially for their entire brief existence.
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Aug 5, 2015 01:51
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Interesting points about 'black lives matter' http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2015/06/15/genosuicide-and-its-causes/ I mean interesting in terms of it being a male thing, not a race thing, where males fight for their rights, and die in droves.
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Aug 5, 2015 06:55
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Comparing a systemic issue of prejudice to an organized , if violent, mass action with clear goals and a leader (war) seems really dishonest. It seems like he spends the entire article saying hey I know black people have it bad (citing murder rate) then goes all over the place to finally say Hey maybe those police being there are good. As if people protesting are angry about the police existing period, instead of the issues of police oversight , profiling etc. It really feels way too simple of an article "the imposition of majority rule in Iraq is that the sad, oppressive, old regime is better than any possible improvement". Are there reasons that the old regime was better in some ways , ie americans came in and dismissed everyone from the army and those people somehow ended up as insurgents.
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Aug 5, 2015 14:04
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thehomemaster posted:Interesting points about 'black lives matter' http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2015/06/15/genosuicide-and-its-causes/ Eh, this is classic old white man projection. Rather than acknowledge the role he plays in the construction of system that allows black men to die in droves, he blames the black men for dying. Coates references this briefly in the book but talks more about it in some of his other writings. The "ghetto" and the "streets" are white political inventions. The congested and segregated neighborhoods of poor urban blacks were a conscious and deliberate design by those people in power. The violence inherent in those constructions is the purpose of them. Its a manufactured and fundamentally dishonest system of presenting young black men as solely responsible for their own situation.
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Aug 5, 2015 14:18
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Mel Mudkiper posted:It genuinely reads like a complete reflection of lifetime's struggles with race more than a specific treatise to any particular group or goal. That's how I read the book, too. Just about every situation he depicts to his son, he inevitably frames it within this constant battle. Even something as simple as a family trip abroad.
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Aug 5, 2015 21:35
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ulvir posted:That's how I read the book, too. Just about every situation he depicts to his son, he inevitably frames it within this constant battle. Even something as simple as a family trip abroad. Some shithead I forget where had a big thing about the escalator story in New York. He said Coates was too race-obsessed because he assumed the treatment he and his son received was because he was black and not that the other person was just an rear end in a top hat. But I think it underlies how little we look at our own privilege. One of the unique privileges of whiteness is that we can assume all interactions are neutral. If someone is rude to us, we can assume its because of who they are, not because of who we are. But minorities in the US don't get that opportunity. Their minority status is so ingrained into people's interactions with them that there is no clean way to separate their blackness from the other persons' rudeness.
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Aug 5, 2015 23:58
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I am really suffering from the lack of delivery, loving cz, so I will start reading in a week or so, hope it's as interesting as you guys say.
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Aug 7, 2015 21:27
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sajobi posted:I am really suffering from the lack of delivery, loving cz, so I will start reading in a week or so, hope it's as interesting as you guys say. I found it really enlightening myself, actually. The really distinct and explicist primary discourse-type narrative helped a lot in making the message sound clear, IMO. Hope you enjoy it.
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Aug 8, 2015 00:02
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I'd say that even if you don't agree with his basic premise, it can easily be treated like Stephen King's On Writing, which is really just the lyrical autobiography of a writer. It's really short, is pleasurable to read in a prose sense imho, and has given me some knew mental tools (which would probably really be helping Bernie Sanders right now for instance LOL, since black lives matter protesters shut him down in Seattle a night or two ago.)thehomemaster posted:Interesting points about 'black lives matter' http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2015/06/15/genosuicide-and-its-causes/  I hope you're just trolling. I forget since this thread is roughly one page long but, do we need to bring out the dinner table analogy again?
coyo7e fucked around with this message at 04:14 on Aug 10, 2015 |
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Aug 10, 2015 04:11
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Well I don't know that analogy so do go on? I'm just up to the bit about the Civil War, it's a very disturbing read, yet enjoyable on the sentence level. Really puts me at odds.
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Aug 10, 2015 04:20
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Coates has a By The Book on NYT http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/books/review/ta-nehisi-coates-by-the-book.html
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Aug 11, 2015 04:43
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Not sure how I feel about this sentence: 'Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it.' Like, am I white or do I just believe I am (will myself to be) white? Am I missing out on life by not being a minority? But then I realise this text isn't for me.
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Aug 11, 2015 06:40
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thehomemaster posted:Not sure how I feel about this sentence: Given Coates' insistently physical/materialistic perspective, I think it's a mistake to take "the meaning of life" with its typical loose spiritual connotation of being something fulfilling. The next sentence in the passage is clarifying: "The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable." He's saying that the truth of life is that it's chaotic, fragile, and contingent - and suggesting that because black bodies are treated as expendable, maybe Samori is therefore positioned closer to that truth. I wouldn't talk about that in terms of "missing out" - not any moreso than you'd talk about "missing out" on car wrecks if you've never been in one.
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Aug 11, 2015 08:39
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Yeah I guess. Thing that bugs me is that a) I know the facts of this already so not learning anything and b) I don't have anything from which to anchor my perceptions. It's not changing my mind per se, I agree with him, and yet I can't relate to him. The only thing I can do is appreciate it on the sentence level, and also appreciate the outpouring within it.
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Aug 12, 2015 00:42
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thehomemaster posted:Coates has a By The Book on NYT
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Aug 12, 2015 17:37
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Look at us, ahead of the curve: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/between-the-world-and-me-book-club-the-story-not-told/399605/ http://www.npr.org/books/titles/421479495/between-the-world-and-me https://www.facebook.com/nprbooks/posts/1074796205883637 http://www.hypable.com/president-obama-summer-reading-list/ Aside: are we still good with Moonstone for next month? Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Aug 15, 2015 |
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Aug 14, 2015 23:51
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I read this in two close sessions last night and boy is it relentless. I realise that it's an epistolary novel but it almost read more like a speech to me, like one of the old published presidential monologues. It has that same sense of poetic rhythm to the way it relays these potent, bracing facts. I finished it feeling like I needed to go back and start it again, but now I'm wondering if the audio version read by Coates himself might not be the better option given that style. As a white Australian, a total dreamer, I'm alienated from the content somewhat but I didn't have too big an issue with that fact. People seem perturbed by the notion of this books audience when its pretty clearly written for his son and thus for everyone of this upcoming generation. Not a guide or prescription , just personal wisdom passed down from one generation to the next to maybe help them come up with their own plan, their own path of struggle. This doesn't mean that it can't speak to us, just that he wasn't aiming too, just as Tolstoy wasn't aiming to move the Zulu's but probably did some. The second half of the book is just him telling his single, human story which should work for everyone to some extent.
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Aug 17, 2015 02:59
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| # ? May 3, 2024 21:46 |
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:
drat, I must have missed voting regarding moonstone?
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Aug 18, 2015 18:08
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