As Coates grew older, attending high school and later Howard University — his personal “Mecca” — the questions sharpened and evolved. When a college friend, Prince Jones, was shot to death by a member of the Prince George’s County Police Department, Coates was overcome with a rage that radicalized him, and new questions flowed. The political apparatus that conspired to deprive Jones of his life was run by black people, a fact he struggled to understand. “The officer who killed Prince Jones was black. The politicians who empowered this officer to kill were black. Many of the black politicians, many of them twice as good, seemed unconcerned. How could this be?”
Reading the book the first time, I imagined that Coates would eventually answer these important questions for his son. He would spell it out — make it plain — the way he does so well in his essays, articles and blog posts. He would carefully define the Dream and delineate the difference between the nearly universal dream that parents have for their children — the dream of good heath, security, quality education and the opportunity to fulfill their potential and make a meaningful contribution — and the insidious Dream that is destroying the lives of children in Baltimore and threatening human existence on the planet itself. I imagined that Coates would explain what it means, exactly, to choose the Struggle over the Dream, and why so many black people, like those in Prince George’s County, find themselves lost in the Dream.
Reading the book the second time, I held no expectation that the big questions would be answered. I knew they wouldn’t be. It seemed that Coates was doing for his son what his own father had done for him: demand that he wrestle with the questions himself. The second time around I could see that maybe, just maybe, this is what is most needed right now — a book that offers no answers but instead challenges us to wrestle with the questions on our own. Maybe this is the time for questioning, searching and struggling without really believing the struggle can be won.
And yet I cannot pretend to be entirely satisfied. Like Baldwin, I tend to think we must not ask whether it is possible for a human being or society to become just or moral; we must believe it is possible. Believing in this possibility — no matter how slim — and dedicating oneself to playing a meaningful role in the struggle to make it a reality focuses one’s energy and attention in an unusual way. Those who believe we are likely or destined to fail — because the Dreamers hold all the power and our liberation is up to them — can easily tell themselves they are “in the struggle” when they show up at a rally with a sign, or go on Twitter or Facebook to rant about the police, then do no more. When meaningful change fails to come, they can say, “We tried, but of course nothing happened.” But those who are in it to win it, and who believe in their own power and understand their responsibility to use it wisely, cannot so easily lie to themselves about the utility of random or halfhearted gestures of resistance, rebellion, organizing or consciousness-raising. Greater precision of thought and action is required.
Coates clearly knows the importance of avoiding vagueness or generalization about critical aspects of black experience. In one of the most moving passages of the book he reminds his son: “Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is active as your own; whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods. . . . ” He goes on to describe, in stunningly sensitive detail, what slavery means for this particular woman born in a country that celebrates freedom and yet will whip her, rape her and sell her children from an auction block. He admonishes his son that he “must struggle to remember this past in all its nuance, error and humanity.”