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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 12:16
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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 12:20
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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 12:05
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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 15:07
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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 16:58
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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 22:34
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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 4, 2015 23:35
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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 00:09
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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 00:51
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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 13:18
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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 22:58
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Paper With Lines posted:Did anyone see the David Brooks op-ed response to it? The response was so tone-deaf as to be essentially insignificant. This loving paragraph here quote:I think you distort American history. This country, like each person in it, is a mixture of glory and shame. There’s a Lincoln for every Jefferson Davis and a Harlem Children’s Zone for every K.K.K. — and usually vastly more than one. Violence is embedded in America, but it is not close to the totality of America. Misses the point of BTWM so hard that it brings into question if Brooks even read it.
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Aug 20, 2015 19:52
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The big issue is that white people are taught to see Lincoln and Davis, for example, as opposites. Davis bad, Lincoln good. It's how we can say "yes slavery was bad, but people also were against it" and act as if the end result is moral neutrality. They do not understand that the evil of one side has more moral weight than the goodness of the other. A nation that endorsed slavery until the second half of the 19th century is not morally cleansed by the fact we eventually stopped doing it.
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Aug 20, 2015 22:10
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I would go so far to say that treating ending slavery as "good" is itself morally bankrupt. Stopping a wicked action because you realize it is wicked is not inherently virtuous in itself.
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Aug 20, 2015 22:13
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thehomemaster posted:Eh, really? The past exists to be judged by today's morals ulvir posted:opposition to slavery wasn't magically invented at the end of the 1800s. Right but we are not talking the morality of people, we are talking the morality of nations. Was a person who fought to end slavery doing a moral action? Absolutely. But you cannot consider the actions of moral people going against the immorality of their own culture as a credit to the culture itself. You cannot say "America had people who fought for slavery, but it also had people who fought against slavery" and act as if that somehow means America was morally neutral on the issue. For the first 100 years of America as a nation and 200 years before that the government endorsed the institution. Eventually realizing it was wrong and ending the practice does not redeem the country from its history, and its dishonest to try to defend the country's legacy by pointing to the actions of abolitionists when they were fighting against the country itself. Mel Mudkiper fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Aug 21, 2015 |
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Aug 21, 2015 13:24
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ulvir posted:Oh no, I wasn't arguing against that. I was just commenting on the dumb idea of "judging the past by todays morals". Because there were nations who abolished slavery a whole 100 years before the US, for example. (And also lol at the idea in general, following that logic, we shouldn't say that what Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot etc. was doing wasn't objectively terrible) Yeah I wasn't sure which post you were responding to so I figured I would cover my bases
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Aug 21, 2015 22:30
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| # ¿ Jan 19, 2026 14:09 |
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Since the month is winding down I want to remind everyone to check Ta-Nehisi Coates' twitter He has spent the last few days posting exclusively about old school PC RPGs and debating Planescape vs. Baldur's Gate II
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Aug 28, 2015 22:44
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