UB Libraries Book Group discussion

A belated welcome back to school to you all! Our discussion on this month's title will begin on September 26th.

FYI: there are two copies of this title on Reserve at Lockwood (2 hr/in-library use only) -- seems it is required reading for some classes this fall. It's a small book (150 pages) so maybe could get completed in that time.
Looking forward to our discussion!

Thanks Kathie, I read it in August, trying to keep up with things as the semester starts. Now my challenge will be to remember the details. :-)

Good morning, All –
This month’s book was a small one with a big voice; part treatise, part memoir. I’ll kick off the discussion with a few feelings I had about it.

I found the first 20-30 pages a little difficult to get through, partly due to the heavy subject matter and partly due to the uneasy feelings such a discussion provoked in me. I feel very privileged that I didn’t grow up living the life of fear that Ta-Nehisi Coates did.

For me the central theme was disembodiment and how he grew up with the feeling that his body could never be his own. The need to always be on your guard and be careful of who you were with, how you were walking, who or what you smiled at. Of the awareness that you will be stopped by police for being black and how America has defined what “black” means. How he grew up with the knowledge that he must be twice as good because “our errors always cost us more”. How he felt bound to other black people not by color but because they “suffered under the same weight of the Dream”.

It was a little difficult not to get weighed down by this book; in fact I guess the weight is necessary and central to such a subject. I found many moments of brightness within the weight too. Reading of his time at Howard and how he was intellectually awakened while at his Mecca there. How his love for his son and family comes through even though he acknowledges how his fear made him hard and he had to learn how to love his son more openly. His writing, his language, was often very beautiful and his recounting of his time spent in Paris was particularly engaging for me.

A lot of chatter from me so I'll stop there for now -- anyone else want to share their thoughts?

Well said, Kath. I had very similar observations. I found the first third of the book difficult to get through as well. It picked up for me after that...for the middle third...and then I found the last third again hard to plow through.

I think this is an important book. It opened my eyes for sure. I can see why it is on required reading lists for several UB courses.

I think the whole body/disembodiment theme is so interesting and very important.

I agree with both Kath and Lori.
I am glad the author is feeling he is in a more secure place now, or hopefully does.
It is a good book to read to see things from another's perspective.
Interesting aside, I grew up in NYC, so I know what it is like to always watch everyone around you. On a recent trip, once out of NYC, I realized my whole body had relaxed. I didn't notice how tense I had been until I was where I felt I could let my guard down. It's tough for those who can't leave the situation....

I feel vulnerable to harm sometimes based on the fact that I'm a woman. In certain settings, mostly late at night by myself, carrying a purse, etc. Fortunately I can minimize such situations through careful planning, but sometimes I feel frustrated that I need to do that.

It really brought the point home to me that the author has to feel that way pretty much all the time. And that the danger has gotten worse during certain times of his life. It sort of left me with a feeling of despair. How could a world like that, with such huge disparities ever be fixed?

What I really like about this book group is that it encourages me to read books I never thought of reading. This book was very enlightening to an ex-New Yorker and current suburbanite like myself. It gave me such a clear view into the life of African-Americans, both from the parent and child point of view. I thought it was very well written and I also thought the body/disembodiement theme was so true and something I had never considered. I have recommended this book to many people.

Ellen and Becky, I personalized this book in a similar way thinking of how I feel out alone at night; I cannot imagine feeling that way all the time. Considering that idea made it easier to understand how he described young men in his rough neighborhoods transmuting their fear into rage. It was amazing to me to read of the mothers of dead young men who could transcend the anger and move to activism. I think I would be stuck in the anger and despair.

Rena, I also appreciated how this gave me an insight into both the parent and child perspective, from different generations of African-Americans. I've also recommended it onward and feel like I need to do some more reading myself; he mentioned many authors, several I had never heard of.

Also, side note: this week's Chronicle of Higher Ed has a special Obama issue with several AfricanAmerican writers examining their own experiences in higher ed as well as Obama's accomplishments and disappointments. http://www.chronicle.com/specialrepor...

Ellen,
We make the world what we want it to be. There is a saying,by a long ago Burke ancestor,Sir Edmund Burke, " Evil flourishes when good men do nothing."
The sad thing is we can only affect a small portion of the world usually. But I believe we must try.
There is hope. Each immigrant group went through this type of experience sadly. Which leads me to hope this will end for this group as well.

