REBELS AGAINST THE RAJ | Kirkus Reviews

The highly effective story of a father’s previous and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior author Coates (The Lovely Battle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Street to Manhood, 2008) affords this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his personal experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I’m wounded,” he writes. “I’m marked by outdated codes, which shielded me in a single world after which chained me within the subsequent.” Coates grew up within the robust neighborhood of West Baltimore, crushed into obedience by his father. “I used to be a succesful boy, clever and well-liked,” he remembers, “however powerfully afraid.” His life modified dramatically at Howard College, the place his father taught and from which a number of siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had at all times been one of the crucial vital gathering posts for black folks.” He calls it The Mecca, and its school and his fellow college students expanded his horizons, serving to him to grasp “that the black world was its personal factor, greater than a photo-negative of the individuals who consider they’re white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their unique racial id; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides folks, however moderately “the precise damage achieved by folks intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they’ve named issues greater than something we might ever truly do.” After he married, the writer’s world widened once more in New York, and later in Paris, the place he lastly felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist desires. He got here to grasp that “race” doesn’t totally clarify “the breach between the world and me,” but race exerts an important pressure, and younger blacks like his son are weak and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately desires his son to have the ability to stay “other than concern—even other than me.”

This shifting, potent testomony might need been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”