Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me
A Must Read

I have watched and rewatched The Equalizer trilogy of films starring Denzel Washington and have written essays on all three movies. However, each time I watch the movies, I notice things that I missed, or I missed the message. This video is the exchange between McCall and Miles. McCall is trying to help Miles, a teenager facing problems growing up.

McCall gives Miles Between the World and Me written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It is designed to provide Miles with the journey Coates took as a black person in a white world. He discusses discrimination and pain that he experienced as he grew up in Baltimore. He experienced white bigotry and oppression in the city streets, but he also saw the other white world of suburbia.

Coates attended Howard University, which provided him a place to gather his thoughts together with black professors and students. He described Howard as his “Mecca.”

Coates uses his life as a young black in Baltimore to help his child. Between the World and Me is essentially an open letter to his son. What Coates did with his son is paralleled by what McCall is doing with his adopted son, Miles.

The dilemma that Coates is attempting to label is the various expressions of racism that his son, in particular, faces. Whites can’t grasp racism. A white liberal can only approximate what blacks face in the States. No white can fully understand systemic racism in America. Whites can try to walk in the shoes of a black for a day or a week, but they are only borrowing them from a black.

In the late 1950s, John Howard Griffin, a white, wanted to wear the shoes of a black, as he wrote Black Like Me. He did everything possible, which included taking Methoxsalen orally. It will darken one's skin temporarily. Griffin also used an ultraviolet lamp, which darkened his skin. His desire was to look as black as a white could. It allowed him to approximate being black as he was working on his book.

In the past several weeks, I have written a number of articles about the two -isms: racism and sexism. One’s station in life is based upon which sex and/or one's race. White males are at the top of the pecking order.

That notion is absurd at multiple levels. Females aren’t the inferior or the lesser sex. Women's brains develop faster than men's. There are more women in medical schools. In veterinary school, 80% of the students are women. Starting in the 1980s, 58% undergraduate students are women, 62% master’s degree students are women, and over 50% of PhDs. California Institute of Technology is the most difficult school in which it is to be accepted. Only 3% of the applications are accepted. Caltech’s class of 2028 will be 113 female students and 109 males.

Racism and sexism need to be addressed. The South lost the Civil War, but the North lost the peace. The South rebuilt its Southern mindset with Jim Crow laws, the KKK, and the melancholy feeling of Gone with the Wind. They constructed 1,500 public memorials and monuments. A third of the statues tied to the racist mindset are in North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia.

In the National Statuary Hall of the US Capitol, each state can contribute two statues of a famous person from that state. The Statuary Hall contains several Confederate officers, the president and vice president of the Confederacy, and the rest were supporters of the South. Robert E. Lee and another general of the Confederacy have been removed in the last several years.

I have traveled to Germany several times and enjoyed sightseeing in places like Berlin, Bonn, Stuttgart, Cologne, Nuremberg, Berchtesgaden, Konstanz, and Munich. I never saw a statue of Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, Bormann, Ribbentrop, or Goring. There are none. However, America is still fighting the Civil War with statues of leaders of the Confederacy.

Between the World and Me was his open letter to his son. McCall did the same with Miles. Each one of us needs to address both sexism and racism.

This is an excellent interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

This is a PBS News Hour video of Ta-Nehisi Coates testifying before Congress.

This is the poem from which Ta-Nehisi Coates used as the title of his book.

Between the World and Me
by Richard Wright

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled
suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly
oaks and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting
themselves between the world and me....

There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly
upon a cushion of ashes.
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt
finger accusingly at the sky.
There were torn tree limbs, tiny veins of burnt leaves, and
a scorched coil of greasy hemp;
A vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat,
and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood.
And upon the trampled grass were buttons, dead matches,
butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a
drained gin-flask, and a whore's lipstick;
Scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the
lingering smell of gasoline.
And through the morning air the sun poured yellow
surprise into the eye sockets of the stony skull....

And while I stood my mind was frozen within cold pity
for the life that was gone.
The ground gripped my feet and my heart was circled by
icy walls of fear--
The sun died in the sky; a night wind muttered in the
grass and fumbled the leaves in the trees; the woods
poured forth the hungry yelping of hounds; the
darkness screamed with thirsty voices; and the witnesses rose and lived:
The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves
into my bones.
The grey ashes formed flesh firm and black, entering into
my flesh.

The gin-flask passed from mouth to mouth, cigars and
cigarettes glowed, the whore smeared lipstick red
upon her lips,
And a thousand faces swirled around me, clamoring that
my life be burned....

And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth
into my throat till I swallowed my own blood.
My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my
black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as
they bound me to the sapling.
And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from
me in limp patches.
And the down and quills of the white feathers sank into
my raw flesh, and I moaned in my agony.
Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a
baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs
sides of death.
Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot
sides of death.
Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in
yellow surprise at the sun....