There seemed to be a pattern of unnaming women, which made me assume it was deliberate and made it more striking to see the focus on Mable Jones. Partly this is probably a stylistic quirk related to framing all of this as a letter, but I wondered at times about the sort of disembodiment involved, what it means for a father to talk to his son about female beauty and women who can be described by their body parts and parentage.
Yeah, that had to have been a deliberate choice, and I didn't quite figure it out. (There was a point early on where I was considering drawing out family trees trying to be certain of exactly who someone was; can't recall exactly how, but the namelessness confused me.) Something to do with it being a letter from a man to his son? But I'm not sure what the significance was.
Lunchtime! I can pop in finally.
Thanks for separating the posts, heebie. I assumed they would be blended because the two earlier BTWAM posts were, but I did wonder a bit about the tone shift from Thorn's elegant everything-that-rises-must-converge to my, uh, ramblings.
Also, re: women's names, as a Philadelphian I was of course pleased to see Sonia Sanchez name-checked a couple of times, and TNC did mention other women he was reading at various points.
But women actually in the book were a bit different. I actually found the section on Dr. Jones to feel almost Teflon-esque in parts, and I couldn't tell if that was my inability to feel what TNC felt in the interaction (or grasp what he was trying to convey) or whether it was a reflection of his own difficulty in assessing what Dr. Jones was feeling.
He does say at one point that he's relieved to know what she's thinking instead of what he projects she's thinking. I'm paraphrasing that bit so I might be off.
(It's not that TNC can't write incredibly movingly about parents, and specifically mothers, who have lost children -- I think that his several posts on Lucy McBath, among others, prove that quite emphatically.)
I haven't got my copy of the book handy, but I thought Coates was clear that he didn't presume to speak for black women, whose security in their own bodies is a separate issue from the physical issues that confront black men - and an issue that he didn't feel qualified to discuss.
This is a corollary, I think, of what we decided about solutionism: That isn't what the book was about. I don't think the focus on Mable Jones was really about Dr. Jones, and certainly not about women generally, but was really about her son (and, by extension, maybe Coates's son).
5.1 is accurate and I think a good choice on his part, although I absolutely see why black women reading feel erased or marginalized by it. I meant things like "the girl with the long dreads" seemed like a weird thing to write talismanically to your son, but what do I know?
5 -- there's a passage where he says something like "imagine my fear multiplied by ten and you get black women's fear." But it's kinda a throwaway line, and as I've said before I do think a problem with the book, insofar as it has a politics, is a failure to reflect on how his particular vision of/experience with oppression links up with other kinds of oppression. That's not to chastize him for focusing on what he wants to focus on; it's to suggest that his politics concerning black men (again, insofar as he's advocating a politics and not just recounting his own experiences) would be better if connections were thought about more systematically.
Yes, I think he is very clear that he doesn't intend to speak for. I was just adding that in addition to that, women in general seem to play a circumscribed role in the book, even when they are in some ways the focus. I take your point about Dr. Jones's presence being more about her role vis -a-vis Prince Jones.
Thanks to Google books, I can offer this in support of 5. Talking about the responsibility of a black man for things that are beyond his control:
But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful -- the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. And this is not reducible just to you -- the women around you must be responsible for their bodies in a way that you will never know.
There's also a passage where he says something like "the most beautiful women in the world were on the courtyard at Howard" which to me had both all the positive and all the negative valences of some kind of 70s black male nationalist "look at all these beautiful black sisters."
From 9, the women around you must be responsible for their bodies in a way that you will never know was a phrasing that bothered me because you might not know it intimately or as a lived experience, but men SHOULD be trying to figure out what this experience might be like, just as the white readers of this book SHOULD come away with a better understanding of the particular burdens discussed.
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Not really OT so I don't feel so bad about it being under 40 comments in because of that losing weight link. Did Coates really lose 30 lbs in 30 days? That's incredible. I've been doing serious calorie restriction for about 3 weeks now, very light breakfast, light or no lunch and a falafel sandwich for dinner. I weighed my self on September 1st and today and in that time I lost 4.8 lbs. That's without starting any serious exercising which I'm going to begin this Sunday. So I'm on track to lose at least 15-16 lbs a month if I just keep up what I've been doing.
OK, I do feel a little bad, now. But I'll still hit post. Carry on.
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IIRC from his other weight loss posts, I think the title is sarcasm? Or something akin to it -- identifying a weight loss model he thinks is unhealthy or unworkable. I thought he'd lost a lot of weight quite slowly.
Quick google... Yeah, that's right.
The Swedish Fish diet (one pack for breakfast, one for lunch, and a sensible dinner) does not work at all.
Thanks. I have a target in mind to hit in early December and I think I have a good chance to get there with a bit of cushion.
On the other hand, I've had excellent results from the Belgian Chocolate diet. I mean, if you count 'eating Belgian chocolate' as an excellent result, which I do.
"It's not a beer belly. It's a cushion."
I love chocolate too. I almost never can resist it but I've been doing OK. I did have some chocolate today on account of it being a cow-orkers birthday and someone brought in these incredible chocolates that were more like miniature chocolate pastries. So I had one and that was my lunch. But then I was just at an exhibit (was supposed to be a movie that got cancelled - funny story I may drop in the NY meetup thread) and it was catered but I successfully resisted all the succulent little chocolate delicacies they had and settled on a little fruit instead.
