The first sentence of Chapter 1: “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” of W. E. B. DuBois’s Souls of Black (1903) might sound eerily familiar to you:
Between me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. (9)
The unasked question is, “How does it feel to be a problem?” The familiar echo is the title of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s best selling, critically acclaimed book, Between the World and Me (2015). Written in the form of a letter to his son, Coates’s book begins with a different question, posed to him on a popular news show: “What does it mean to lose your body?” Coates’s meditation on the consequences of racial discrimination and prejudice on the black body propelled him onto the national consciousness.
When he gave the Reynolds lecture at Davidson in 2015, Coates said that he set out to become “the best writer of [his] generation.” He’s been pretty successful, if Toni Morrison’s estimation is any measure of success: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died,” Morrison wrote, “Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates” (see book jacket).
The comparison between Coates and Baldwin now dominates discussion of Coates’s achievements, glossing over what might be a more apt comparison to another literary predecessor: W. E. B. DuBois. Coates’s title directly alludes to the opening of DuBois’s great work, and Coates’s wide ranging social critiques mirror DuBois’s interdisciplinary intelligence. Consider DuBois’s Chapter II: “Of the Dawn of Freedom,” which is a groundbreaking blend of history and political science, telling a story that had never been told about the history and fate of the Freedman’s Bureau during the Reconstruction Era after the Civil War. DuBois concludes the chapter by affirming the value of historical study and comparison:
To-day, when new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully? (33)
DuBois’s answer is an implicit and resounding YES. To solve the problems of the present day, we should assess the legacy of the past honestly and carefully.
This kind of historical accounting is what Coates offers in his Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations.” Read this article and compare it to Souls. Notice how, like DuBois, Coates begins with a series of epigraphs, creating a counterpoint between Biblical, white, and black voices. Notice how he, too, mixes first-person address, storytelling, history, sociology, economics, and political science in order to offer a vivid, complex, and compelling narrative about systematic discrimination and failure to redress the injustices of slavery. Notice how Coates, like DuBois, demands that we count the legacy of the past honestly and carefully in order to face the “newer and vaster problems” of the present day.
Works Cited
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015.
DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Ed. by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999.
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