Between the World and Me

I just finished a life-changing book. Between the World and Me is a powerful personal and historical account of what it means to be black in America. The book is written by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the form of a letter to his teenage son. It is very succinct (only 150 pages long) – and jam-packed with truth bombs. Below are a only a fraction of the quotes that stood out for me.

"There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally." Coates points out that people who believe themselves to be white (a term he uses throughout the book) think of racists as fanatics, but really racism is more often disguised. This reminded me of how Hannah Arendt described fascism in WWII – as the banality of evil. To do evil, a human being must believe that what they are doing is good and just. This is the foundation of what Coates calls the Dream. 

Coates on the Dream: “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.”

As someone who works in the field of abuse prevention and watches how the media and the public have responded to the Adrian Peterson case, for example, and the image of an African American woman smacking her son at a riot in Baltimore, I found Coates’ discussion of child abuse as a means of protection particularly poignant:

“Now at night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our American generations, took me. Now I personally understood my father and the old mantra – ‘Either I can beat him or the police.’  I understood it all – the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket…. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of ‘race,’ imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods.”

I recently had a conversation with an expert on historical trauma in the African American community.  He, like Coates, explains that because African American culture exists as a response to slavery, institutional racism, and historical trauma (in short, terrorism), black children are raised to survive, whereas children of privilege are raised to be happy. These children are parented differently and thus interact with the world differently and it is easy to see how these two worldviews can then come into conflict. Coates says, “Your mother had to teach me how to love you – how to kiss you and tell you I love you every night. Even now it does not feel a wholly natural act so much as it feels like ritual. And that is because I am wounded. This is because I am tied to old ways, which I learned in a hard house. It was a loving house even as it was besieged by its country, but it was hard.”

Coates is a realist. From my perspective, he is calling on all people to acknowledge the truth of American history and to understand black Americans today as human beings within the context of that violent, oppressive history. The injustice is so staggering that the word injustice doesn’t get near the scope of the reality. For obvious reasons he is skeptical of those with good intentions. He states, “’Good intention’ is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”

To his son he says, “The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise. The world needs saving precisely because of the actions of these same men and women. I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But 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…. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot like. You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton and gold.”

Coates argues that the existence of the Dream and the persecution of African Americans as a necessary component of that dream hurts not only African Americans but all people. I agree. When protesters were fired upon by ignorant, angry white men at a Black Lives Matter demonstration in my city, I felt shame. And I felt more shame, a shame that I will never forget, when the following day a Black Lives Matter march occurred and I was too scared to attend. I could stay safe in my home. I am not vulnerable to unjust violence by police and others. And I felt shame about the fact that I didn’t have to have a stake. And being complicit, seeing only the Dream for ourselves and not facing the realities of what life is like as a black American, is damning. As Coates says to his son, “And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.”

Sometimes You Eat the Bear, and Sometimes the Bear Eats You

I like to think that I can keep a pretty positive attitude and not get caught up in unfortunate circumstances. Often I'm able to channel stress into action and end up feeling pretty good about it. This week, however, was a real humdinger. I mean, nothing serious or traumatic occurred (these are privileged-people problems), but it was just one thing after another until I felt knocked down.

In the last six days...

• I had three fillings replaced in one afternoon. It is surreal how like a horror movie it is to have people drilling and spraying water in your mouth, and yet it is so commonplace. And half-way through the dentist decided that the suction tube wasn't sufficiently working and I had to move to another room. Awful.   
• A few hours later, I got pulled over because my tabs were expired. I'm not sure if it was because we moved or because I renewed my tabs online last year, but I never got a reminder in the mail. Don't get me wrong, this was definitely on me, but the timing was brutal; the novocain was still in effect when I was talking to the cop. Also, when $120 goes down the drain I can't help but think of all of the ways it could have been better spent. 
• Because I have the ambition to prove my worth daily at work, I spent my MLK holiday working on a project that I lead in preparation for a meeting the next day. Then, in said meeting, I was told that the project will be put on hold for 6 months and the focus on my position will turn to grant writing in the meantime. It was disappointing to feel like the rug was pulled out from under me. I hate when decisions are made without those who are impacted.
• I received my first grant writing assignment three days before it was due. I worked more than 24 hours in two days to allow time for two supervisors to review it. One chose not review it and the other obviously spent about 15 minutes with it (it is 9 full pages of text). While I love to write, high-stakes writing keeps me up at night, and the lack of someone saying "this looks good" or "just focus on this piece" really impacted my comfort level with the whole thing. 

