jj

I love the details, the pride, the power of this description!

But how exactly are they related? And doesn't this (of course it does) deeply complicate the concerns about "black-on-black" crime, making the violence experience by a black youth all part of a connected system of violence?

This need for remembering that we are individuals, not a composite of a whole race, is essential. Too often, we allow ourselves to be defined by stereotypes that lack a connection unless we embrace them in our own thinking and actions.

Many minority groups are discouraged from giving back to their communities because escape is a survival reality. Returning is not deemed an honorable option when it equates to demise of the body.

Many minority groups are discouraged from giving back to their communities because escape is a survival reality. Returning is not deemed an honorable option when it equates to demise of the body.

These clothes often are stereotypes of urban bodies for black youth. In contrast, I would say that the opposite response of polo shirts, bow ties, and conforming attire that many black boys wear in an effort to fit in with the dominant culture--through assimilation--is also a form of fear.

I wonder if our "BlackLivesMatter" curriculum sometimes makes the same mistakes. http://youthvoices.net/blacklivesmatter

This is such a powerful articulation--borrowed from Baldwin as the epigraph makes clear--of the social construct of whiteness.

A riff on the title of TNC's forthcoming book, itself a a riff on WEB Du Bois's famous description of black experience in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). As he opens that book in a chapter entitled "Of Our Spiritual Strivings":

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. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.

Is the answer undefined because respect for our common humanity has no specific path? Each person must find his or her own terms of connection with every individual since we combat tendencies in varied ways when we encounter our differences.

Perhaps, when we struggle to define difference as either weakness or strength, we open the door for the challenge of racism and other social inequities. Perhaps difference, when counted as a necessary glue--a common bond--to elevate humans to being more collectively than who we are individually, is what we grapple with because we see it as isolating when we should see it as our hope for attaining our greatest human character once we see difference as a function of our collective wealth--our interdependence on each other--rather than our independence to stand in contrast to one another.

legacy = heritage = systemic inequity = cloaked hoods reminiscent of the hoods worn by KKK and their ideological superiority

I am hesitant to place this broad sense of authority on the police department. I do not think it is a department; instead, I believe it to be people cloaked in masks of justice Some believe in a false image of of others based on color: they see color and not a person, an image and not a heart, a stereotype and not a son or a daughter.

When the person in uniform starts seeing problems and not people, they take on the systemic, divisive heritage of inequity that manifests itself in racists, sexists, social hierarchies that destroy the humanity in all of us.

If a people's wealth, being, or privilege is based on standing on the backs of others, the struggle or jeopardy of the situation is that they are living on uncertain time--a time that will disappear once those who are on their backs eventually stand straight. For those who stand on the backs of others, they have not known true work for what they have attained since they have not earned what they have by their own efforts--at least not on the basis of their own grit and determination that emerged from their personal character of inner strength and resilience. They must live lives continually wondering when the dream will end, when the property will be returned to those who have rightfully fought for what is in the hands of a usurping group.

A usurped dream is a delusion, a farce, a hoax, that survives on borrowed time, terms, and values. For those who benefit from its ongoing perpetuation, the dream is more of a pending nightmare.

Or Restorative Justice these days, I suppose. Yeah, there's something going on here. I need to just listen more.

Only? I get the contrast Coates is describing here, but can't we have non-violence and a savage civilization, with reality bouncing between these?

What about school? Can school be a retreat from the culture of the street? Or does it just extend that culture?

Given my interest in inquiry and the use of questions, I wonder if Coates would say the same about school, that it transforms "every ordinary day into a series of trick questions," and (I fear) "every incorrect answer risks a beat-down" -- even if it's just humiliation and bad grades.

Teachers need to understand that this is going on in our classrooms too.

I'm trying to remember if I, growing up in a home that thought of itself as white in a small town, ever felt this dread. I do remember fearing death as a child, but it was when I was in the back seat of a car, watching the highway rushing by. I don't remember feeling like anybody could kill me.

A different kind of dream from the Dream referred to in the first couple of paragraphs.

Why do we have to accept this as either/or here? Why can't we continue to embrace both sides of this opposition?

And I guess that the point is that we have to live with both sides of the oppositions presented in this paragraph

The fashion and lifestyles of fear. I love the details in this paragraph. I wonder what to do with this critical perspective. Do we look at sagging pants and think, "I know something you don't. I know that you are responding to the fear in your life." Of course not, but then how do we integrate Coates insights? Or do we just listen to what he is saying to his son, and take something from what he is saying in the context of explaining something to his son. Perhaps it's enough to understand that fashion and lifestyle choices have meaning, and it's worth exploring these meanings with the youth making these decisions.

What does this central thesis -- I think -- feel like, get understood to mean... to a 15 year old?

I'm wondering if "the dream" -- at least as Coates sketches it out in the remainder of this paragraph -- has become a "war with the known world" for people without education and money. Is it about race or class. Robert Putnam makes a good case for the problem being about rising economic inequality in America, even as racial and sexual divisions have been lessening.

I read this paragraph three times, blinking back tears. Moments like this get collected by many (not all) of our students. It's amazing to ask them, to give them space -- perhaps a little information -- to tell their own memories of these weeks. There's something here for curriculum, for teasing out the memories of our students over the past years. And asking them what these stories mean to them, and asking them to use writing to remember and to make meaning of these moments. That's how anti-racist education with African-American and Latino youth is different.

Stop and frisk has ended, right? Not so fast: "The NYPD hasn’t ended its practice of stop-and-frisk...." It just stopped reporting the number of stops.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/nyregion/some-new-york-police-street-stops-are-going-undocumented-report-says.html?_r=0

very poetic

Start at 9:29 Face the Nation, November 30, 2014

I like that he is taking us on a journey of this sadness becoming more clear or perhaps he is just noticing the times when it comes up.

The clarity of this sentence comes from this being a letter.

Yes

A powerful lesson .. a truth in America ... and a gift from a father to a son that all that comes before leads to ...

I saw this reference in a review of the book ... amazing to think about ...

A great lesson ...

How did we all get hooked into that show and its underlying narrative?

What? Is that true? or perception of the past?

Interesting ... and this is what we show and explain in school today, too, right? Peaceful protest ...

This seems to be the center of this whole piece, in my opinion.

This was the reality of despair. Or is the reality of despair. How do we fix this? How?

I don't agree. Maybe not uniquely. But evil, nonetheless.

Man. Powerful moment. I can see him. I can see his son. I see the shadows of history. And even in the sadness, I see something .. a glimmer. Perhaps, as a father, I am projecting. So be it. This is one of those moments, the lesson that will linger.

This phrase makes the political so personal, as he intends. It really hits the heartstrings .. and I feel like I am intruding here, don't you? As if I shouldn't be reading this talk between father and son ... as if annotating in the margins is infringing on that bond that the writing is creating. Or is that me?

This is a sad commentary on our times, when such an articulate man either can't find the words, or has the words but know they won't matter. Or something else I am not privy to.

Hard not to relate this piece to another great statement of African American experience: Frederick Douglass's 1841 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

I'm just trying to imagine how it might make Coates son squirm to have his dad talk to him about his body. I guess I'm squirming a bit too. I'm expecting to hear about racism, but here I'm being asked to think about a body.