The author frequently says something like "people who think they are white." Is he simply referring to the fact that we are all of mixed race in terms of our bloodlines? Or am I missing another meaning?

Ellen, I took that to mean that we are all of mixed race in some point of our history.

Also, to add on to Becky's comment, I actually think the author was somewhat hopeful of the future. I think he found hope when he was at his Howard reunion and he could feel the love and beauty and power of their group. "They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people...As do all of us who have voyaged through death to life upon these shores."

He also made comment (somewhere that I can't find) about how he could see that his son grew up in a very different world with less of the fear and hardness about him. Unfortunately, this made the Michael Brown killing (with no charges for the police) into a real shock and awakening for him.

I think the author has a justified fear for his son in this world but I'd like to think there is some hope there too.

Kath,
Good thoughts.

Sorry I'm coming into this discussion kind of late, the month just seemed to go by very quickly. I think everyone had wonderful insights and I was happy to hear that I wasn't the only person who had difficulty with the first third of the book. What bothered me was parent trying to keep their children safe through punishment, statements like I will kill him first before the police can. I understand that instilling fear can make the child behave and be more cautious but it can go the other way too. I was happy to discover he didn't carry on the tradition with his son and that his son could see a world with less fear.

It is interesting how the microcosm you are born into shapes your entire life. With reference to all those other NYC people in the club, I find myself to be more of a stereotypical New Yorker when I am visiting there than in my daily life here. I drive more aggressively, don't make eye contact on the subway, etc. Although the author went on to become successful and leave the inner city, he never lost that part of him. That fear he developed early in life is probably justified for a black man no matter what his socioeconomic status. One would hope that the full strength of it wouldn't be passed on to his son and that people in general could start looking past the color of someone's skin.

Marlies,
True, we can hope so.

I'm not sure if anyone has anything else to add to the discussion but I thought I'd throw in a quote that I just found so beautiful and filled with sorrow. When he was speaking about his friend Prince Carmen Jones being murdered by county police he described this tragedy in a heartbreaking paragraph. I'll only quote part here:

"Think of all the love poured into him...Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him sent flowing back to the earth.”

I did look up this case and it looks like this police force was repeatedly accused of excessive force and this case finally tipped the scales into a Justice Dept investigation into brutality and racism. While initial local investigations cleared the officers for this 2000 killing they were ultimately held responsible in a civil court for wrongful death in 2006.

Thanks, Marlies, for joining in! I posted my comment without having seen yours. I totally understand what you mean when you describe your NYC behavior. I remember before my first visit there in my 20s people had all kinds of warnings against appearing vulnerable like "never appear lost; always walk like you know where you are going". I can't imagine having to be on perpetual guard like a black man.

Toward the end of the book when Coates is speaking with Prince Carmen Jones' mom, she listed all of the things she worked for to get out of poverty, to make a solid career, acquire assets, be a person of means. She gave her son some advantages and still, one racist act can take it all away.

I hope we are making some progress yet "stop and frisk" racial profiling practices are still being promoted by some. :-/

First, Kathy, thanks for choosing this book. I have to say, as much as I enjoy using Goodreads, I almost wish we were meeting in person to discuss this one.

I listened to the audio- read by the author. And I think it added a dimension to the work; it felt very personal- that we (reader and author) were having a conversation. It's a love letter of sorts to his son, and I really felt that by the way he read each passage. And as hard as his life was and is, I couldn't help but feel that this book is truly a gift. He deftly and with great depth and honesty explores difficult issues and explains how he got to be who he is- that's a "conversation" I don't think most parents have with their kids- at least not as honestly as this book does.

This was a great selection- it's not often you read a book that's this transformative.

I found it so interesting that the author had a completely different, very freeing experience when he went to Europe. Yet I wonder if that is different now given the refugee crises going on there, Britain's EU exit, etc.

As Amy did, I listened to the book. It did feel more personal and the tone he put into it added a dimension to the words.
I also was so sad when he describes what happened to his friend Prince. I do hope things are getting better.

I'm generally not good at audiobooks (I'm too distractable) but I would like to try again with this one -- it would be nice to hear his words in his voice.

Ellen, my guess is France would still feel more liberating to a black man... Not a good time to be a Muslim there, however, with the terror attacks and backlash they've had.

Feel free to keep the discussion going, all -- I'm heading out on vacation tomorrow so will be offline after today.

Marlies will be leading our next discussion in October on Inside the O'Briens by Lisa Genova. Happy reading!

Thanks Kath. Enjoy your time off!