Readying myself for a polished and prepped lecture by none other than Ta Nehisi Coates himself, I walked into the LeFrak gymnasium expectantly waiting for a lofty treatise on the ills of racism. I expected to be slightly bored by the topic, since freshmen orientation has more or less butchered the conversation of race at Amherst College, at least for me. I expected spouting of repeated information and ambiguous calls for reform that everyone seemed to propose but never truly outline the “how’s” of. In other words, as much as Coates was embittered by the race dialogue, I was equally put off by it - not because I didn’t believe in the need for social justice, but because of the lack of coherence amongst political activists in attaining such change.
Yet I found myself thoroughly enjoying Coates’ talk. He did not speak in elevation above the audience, but rather towards us. His points were not fed to us in packages of concise articulations, but in poetic lines as carefully nuanced as his arguments. He illustrated what he did best, which was to write, by reciting passages from his novel and letting the words speak for themselves. Sentences that I barely glanced over in reading suddenly became alive, brimming with phonetic expression. One of the lines that struck me as poetic was: “Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear.” Spoken out loud, the sentence seems to be propelled by some innate force, emphasizing the black body as a vessel of predestined misfortune. Coates urges us to not to search or struggle for the Dream, but to understand it is only a mirage built from history’s blindness.
Opening the forum for a question and answer session, Coates engaged the audience conversationally as students inquired about modern day slavery and the route in which we should pursue equality, all of which the author attributed to the Dream, or our inability to wake up from it. The Dream - reframed from the idealistic “American Dream” - is one that serves white Americans in the security of their bodies at the price of black liberty. Stating that “[t]he whole country is a safe space for being white,” Ta Nehisi Coates also adds that people of color “end up having to demand explicitly what is implicit for everyone else.” He does not offer us a solution or a grand vision for this disparity, interpreting race relations as an imaginary social construct defined by systemic oppression dating back to the time of slavery. Instead, Coates offers us authentic assessment of it means to live in black body in one of the most trying times in history - it is up to us to make something of it.
