Last night I started a book that I picked up at the local library because Toni Morrison had endorsed it as “required reading.” Every so often as humans we find books that are so quick to the point, in this case even poetic, that they transform our way of seeing while we’re in the process of reading them.
Race relations are complicated in the United States (and likely in your part of the world, too, if you are not in the US). I know we all come from different places full of varying experiences, but there are basic truths of our collective history that when told and truly heard can act like bolts of lightning illuminating & invigorating the whole scene. Between the World and Me is such a bolt. Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks the truth boiled down and, although the book is written as a black man to his black son, I think it is also required reading for white people.
For those of us open to the truth, and not clouded by biases we were raised with or from our individual lives (and it’s a constant work to be open I’d say), I would encourage to get your hands on this book and read it. If you are white, I would doubly speak this summons. This account has been mostly focused on homesteading, but social justice is often on our minds and we don’t see it as disconnected from our pursuit of empowerment with the land. As humans, it is our privilege and care to speak up until all of us are free. I’ll let these words speak for themselves.
“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, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own, whose range of feelings 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 loved her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks 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 its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world- which is really the only world she can ever know- ends. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains- whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
...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... You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.” (pg 69-71)
“As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in white, was not achieved through wine tasting and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.”(pg 8)