Book Club - apologies for length.
General
I'm really finding the prefaces to each article more interesting than the actual articles themselves – it's fascinating to hear such an accomplished writer talk about the process and sometimes overshadows the actual article. This might be due to being a Brit, some of the articles deal with things that are not so much part of my cultural makeup – for example Malcolm X.
Fourth Year
This has one of my favourite sentences about writing – 'The sentence might be magical, but the magic should never be sentimental.' It's a great description of how writing should work, and also shows the effort that Coates puts in to his work. Some of it is clearly trying for poetry – see also 'The history told me. The streets told me. And so the music told me. I heard the tune. Soon I would hear the lyrics.' Just brilliant.
On to the more topical side – one quote that leaped out at me was 'And the next day, I saw black people smiling. And some conscious part of me died with their smiles.' The fact that it's the conscious part is telling – he knows that underneath the surface, the racism still is part of the American psyche and simply Obama being in power is not enough. The comparison between Malcolm X and Obama does seem forced but it sometimes feels as if Coates wants Obama to be more like Malcolm X – this article is that first hint towards the fact he wants more than just being in power.
Fifth Year
This seems like the turning point in the book – it's a much longer section and it deals with the first major point where Obama did nothing wrong and far less than he should have, but got pilloried for it. His comments on Trayvon Martin in the wake of such acts as Charlottesville now seem like almost nothing, but were used against him. It almost seems like Obama shrinks a little bit in this article and it shifts focus on to how people viewed – he becomes the object, rather than the subject.
'His is the perfect statement of the Obama era, a time marked by a revolution that must never announce itself, by a democracy that must never acknowledge the weight of race, even while being shaped by it. Barack Obama governs a nation enlightened enough to send an African American to the White House, but not enlightened enough to accept a black man as its president.'
I think Coates has begun to think at this point that it never will – that there is something flawed within America.
Sixth Year
The reparations issue is one that I hadn't viewed in the way Coates talks about it. I'd thought of it as simply trying to repay money for problems that had been 'solved' in the 1860s. I was wrong and this article showed me how wrong I was – that reparations was not just about slavery but also about the problems facing Black Americans since.
One section that seemed interesting in response to Brexit was 'Could it also be true that the masses of poorer whites might support lowering those same taxes for the rich in response to a different vision of the world?' Brexit sometimes seems to be a discussion between two groups talking at cross-purposes – neither seems to be able to understand that the other has a different vision of the world, which is causing our Parliament to basically stall.
Back to Coates – 'we believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don't look'. I knew about white dominance but Coates has made me look at the world again.
General
I'm really finding the prefaces to each article more interesting than the actual articles themselves – it's fascinating to hear such an accomplished writer talk about the process and sometimes overshadows the actual article. This might be due to being a Brit, some of the articles deal with things that are not so much part of my cultural makeup – for example Malcolm X.
Fourth Year
This has one of my favourite sentences about writing – 'The sentence might be magical, but the magic should never be sentimental.' It's a great description of how writing should work, and also shows the effort that Coates puts in to his work. Some of it is clearly trying for poetry – see also 'The history told me. The streets told me. And so the music told me. I heard the tune. Soon I would hear the lyrics.' Just brilliant.
On to the more topical side – one quote that leaped out at me was 'And the next day, I saw black people smiling. And some conscious part of me died with their smiles.' The fact that it's the conscious part is telling – he knows that underneath the surface, the racism still is part of the American psyche and simply Obama being in power is not enough. The comparison between Malcolm X and Obama does seem forced but it sometimes feels as if Coates wants Obama to be more like Malcolm X – this article is that first hint towards the fact he wants more than just being in power.
Fifth Year
This seems like the turning point in the book – it's a much longer section and it deals with the first major point where Obama did nothing wrong and far less than he should have, but got pilloried for it. His comments on Trayvon Martin in the wake of such acts as Charlottesville now seem like almost nothing, but were used against him. It almost seems like Obama shrinks a little bit in this article and it shifts focus on to how people viewed – he becomes the object, rather than the subject.
'His is the perfect statement of the Obama era, a time marked by a revolution that must never announce itself, by a democracy that must never acknowledge the weight of race, even while being shaped by it. Barack Obama governs a nation enlightened enough to send an African American to the White House, but not enlightened enough to accept a black man as its president.'
I think Coates has begun to think at this point that it never will – that there is something flawed within America.
Sixth Year
The reparations issue is one that I hadn't viewed in the way Coates talks about it. I'd thought of it as simply trying to repay money for problems that had been 'solved' in the 1860s. I was wrong and this article showed me how wrong I was – that reparations was not just about slavery but also about the problems facing Black Americans since.
One section that seemed interesting in response to Brexit was 'Could it also be true that the masses of poorer whites might support lowering those same taxes for the rich in response to a different vision of the world?' Brexit sometimes seems to be a discussion between two groups talking at cross-purposes – neither seems to be able to understand that the other has a different vision of the world, which is causing our Parliament to basically stall.
Back to Coates – 'we believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don't look'. I knew about white dominance but Coates has made me look at the world again.
