Abstract
I was invited to review Between the World and Me just as the world plunged headlong into fresh deep realms of darkness and chaos. The novel coronavirus had turned vibrant cities into ghost towns, and ICU wards into war zones. But that wasn’t the only pandemic: police in the United States had killed 164 black men and women in the first eight months of 2020 (Cohen 2020). The video-streamed murders of young African American men took place before our eyes. “Karens,” so many of them, took center stage. The name emerged as a derisive term, calling out the blatant racism of white people who ascribe malicious intent to African Americans engaged in everyday activities of life: birdwatching or taking a daily jog. There was Starbucks Karen, Central Park Karen, San Francisco Karen. In each situation, the malevolent actions—a malignant othering—sought to set boundaries as to where it was or wasn’t appropriate for the other’s body to be present and to suppress the voice of the other—what they had a right to say to a person in the historical majority.
As I began to read Between the World and Me, I painfully remembered when my own body was not my own and my voice could be so easily silenced. I was eighteen and had just moved to my first apartment in Queens. With a newfound sense of independence and optimism for the future, I left my apartment to make a grocery run to cook my first meal. Within ten minutes, an unmarked car accelerated toward me. It jumped the curb and blocked my path. I was paralyzed. My instincts to run were thwarted—thankfully! Two white men jumped out with guns drawn.
One officer grabbed my jacket collar and, using it to choke me, threw me to the ground and pinned me, the gun in his right hand placed at my temple, his knee on my back. The other held a walkie-talkie in one hand and his gun in the other. I pleaded, implored them to listen to me. A powerful mix of desperation and helplessness took hold. I screamed, “I am not that person you are looking for.” His partner dug into my jacket and pants pockets, jostling the contents onto the ground to discover only my wallet and a grocery list. The grocery list had somehow managed to penetrate the consciousness of these two men in a way that all my efforts at protest could not. It was as if it breached some psychic realm, making them aware that my body was as human as theirs. The aggression directed at my body suddenly stopped and both men appeared confused.
Minutes later, one remarked that further information had “come over the air” that they had detained the wrong person. Just as quickly as I had hit the concrete, the two undercover officers were gone. Illusions of my independence, illusions that I could keep the integrity of my physical body and space safe, were gone too. I wish I could say that that moment was an isolated experience, but it was not. I am thankful I did not die that day, or on the other days when I was called to account for why my body was someplace that another believed it should not have been.
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates quickly immerses the reader in a painful exploration of the African American experience, bleak and dystopian, in the United States. We are transported into his world through the discourse between Coates and his fifteen-year-old son, Samori. The intimacy of this conversation is suffused with elements of trauma from Coates’s past, historical and present racism in America juxtaposed with his dreams, wishes, and fears for his teenage son’s life—at a precarious age when he will so readily be viewed as a danger, an undefined threat out in the world. The author carves in high relief the tribulations of parenting a young black male: negotiating the pitfalls from within one’s own culture—poor educational opportunities, drugs, gang violence—and warding off threats from the external world, society at large, such as police brutality, systemic legal inequities, and relentless sociopolitical pressures to maintain the status quo. For the reader, it’s an uneasy journey.
Coates asks his readers, as sojourners in his brutal world, to tolerate powerfully affective states of sadness, anger, rage, hatred, paranoia, hopelessness, and despair—emotions intricately embedded in the day-to-day lives of African Americans. A centerpiece of Coates’s thesis is that the African American body—post–Emancipation Proclamation, post–Jim Crow, and post–civil rights—remains the prized chattel of an American racist machine that reaches into the social, political, and legal fabric of American democracy. As long as such forces exist, he argues, the notion of the Dream for persons of color remains a quixotic myth.
I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies [p. 11].
Coates’s work builds on the seminal writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. For example, Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness highlighted the incongruent experience of African Americans as they viewed their sense of self from divergent planes: from the perspective of being Black; and from the perspective of the dominant other. Ellison continued the exploration of the intrapsychic, interpersonal, and physical world of Blacks by positing that the African American experience was one of extreme alienation in which neither the Black psyche nor the Black soma could be acknowledged by the dominant other, rendering Blacks invisible.
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn’t bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face [Du Bois 1903, p. 2].
What happens when the Dream becomes undreamable? What happens to the other who does not have the privilege to dream? Are symbol formation and fantasy left to wither away? What happens when fantasy is supplanted by urgent practicality—an enduring need to survive? How can we move beyond the enigma of what Coates calls the Struggle? Coates leaves these and many other questions unanswered, and the reader is left to sit with the uncertainty, to identify with feelings of futility and hopelessness in the other.
For Coates, the Dream is crushed under the weight of systemic racism, and its impact is experienced on both visceral and temporal levels, encoded on a synaptic register and embedded within the body, subsequently attacking the fundamental development of African Americans and irrevocably altering life trajectories.
But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body [Coates 2015, p. 10].
Strikingly, like Du Bois in 1903 and Ellison’s and Baldwin’s works on the Black experience, completed, respectively, in 1952 and 1955, Coates’s book argues that one outcome of systemic racism (e.g., loss of the Dream) is a significant disruption in one’s meaning and use .of time and cohesion of sense of self: time lost preparing an acceptable false sense of self for the world, time spent steeling one’s self to work harder for less money and the time lost developing other aspects of the self that would lead to a more integrated self-state: fatherhood, motherhood, the relational self.
It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered. The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in moments. It is the last bottle of wine that you have just uncorked but do not have time to drink. It is the kiss that you do not have time to share, before she walks out of your life. It is the raft of second chances for them, and twenty-three-hour days for us [Coates, p. 91].
Arguably, Coates’s metaphor of the readying of the mask is a forced induction into the role of what Helene Deutsch (1942) described as an as-if personality. Deutsch introduced the term to describe phenomena in which the person’s whole relationship to life lacks genuineness and yet outwardly moves along as if it were complete, leading outside observers to ponder what is wrong. She noted an absence of authenticity and a proneness toward narcissistic identifications with others, with these identifications never fully integrated into the self-system. In the as-if individual, repression gives way to loss of object cathexis—a loss of investment of psychic energy in goals, ideas, or activities (pp. 302–304).
Through a psychoanalytic lens, systemic racism can be conceptualized within a Kleinian framework. Klein’s description of the paranoid-schizoid position as a state of mind in which the individual splits off both self and object into rigid binary poles of good and bad, with little to no integration, serves as a bridge from the intrapsychic to the group and societal domains. In this regard, the othering of another due to his or her race can be viewed as a defense against perceived vulnerability whereby intense anxieties, aggressive impulses, and feelings of disgust and shame can be split off from the self and attributed to the feared racial group. In turn, the projected “bad” parts of the self can be internalized, identified with, and embedded within the personality configuration of the other.
What relevance does Between the World and Me have for psychoanalysis? Coates’s work is a salvo to the analytic world, discharging a powerful reminder that, as Thomas Ogden (2005) has noted, “the analyst not only lives and works within the terms of the analytic situation, he also lives and works in the context of the social/political situation of his time. . . . the analyst is responsible not only for remaining receptive and responsive to the truth of what is occurring in the consulting room, but also to what is happening in the outside world” (p. 12). The world in which the analyst lives today is marked by racial hatred of the other—a world in which there is a fever pitch of mass police brutality, senseless attacks and murders of people of color. It is also a world in which dissenting voices are rising, and allies are emerging. The question remains: Where will psychoanalysis find itself between the signal and the noise?