On Race, Politics, and America

Today marks the annual day to recognize and remember Martin Luther King Jr., a prolific figure during the American Civil Rights Movement. Though many people see this as another day off from work or school, I think it should also a good time to set aside some time and reflect what has happened in America over the course of its history. People say that the Civil War ended in 1865, but it has not. In little subtleties, there is still evidence that the Civil War persisted, through the Jim Crow laws, to the Civil Rights Movement, to even the law enforcement brutality we see today.

This brings me to what I want to reflect and talk about. I spent my morning reading Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between the World and Me. In it, Coates resonates what it is like for him being black in the United States over the course of his life. He brings about important issues, namely the treatment of African-Americans throughout American history. Now you're probably thinking that this sounds generic and that there are lots of such articles being generated all the time.

For those of you who don't know, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a prolific journalist and author. He mainly writes for The Atlantic and publishes articles revolving around race and politics. In addition, he creates Black Panther comics for Marvel (which I've yet to pick up). Between the World and Me is unique in that it is an essay divided into three parts which Coates articulates to his fifteen-year-old son. In this essay, he explains to his son what it is like being black and what his son will have to face.

The book is written in a particular fashion: Coates pulls from anecdotal evidence chronicling his life, spanning from his childhood, his college time at Howard University in Baltimore, his life after his son was born, and his time spent being in global cities such as New York City and Paris. With each story comes a reflection. Though Coates implies that race relations will never be resolved, given its brutal history and its result being born from a struggle for power, he advises his son to be aware of this. There are no sugar-coated descriptions when it comes to Coates. He is straight and direct as he can be towards his son.

Coates writing is both poetic and bleak. He gets his point across, mainly being that violence towards African-American stems from the problem with the American system. It is something that they all live in fear of, and Coates must protect his son from the smallest crimes like many other African-Americans have to do to their own children. This is not a book where Coates is reprimanding the whites or trying to explain African-American experience to the whites. Rather, it's a reflection and he trying to tell his son how to live with it and struggle to survive. 

So on this annual MLK day, I think we should all reflect, like how Coates has, on our lives and what we are born into. It's a difficult system to fix, but we have to be cognizant of it and adjust accordingly. We should acknowledge what people like MLK and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, both before and after, have done for race and politics in America. As Coates says:

I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

Very profound.