Connection, Responsibility, Vulnerability
What? Coates’ central message about the living in a black body is how different it is from living in a white body. Living in a black body is living in a constant sense of survival mode — something most white people don’t have to think about. He explains, that living in a black body is living in a world of racism, a “visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.” This is so crucial for him to tell his son because he is afraid of his son being out in the world of police brutality and racism he knows from experience and the world he has heard about without him and not knowing about what is waiting for him there.
This is related to his points about the Dream because at the end of his speaking about the dream, he says how sad he is for him. The structural issues that he feels the responsibility to share with his son are the ones he describes in his points about the Dream: “But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.” Speaking with his son about these structural issues might be related to the idea of critical consciousness and liberation that we have been discussing because like we have been saying, you can’t fix these structural issues if we refuse to acknowledge they even exist.
So What? Coates’ desire to share these truths with his son is similar to Rauch’s story and childhood experiences because the truth’s Coates wants to share are seen in Rauch’s own life experiences. Rauch sees caring for the small critters he finds as important because he “wanted all the animals to be my companion and friend,” and acknowledges that they are friends with each other and that he doesn’t own any of them. Because, as stated earlier in the podcast, he didn’t have his first human connection until he was six or seven years old, it was important for him to form these bonds, companionships and friendships with these critters because he didn’t have anything or anyone else to form them with.
Another reason why caring for these critters is so important to Rauch is because he says he can communicate with them better than he can people. In the middle of the podcast, Rauch states: “I take care of animals because they teach me what I can’t learn from people. It’s unconditional affection or appreciation. Unconditional love is, ‘Here. No, it’s yours. No, no. Nothing. It’s all you.” This says that with the shared human condition and suffering humans endure, everyone needs these shared bonds and connections with something, anything, that can give them any sign of a connection back, anything that can be a distraction from the real world of suffering faced by humans. Humans crave, and possibly even need a connection with other people and things to survive, and Rauch’s story proves that.
Now What?Some of the issues that Coates describes that also put the people I work with in danger are the sense of a “survival mode” he talked about. Many of the people I work with are undocumented immigrants or the children of undocumented immigrants. Because of their immigration status, they can often feel as if they don’t belong, or as if their lives could be stripped of them at just a moment’s notice, especially now with Donald Trump as our president and how vocal he is about his hatred of undocumented immigrants. A letter that a parent who fears deportation might have to write their child a similar but different letter to that of Coates. I’m sure it would be similar in the way that it is written by a parent, with wise words and advice about the world for their children, just with a slightly different story. It would probably tell of the struggles they have faced their entire time in America and tell how to best avoid deportation if at all possible.
Rauch’s story, his traumatic childhood and his need to nurture life informs my understanding of the things I don’t know about the people I’m working with in that it made me realize you truly do never know the extent to someone’s suffering, or on the other hand, their happiness. You truly do not ever know one’s story unless they tell you all of it themselves and Rauch’s story tells that. Yes, he is in prison for second-degree murder, but what led to that? If we didn’t know that his mother tried to drown him as a child and about the other childhood experienced he dealt with, would we still even listen to his story or see his suffering as valid? The moral of his story I feel is that we really never know how much someone is suffering unless they decide to tell us, and that no matter how “bad” someone may be based on what they have done, they still need and deserve some type of connection, human or not.
