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So on a chilly evening in the middle of February, I and a handful of others queued up outside Ohio State's Mershon Auditorium to be among the first to enter and try to obtain the best seats we could.
Though this was billed as a lecture, there was very little of Mr. Coates standing at the lectern and speaking. After a few opening remarks, he read a bit from Between; then he and Don Pope-Davis (Dean of OSU's College of Education and Human Ecology) sat and had a conversation.
One of the things that surprised me about Mr. Coates was that he's funnier than I would've expected. I think that's because his writing is often so...heavy. His subject broadly is race in this country—clearly no picnic, and he writes about it with devastating skill.
After the conversation with Dean Pope-Davis, Mr. Coates took a few questions from the audience. And I came prepared. I'd been wondering for almost 2 years about something he'd written in Between.
Here is a (slightly-edited version of) what I asked him:
In Between the World and Me, you talked about a concept you called what white people were called before they were white. And you named some examples, including some ethnic identity labels. I thought what you might be implying was that everyone who came to this country who was not indigenous to this continent or brought here by force would have done well to continue all along using their original ethnic identity labels and that their descendants now would do well to revert to such labels. So I thought I could start calling myself a German-English-American. But then I thought, well that's kind of unwieldy, so why don't I use "European-American?" But then I mentioned this whole concept to some friends who happened to be very...aware, and they said they were really uncomfortable with that because "European-American" is what certain far-right hate groups call themselves. I was like, "Oooh, I did not know that," and "you will not hear that from me again." But I was left wondering: when I took it there in my head, was that a step too far in terms of what you meant? Or in any case could you expound on that for us?
In reply, he spoke for several minutes, and I can't reproduce all of that here, but I'll share the points that stood out to me the most:
- Race is power [emphasis mine] and often violence. He postulated that our definitions (in this country) of Black and of White come directly from slavery. Because there's no other, global definition of those terms outside of the enslaved/enslaving experience. He said something I hadn't thought of before, that if he'd been born in another time and/or place, he would very probably have been labeled something else.
- He got a laugh (but also meant it seriously, I'm sure) when he said that if en masse the people who believe they are white stopped believing that...it would solve the problem. Two things: If you don't know what we mean by people believing they are white, you need to read Between the World and Me. The other thing I notice is: He said that they would need to stop believing it, not just...stop calling themselves that. Two different things.
- As an individual, one cannot overturn racism by themselves. This seems obvious, but the reason I'm talking about it here is: that's one thing I wish I'd done in my question, stated that I certainly knew I wasn't going to make any kind of huge impact just by re-labeling myself. I mean, I do remember thinking that I should share the idea with friends and maybe together we could make it "a thing," but in any case I certainly knew that we were not going to upend the whole thing on our own.
- As a follow-on from the previous point, he said something that really struck me: that I can no more escape being racially white that he can escape being racially black [emphasis his]. Again, that's not how I viewed it. I didn't think, "This is how I can escape being white!" But this is still a striking thought. We white people cannot get away from the fact of what our forbears did. "What we are bearing is history." And given that my ancestors are (as far as I know) German and English, I'm bearing some pretty heavy history—colonialism and genocide, in addition to slavery. I'd never thought about it in quite this way before.
- Our ideas about how change happens tend to be very individual; we don't have a concept of generational struggle. We don't tend to hear people talking about their goal being 200 years hence, the whole idea of whiteness would disappear.
We don't need people with blue eyes to disappear; we don't need people with blond hair to disappear. We mean: the language that we put and the power that we attribute and the credit we give people simply for the bare fact of having those things.
- This year, 2019, is exactly 400 years from the first time captured Africans were delivered to Jamestown, Virginia. "You are bearing 400 years of weight."
- "There are things that white people can do to be less white." This got a laugh. But he meant it seriously and in the sense that there are things white people can do to not contribute to structural inequality: Don't contribute to the racial divide if you happen to move into a gentrifying neighborhood; for example, don't set up neighborhood chats that only include people who moved into the neighborhood in the last couple of years. Don't start movements to create separate public school districts that "just so happen" to include only residents of a certain class. Don't call the police because homeless people are hanging out in the park..
- "It's less about what you name yourself right now and more about what you do."
What are we doing to truly work toward justice and equality—for all?