I left off the "...for a love machine" because of taste.
I love chocolate too.
In context, racist.
Apologizing to white people for racism and also diet tips. You people are really SWPL.
...a failure to reflect on how his particular vision of/experience with oppression links up with other kinds of oppression.
We probably shouldn't lament the lack of, then request, then reward, individual and particular visions (especially w/r/t oppression and suffering and all that sort of thing) and then in every case backhand them, while their guard is lowered (as any particular vision lowers one's guard), for not taking a fulsome and ruthless accounting and self-accounting of intersectionality.
I suppose I'm a bit repetitive to criticize people for going Jesuitical-meta in these discussions, but come on. Are we Slate? Buzzfeed? Gawker?!?!?!?! Have we no criterion but "What fault hath the author not confessed?"
My complaint isn't a lack of nuance. It's that (again to the extent it's a political book) he has a politics that aren't quite mine.
Nuance had its day, like "limn," "lapidary" and "Of course we'll copyedit the new Jack Reacher novel before it goes out; we're a respectable publisher, not some fly-by-night Kindle dipshittery."
My complaint is [...] that he has a politics that aren't quite mine
Halfordismo mouseover text
If you're going to read Jack Reacher novels, you can't really blame anyone but yourself.
I've come to recognize that, if its a choice between not eating chocolate and being fat, I'd rather be fat.
What if the choices were not chocolate or going bald?
30: Shouldn't I blame Tom Cruise Jack Reacher?
You should see the movie. It's like visiting Pittsburgh, but without leaving your home.
I'd take chocolate. But I'd take bald over fat. With bald, you can at least do a comb-over, which effectively hides it from everyone. There's no way to do that with fat.
My dad had the most amazing comb-over for a long time, as he went bald out from under his beatles-esque side part. Then he got so bald that the strands don't reach across anymore.
If I ever go bald, I'm going to conceal it the Jason Statham way: with my abs.
My sisters are on me to get a hair cut so that it doesn't even look like I might be thinking of someday having a comb-over when my hair gets thinner.
My old man used to rock the comb over. I want to get one when its time, but my wife say's she'll divorce me.
My old man used to rock the comb over. I want to get one when its time, but my wife say's she'll divorce me.
We're past 40 comments, so I'm allowed to change the topic of the thread and talk about Coates' book, which I will now do at length.
His ending, in which he invokes global warming, superficially seems like a digression, but I think it nicely illuminates his central purpose.
For Coates, the original sin of those who think of themselves as white is not the cruelty, but the foundational falsehoods that lead to it. He disagrees with the Dreamers not merely because they are the agents of evil, but because they substitute the Dream for the facts.
And so his critique of Martin Luther King or Jesus Christ is not that they were bad men, or that they were ineffective or counterproductive, but that in the course of carrying out their work, they employed errors of fact and interpretation that necessarily had adverse consequences.
The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Wallbrook Junction, bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail. My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.
And even if we indulge in a bit of the Dream -- even if we choose to believe against all evidence that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice -- generations are born and die while the arc is bending.
I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister is too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. "Slavery" is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in essential texts ... and when this woman peers back into the generations, all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for no more ... when she dies, the world -- which is really the only world she can ever know -- ends.
Keynes chided his misguided contemporaries similarly: In the long run, we are all dead.
Even Malcolm errs, as Coates notes at the end of the book:
Sitting in that car I thought of Dr. Jones's predictions of national doom. I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm and all of his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. ... No, I left the Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the Dreamers reap what they sow, we would reap it right with them.
And then he starts talking about global warming and its relationship to the Dream, which heretofore had been his term for the narrative superstructure around modern American racism.
I interpret Coates to be saying that the Dreamers, thinking they know which way the arc bends, believe that we need not worry unduly because we can't possibly face catastrophic consequences from spewing carbon into the atmosphere. God or History or whatever force guides the universe wouldn't permit it.
Wrong. The root of all evil -- not just racism -- is the inability to think critically and face facts; the choice of the Dream over the Reality.
I'm pretty sure Jesus meant after everybody died.
44: Right. And that belief:
1. is inaccurate and therefore
2. has negative consequences in the real world.
Because I read the David Brooks piece before I read Coates' book, I didn't fully grasp how carefully Brooks had read Coates, and how clearly he laid out their differences:
This dream is a secular faith that has unified people across every known divide. It has unleashed ennobling energies and mobilized heroic social reform movements. By dissolving the dream under the acid of an excessive realism, you trap generations in the past and destroy the guiding star that points to a better future.
When Brooks talks about the Dream, he's talking about the same thing Coates is talking about. Brooks isn't cheating us here, as he so often does.
He's just pro-Dream. His view is far from ridiculous, and is held by many people who aren't douchebags. Vonnegut said it this way: "We are what we pretend to be ..."
But in the end, I'm with Coates. The costs associated with unreality are too high, and can't be borne in the long run.
Everybody isn't dead yet. I checked down the hall and people are still moving.
Gate of ivory, gate of horn. Climate policy wonks argue a lot about how to get people unreasonably enthusiastic for a plausible goal. Me, I think we need more fiction for it; the Wild/Gold/Pacific Coast trilogy, for instance.