{"id":11262,"date":"2016-05-31T05:00:08","date_gmt":"2016-05-31T10:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/?p=11262"},"modified":"2016-09-07T10:26:09","modified_gmt":"2016-09-07T15:26:09","slug":"reading-56","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/?p=11262","title":{"rendered":"Reading…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"DSC_0208\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Between the World and Me<\/a>, by Ta-Nehisi Coates<\/em><\/p>\n

This powerful book, written by national correspondent for\u00a0The Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0and award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates,\u00a0<\/em>is written in letter-form to his teenage son regarding feelings, fears, symbolism, and the harsh realities of growing up black in the United States. While the book is far from optimistic, it is, I admit to sounding boring and typical, an amazingly\u00a0important\u00a0<\/em>book. And that is where all my discomfort comes in. I will never, ever begin to understand the black experience in America, no matter how many books I read on the subject. I will, however, try my damnedest. And while this book (and any like it) won’t likely give\u00a0people who consider themselves and believe themselves to be white\u00a0<\/em>a true sense of what it means to be black in America, it can’t hurt either.<\/p>\n

I found myself telling Andrew early and often that I didn’t like the book, that I was struggling to read it. It is so intense, so sad, full of so much hurt, that I would read it in short bursts with a lump in my throat before putting it down for a few days and trying to work through what I had read. The truths of these experiences which I will never know, the destruction of the black body, the institutional racism that we as a country experience in daily life, the history that has been twisted and reshaped to be more American apple pie than harsh reality, it is so hard to stomach. Because it’s dark, it’s not what we believe ourselves to be.<\/p>\n

I kept reading, even though I had to stop myself from doing before bedtime (it is not light reading, not for those who struggle to turn off thoughts before sleep — therefore, not for me to read without lying awake at night or having nightmares in which my children were lost or in danger of being hit by a car, or even one where Emil had learned to ride a motorcycle and had sped away from me and disappeared — all set in the streets of Baltimore, where much of Coates’ dialogue occurred). Instead, I read it in a crowded coffee shop and dog-eared pages I knew meant something to me and touched me in a deep, human way. Such passages spoke to me and made my heart ache, such passages about parenthood and the vulnerability and even dread of a child’s safety and place in this country. The differences between white children and black children:<\/p>\n

“The galaxy belonged to [white children], and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs… This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. No one told those\u00a0little white children, with their tricycles, to be twice as good. I imagined\u00a0their parents telling them to take twice as much.”<\/em><\/p>\n

There are so many passages I felt moved by, and enlightened by. It was hard to read. But I’m so glad I did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates This powerful book, written by national correspondent for\u00a0The Atlantic\u00a0and award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates,\u00a0is written in letter-form to his teenage son regarding feelings, fears, symbolism, and the harsh realities of growing up black in the United States. While the book is far from optimistic, it is, I admit … Continue reading “Reading…”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11403,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[186],"tags":[48,132],"class_list":["post-11262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","tag-motherhood","tag-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11262"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11344,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11262\/revisions\/11344"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}