eBook
French language
Published Nov. 6, 2016 by Autrement.
Voilà ce qu'il faut que tu saches : en Amérique, la destruction du corps noir est une tradition - un héritage. Je ne voudrais pas que tu te couches dans un rêve. Je voudrais que tu sois un citoyen de ce monde beau et terrible à la fois, un citoyen conscient. J'ai décidé de ne rien te cacher. « Je me suis demandé qui remplirait le vide intellectuel après la mort de James Baldwin. Sans aucun doute, c'est Ta-Nehisi Coates... Une lecture indispensable.
I agree with Toni Morrison that "this is required reading". Whether or not Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this precisely for his son vs. His son and others, the book was short yet profound. Personal, brutally honest, compelling, and very powerful. Highly recommended.
An eloquent journey into a side of American life that is foreign territory to me.
Rating unchanged upon second reading. Added a few passages to remember. I'm looking forward to discussion with a new-to-me group this weekend.
Rating unchanged upon second reading. Added a few passages to remember. I'm looking forward to discussion with a new-to-me group this weekend.
A first-hand account of what it means to be an African-American. Profound, penetrating, moving yet tranquil in tone.
I don't know that I can add anything that hasn't already been said by just about any of the reviews I've seen about this book.
The author's voice - both written and spoken - is clear and authentic and powerful. As a white woman who grew up in a racial diverse family in a racially diverse area, there were some things in the book that I absolutely recognized but even more that I'll never experience. I highly recommend this book to everyone.
This book is a chronicle of the mental and emotional changes of a sensitive man living in a black body in America. It's at times poetic and honest about deep emotion, and though most of the time he's addressing his son, the author speaks to the silent observer who takes their white body for granted in the luxury of ignorance. He never uses the term "white privilege," and he's less accusing than James Baldwin, but he welcomes the reader into his head and to see with his eyes.
"I wanted you to see different people living by different rules."
Coates has a complicated relationship with the place that he grew up. He complains that he was in a fight for survival, keeping his body safe, and putting him at the very bottom rung of Maslowe's hierarchy of needs. However, he justifies the very system of violence that he abhors, he …
This book is a chronicle of the mental and emotional changes of a sensitive man living in a black body in America. It's at times poetic and honest about deep emotion, and though most of the time he's addressing his son, the author speaks to the silent observer who takes their white body for granted in the luxury of ignorance. He never uses the term "white privilege," and he's less accusing than James Baldwin, but he welcomes the reader into his head and to see with his eyes.
"I wanted you to see different people living by different rules."
Coates has a complicated relationship with the place that he grew up. He complains that he was in a fight for survival, keeping his body safe, and putting him at the very bottom rung of Maslowe's hierarchy of needs. However, he justifies the very system of violence that he abhors, he casts it as an act of defiant identity creation and protection for the people living in his community from outsiders. It's very complicated for him as he talks to his son. He wants the best for his son, and he doesn't want him "blinded by fear" when dealing with the rest of the world, but he still wants him to remember where he came from and the struggle of his people, who are they his people? Are they really a race? Race is a concept created by the oppressor, so it can't be that. The conflict of wanting to pass on your child a Heritage, but not the negative aspects of that heritage hold universal appeal.
His experience of feeling free from all of the racial baggage that he experienced every day in New York City is not uncommon among American people in Paris. The idea that learning French in school seems pointless because you don't know any French people to talk to transforms into realizing subjects like French are Bridges to other universes with a different culture, with an entirely different way of thinking, and an entirely different way of perceiving beauty.
It's hard to look at your own world through others' eyes. Especially when what you see is the exposure of privilege, and the denial of that privilege to so many. Coates takes a hard look at the American Dream, and through an essay to his teenage son, explains the origins of that Dream, the conflict at its core, and the willful blindness many have when it comes to the degree to which the Dream is denied to so many Americans.
This is not an easy book to read, but it is a critically important book.
Everyone should read this.
Required reading.
