Letter to One and All

My connection to pen paling dates to fourth grade when I became best friends with a Korean exchange student named Jewel who eventually returned to Seoul after one month. For five years, we sent letters to each other; I found that sharing stories with Jewel compared to sharing them with others in person was…ineffaceably more candid. I am a firm believer that there are always things left unsaid which can be written in a letter. This fact is because the act of writing letters is intentional. Deliberate. From how someone decides to address a letter to carefully selecting what information or experiences they want to share: the art of writing letters is fundamentally vulnerable. But what if a letter were to become publicized? Can content which is deeply personal be easily translated to the masses? Ta-Nehisi Coates executes this precisely in his “Letter to My Son,” in which he writes to his fifteen-year-old son. Coates specifically vocalizes the cruel reality of Black Americans’ experiences living in a country where they are historically (and unfortunately still currently) beaten for the body they have. “What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me,” Coates cautions. “That this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it,” (Coates 84). The letter he presents is not necessarily a message of hope; though, neither is it a message of despair. Instead, he confronts his son, who is at a milestone age in his life, that the life of Black Americans is not an easy nor kind path. However, it is a path which has been walked upon for centuries. His son, Samori, first learns of this truth when discovering Michael Brown’s murder never received justice: “It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed,” (Coates 84). Coates speaks not only to Samori in this moment, but to you, to me, to anyone who reads this letter. Like Samori, many of us as a wider audience may neglect to consider the experience of Black Americans. Coates makes this complicated material accessible by approaching us the way he approaches his son who has not yet fully grasped the brutality of America. The wrongs committed against one individual affects the entire Black community in a way that cannot be fully comprehended, but Coates invites us to try. Merely by directing these instances to his son, Coates essentially allows us to read over his shoulder while he writes. Don’t shy away, he communicates without explicitly saying so. Confront the truths that my son must face. When reading a letter which is not addressed to oneself, Coates grants the viewer space for personal contemplation without pressuring them into one direction of thought. He encourages you to sit with the raw verity of Black hardship and lets you decide what to do with the information thereafter. Action should and certainly can be taken to alleviate the generational traumas of Black Americans, but how exactly? Well, Coates did his part—he unveiled these horrors in a tangible way. Now it’s up to the rest of us to decide which side of history we stand on.