I had not seen this article, so I'm glad you sent it! I should probably read the news more...but there's so much to read.
I confess I skimmed a lot of the dense sections marshaling evidence. These were my favorite lines, towards the end:
It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.
The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump.
Prophetic mode, critique of journalism, reprise of history and politics--a tour de force. Thinking of Trump in terms of Jefferson and Jackson and tragic hubris, mingling democratic demonstration with a kind of collective playwrighting we are all engaged in without a care for the scapegoats, this is deep jeonk. And I think it even begins to suggest a way towards the mending of the ills Coates is mainly at pains to highlight: namely, more writing and thinking informed by all these sources, nourished by these experiences both intellectual and practical. And beyond the writing is the confrontation with history, politics, race and economics that it points toward. But also and especially, I think, squarely questioning those overtones of the word "fallen", and prodding at the white conservative Christians who believe their fall can be redeemed, yet live and act as though that redemption depended, like everything else, on the color of the soul concerned. Trenchantly calling out major white liberals for blindness or cowardice, too, in their attempts to name the problem, Coates is even-handed in his diagnosis. I hope at least one of them replies publicly.
But maybe the most interesting thing for me would be also to try to get those people who voted for Trump to actually read this article, to think through the argument and feel the force of these allusions. That would always be one of my big questions when we came to the Civil War and Reconstruction, trying to get the kids to think about how to even start to change someone's mind-and-heart who is raised to be a racist. I think we all understand on some level that when we go into that thought experiment, the someone is also us, at this moment of history, and not just a white Southerner post-bellum. On this topic, some of Studs Terkel's interviews with such recovering racists are illuminating. People are capable of reflecting, changing, healing in this way, and they are more than willing to bear witness to it if the right person asks the right question...
Honestly, it seems like part of what Coates might be confronting, as struck me in his Between the World and Me, is that the temptation to draw on religious language to identify problems must also remind us that religions have traditionally also claimed to provide people with answers to them, and may possibly suggest that they still actually provide the answer to many people. The Fall is bigger than politics, just as the American tragedy is part of a general human story. To deal with it, we need to turn not just to history and journalism, but to the Bible, to the poets, Blake, Milton, Dante... If people claim to believe in the Bible, for instance, we should read it with them and see what it says, and what they actually think about it; we should point them towards those poets and philosophers down through the ages who have been such subtle readers of it, and found in it things we can only wonder at. The same goes for the traditional beliefs of all the world's cultures, naturally, which we can't really start to understand without teaching foreign languages in a serious way. If public schools never read good books or take languages seriously, we can't really do that there, so in what space can that discussion take place? I wonder about this as I've started exploring online teaching and tutoring. Nothing really has come of it yet, but it's all potential.
I wonder, too, what Mr Copperman is up to in Teacher: Two Years. I take a lot of it to be him processing what he actually was doing there, and I'm intrigued by how little in the way of sweeping statements he comes out of it with, how much more modest his accounting turns out to be than the likes of Geoffrey Canada or the Freedom Writers or any of those charismatics. I agree that he slips in some generic Delta color; I think the chapter about the blues concert is the biggest let-down of the book. Elsewhere his writing is pretty powerful, but there, and when he quotes the kids' dialect, it is a little cringe-worthy. But I have tried a couple of times to say something about teaching in Phoenix, and so far I don't have much to show for it, so I respect and admire him for seeing his book through! He might let himself off a little easy in the end, softening the critique of his objective failure and trying to make up for it by attesting to his love for the kids--attempting to forgive himself. I think that's understandable, but I like that it's counterbalanced by the harsh statistics and hard-headedness of the scholar whose lecture he goes to there towards the end, who shoots him down and calls him hopelessly biased. Of course, this only helps confirm his point: Love is blind! It may be the only thing capable of redeeming guilt, this side of theophany.
Reading with Patrick should be something I can track down and read before too long. I'm glad you got to meet Stephanie, too! It was great seeing you. Until the next wedding, or whenever, let's keep reading, then, and keep in touch!
No comments:
Post a Comment