End of rant. Now that I write it all out it seems less miserable in retrospect than it felt at the time. I am just recovering from sleep deprivation. The good news is that today is a new day, a FRIDAY no less, and hopefully the weekend will provide the respite I need. To go out on a positive note, here is a sweet tune (sorry - the video isn't of the highest quality).

PS. This post title also reminds me of The Revenant, which we saw last week. I will share my thoughts about it on the blog soon.

Winter Warm Up

It has been COLD here. I'm talking about subzero temperatures. On such days I find respite in a steamy warm kitchen. Recently SB and I made homemade pasta with homemade sauce. We were so ready to eat by the time it was done that we didn't take a photo! ;) I can't wait to introduce my 4-year-old niece to pasta making. She will love it.

We got a pressure cooker for Christmas and are testing out recipes in the booklet that came with it. So far the chicken noodle soup was delicious, as was BBQ pulled pork. Our chili didn't really turn out, mostly because it didn't call for beans or as many veggies as we like. A largely meat chili doesn't have the same great texture of beans and veg. Just sayin'.

We tried a quesadilla recipe that was fun and tasty. We always eat tacos - never quesadillas. This recipe is a bit labor intensive for a quesadilla -- roasting peppers on the stove top and then separately charring cauliflower in a cast-iron pan -- but I enjoyed the extra steps and it made the final product more satisfying. The recipe came from Smitten Kitchen. You can find it here.

charred cauliflower quesadillas with a simple lime-y slaw

Tonight we made a tried and true winter favorite - a miso soup with veggies and kidney beans (it also has cauliflower in it -- I guess we're into cauliflower these days!). The recipe was previously posted on this blog. You can find it here.

nothing beats the smell of mirepoix...
the base of this miso soup and so many other things.
ONION, garlic, celery and carrots

Speaking of the glory of onions, my aforementioned niece loves chives. She refers to the chives at my parents' house as "the eating plant" and happily plucks a few and chews on them every time she is at their house. Love it.

More soon...

Blood, Bones and Butter

This year one of my primary goals is to read more. SB and I have, like so many others, gotten hooked on the endless supply of quality TV and film at our fingertips thanks to Netflix. We have spent many more evenings in front of the tube than we'd like to admit. And while SB reads for at least a half-hour most nights before turning out the light, I can only get in a page or two before falling asleep. We have decided to make an effort to watch less TV and dedicate more evenings to reading instead.

I started my new reading kick with a book that I've wanted to read for at least six months -- Blood, Bones and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton. It is the memoir of a chef who was featured on the most recent season of the show "Mind of a Chef." (The show airs on PBS and a few seasons are on Netflix, though not the newest season.) 

I loved this book for a few reasons. First, Hamilton has a Masters degree in creative writing, so the book is particularly well written. The language is beautiful and the flow of the book is masterful (each section comes full circle with poignance). The descriptions are so sensory that you can smell, taste, see and hear the entire story; she provides the deep level of observation and detail that you would expect from a writer/chef.

And then there is Hamilton's voice. She is unabashed, intelligent, at times generous and grateful and at other times cold and unforgiving. And her story explains well how she came to be that way. I don't want to tell the whole story here, in case you want to read the book... what I will say is that she is interesting on many levels. 

For example, she straddles two worlds in that she is highly educated and can speak the language of academia and simultaneously is a tireless manual laborer working in largely male restaurant kitchen culture. She is a woman who identifies as a lesbian for much of her life and then ends up, to her own surprise, acquiring a husband and becoming a mother of two. Her discussion of identity politics in the book is rich.

Some parts of her life sound idyllic - her childhood with artist parents and fine food and life outdoors, her Italian husband and their July trips to Rome - but for all of the wonder and magic that has been part of her experience, her story is also a painful one. While she is able to thrive in a fast-paced kitchen because that is her personality, her personal relationships outside of the kitchen are often distant and tenuous. 

In short, a complex and interesting woman and a very compelling read.