An Education: Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me’
Coates should be required reading for educators.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s much-discussed new book — in form, a letter addressed to his young son — pushes back against the dominant narrative of race and racism in the United States:
‘[R]ace is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.’ (7)
Throughout the book, Coates reflects on his own intellectual coming-of-age as a black man in a white supremacist society in order to impart wisdom to his son and by extension (it is a book after all, not a private letter), a new generation.
At its core, Coates’s book is concerned with education; it is more than just instructive for teachers and educators. It is crucial.
School, an Institution
In recounting his own experiences growing up black in the US, Coates attempts to further expose the mechanisms of institutional racism which would seek to obscure their own function (‘…there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much’ (8).)
Of course, institutional racism requires that people do not inquire much at all.
Coates recounts being a young man in West Baltimore:
‘…when I was about your age, each day, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not — all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body…’
‘I think I somehow knew that that third of my brain should have been concerned with more beautiful things’ (24).
As educators, we would agree that school should provide access to “more beautiful things,” to art and music, and ideas which are relevant, challenging, and empowering. The explicit aims of education are to create thinkers, those who inquire, and to provide equal access to the world of thought and beauty.
But we read —
‘If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left… I suffered at the hands of both, but I resent the schools more.’ (25)
This resentment is easy to understand. Coates recalls:
‘[T]he laws of the schools were aimed at something distant and vague. What did it mean to, as our elders told us, “grow up and be somebody”? And what precisely did this have to do with an education rendered as rote discipline? To be educated in my Baltimore mostly meant always packing an extra number 2 pencil and working quietly. Educated children walked in single file on the right side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory, and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated children never offered excuses — certainly not childhood itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra, Biology, and English were not subjects so much as opportunities to better discipline the body, to practice writing between the lines, copying the directions legibly, memorizing theorems extracted from the world they were created to represent. All of it felt so distant to me.
‘I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.’
I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them.’ (26)
The reality is when we get beyond the caricatures of racism projected by a colorblind ideology, the simplistic notion that one individual is doing something mean (and, in the white imagination, inexplicable, isolated from any broader institutional pattern), when we start to probe the institutions that ensure the perpetuation of injustice, we realize that education, as an institution, is seriously implicated.
Education, of course, has been and still is responsible for perpetuating injustice.
Coates reflects on his experience from a distance, and shines light on how this happens:
‘I sensed the schools were hiding something, drugging us with false morality so that we would not see, so that we did not ask: Why — for us and only us — is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault upon our bodies? This is not a hyperbolic concern. When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of higher learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing.
‘Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not,’
‘…and while I couldn’t crunch the numbers or plumb the history back then, I sensed that the fear that marked West Baltimore could not be explained by the schools. Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them. Perhaps they must be burned away so that the heart of this thing might be known.’ (26–27)
Writing and Reading: The Master’s Tools
Crucial to Coates’s personal and intellectual development is his mother teaching him to write, as he says, “…by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation.” Coates calls his early writing, “…the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness. Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing — myself.” (29).
That is what writing is and this is what writing does. This is the meaning of writing, and precisely why we teach it in school: The development of voice. The courage and confidence to ask real questions of import and urgency. An active engagement with a multiplicity of narratives. A dialogic relationship between curriculum, text, and self.
Yet, how many students, like Coates, learn writing merely as decontextualized grammar and mechanics? Experience school as a transmission of predetermined facts from an authority figure, the nature of the authority itself suspect?
Like writing, books were crucial to Coates’s self-education:
Now the questions began burning in me. The materials for research were all around me, in the form of books assembled by your grandfather. He was then working at Howard University as a research librarian in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, one of the largest collections of Africana in the world. Your grandfather loved books and loves them to this day, and they were all over the house, books about black people, by black people, for black people spilling off shelves and out of the living room, boxed up in the basement… (30)
For Coates, questioning is the impetus for growth, for empowerment.
He turns to books to pursue these questions. Books “about black people, by black people” serve as a mirror, that reflect the stories that were (and too often are) left out of a curriculum ultimately designed to pacify and oppress.
These books, his father’s books, provided context and perspective from which to reflect on other images of black people projected each Black History Month in school:
The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life — love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the firehoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality… I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? (32)
As Coates pursues his questions, synthesizes diverse perspectives, and reflects, new insights come into focus:
‘I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the same beast.’
One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body.
‘And I began to see these two arms in relation — those who failed in the schools justified their destruction in the streets. The society could say, “He should have stayed in school,” and then wash its hands of him.’
It does not matter that the “intentions” of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, “intend” for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense — ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction.
‘But a great number of educators spoke of “personal responsibility” in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”’ (33)
The American Dream. A dream deferred. Dr. King’s dream. Coates explicitly rejects this mode of seeing, the Grand Narrative. Particularly when the narrative is wielded to exonerate. This is a politics that rejects innocence and amnesia. That forces an historical reckoning.
The work is a celebration of true education — inquiry over dogma, questioning and reflecting over pat answers. Stance. Narrative. Argument and evidence. Empathy and action.
Coates’s may be a particularly important voice for white, middle class teachers who are grappling with questions of racism and injustice. His experiences reflect a school system that ultimately emphasized blind obedience over learning and curiosity, and privileged the prerogatives of the institution over the student as learner and individual. As educators, we must reflect on our own roles in this injustice.
Further Reading:
- Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom
- Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
- Ladson-Billings, Gloria. (1994) Chapter 5: The Tree of Knowledge and Chapter 6: Culturally Relevant Teaching. P78–126. The Dreamkeepers: Successful teachers of African-American children. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
