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Newsflash for Hillary Clinton: Between the World and Me
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2016-09-05 12:36:39
Today, the all-too-long election season enters its final stretch. Over the weekend the New York Times featured an article
detailing Hillary Clinton’s unpopularity with young African-American voters, many of whom supported Bernie Sanders in
the Democratic primary. The article stated that non-voting, or voting for a third party, threatens Clinton’s ability to win
swing states in the Northeast and Midwest. The first reaction of Democratic Party officials is that these voters will come
around — “they” have to come around — because the alternative of Donald Trump winning is so much worse. The assumption
is that the voters will have to change, become more practical, choose the lesser of two evils. Wrong. The burden of change
rests on Clinton and the Democratic Party. They need to stop lecturing and start listening — and reading. Clinton’s travails
made me think of Ta-Neishi Coates’s groundbreaking book-length essay, Between the World and Me, winner of last year’s
National Book Award. He wrote it as a letter to his teenage son, because:
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.
Coates addresses the black body from a personal, social, and historical perspective. He talks about his childhood in West
Baltimore, where parents meted out harsh physical punishment for infractions because that style of punishment had been
passed from generation to generation, originating under slavery’s lash, and because, as Coates’s father said, he’d rather be
the one to beat his son that it come from a white policeman. The toughness of his peers on the corner hid their fragility, as
eTA-NEHISI
~ COATES
; BET#CEN
dP “This is required reading.” —Tasi Morrison
these black children, teenagers, and young men knew their life could end at any second. ve But
the pivotal moment in Coates’s consciousness (and in the book) is when his Howard University classmate Prince Jones was
killed in Virginia by a black police officer who had tailed him from Prince George’s County, Maryland, in a case of mistaken
identity. When Coates left his West Baltimore neighborhood and arrived at Howard and Washington, DC — places he called
the Mecca — he met black people from all over the world, from all backgrounds. Prince Jones’s mother was a doctor, and he
grew up attending exclusive private schools — none of which mattered when the cop judged him by the color of his skin.
Coates directed his essay to his son, to explain why the black body is fragile and precious, and why he has to be more
careful (“twice as good”) as his white peers. But it’s also a call for white people in the United States to change. That change
begins with understanding and travels through repentance. The fact that a white person’s ancestors didn’t enslave other
human beings or arrived in the United States after the end of slavery is no excuse. The wealth of this country was built on
the backs of enslaved Africans and on land that belonged to people who were already here. Jim Crow laws and the state-
sanctioned terror of lynching reserved the best opportunities for white people, and restrictive covenants and redlining further
segregated blacks and whites. Every single white person in the United States has benefitted from white privilege, regardless
of family history. Hillary Clinton has much to repent. While one should not assume that she plans to follow in her husband’s
footsteps in creating the “incarceration nation,” she bought into the now-discredited “super-predator” image of young black
males in the early 1990s. This, as Michelle Alexander points out in her outstanding (and also award-winning) book The New
Jim Crow, justified mandatory sentencing for nonviolent offenses, including “three strikes” lifetime sentences.
Disproportionately, young black males suffered under the new prison lash, both inside and then again upon release when
they were denied the vote and shut out of professional careers (due to licensing restrictions) and nearly every other job (due
to applications that forced those with criminal convictions to “check the box”). [caption id="attachment_8805"
align="aligncenter" width="374"] Michelle Alexander, The New
Jim Crow[/caption] Clinton’s supporters may counter that she won the primaries in Southern states with large numbers of
black voters, mostly on the strength of elders. Both Alexander and Coates have an answer for that. The New Jim Crow
documents the support of many black leaders and older African Americans for stricter laws and longer incarceration. From
his perspective in the younger generation, Coates explains why, from the harsh punishments elders meted out to children
who had to be “twice as good” to the fragile toughness of his peers who believed their bodies were already doomed. Having
a few friends is no excuse. Hillary Clinton has to change. White Americans have to change. And this change starts with
listening to people who are angry and who have a vision for how things need to be different. This is an uncomfortable
conversation, as every conversation is when it involves criticism and the need for someone to change. Reading Between the
World and Me is a fine place to start...but it can’t end there.
