In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Letter to My Son”, he tries to explain the numerous difficulties, hardships, and what it means to be black in America through his own knowledge and experiences. While the majority of the letter and advice to his son is told by sharing his own stories and the experiences of himself, family members, and people he knew, Coates also attempts to tell and use complicated material in a way that can be comprehended by a general audience including his son. While explaining how black bodies were never represented or celebrated from television to textbooks to important figures in history and government and how his parents banned toys and movies with white faces from the house in order to rebel “against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”, Coates mentions text from the novelist Saul Bellow. He writes that Bellow’s text made him understand how this hierarchy of race connected to the fear that black citizens of America hold; “Tolstoy was “white,” I understood him to say, and Tolstoy “mattered,” like everything else that was white “mattered.” And this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum. Beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior… our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West,” Coates writes. I hate to include such a long quote, however, I think every piece of this quote from Coates is important because it shows how uses the complicated materials that he has encountered to guide us, a general audience, through his thought process in reading that material and to reinforce his points. Although he only included a single question quote from Bellow’s novel, his explanation and thoughts of it help us understand why he would think this way and how this complicated material helped himself to this conclusion.
Coates also talks about an essay that he discovered by Ralph Wiley; the specific quote that Coates brings up is when Wiley writes, “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus…Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership”. In response to this quote from Wiley’s essay, Coates writes, “And there it was. I had accepted bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft”. While Coates thought this quote from Wiley was extremely important to mention to further explain his point, many people, myself included, might have a hard time understanding both the quote alone and the full essay as well if a general audience were to read it. Coates provides us with both an explanation and his thoughts on the quote; he explains how in connection and combination of Bellow’s and Wiley’s complicated texts, Coates was able to come to the conclusion of why “Tolstoy of the Zulus” was so important to the comprehension of the hierarchy of race and what that means for him, being black in America; as he tells us, it means that the way to beat this unfair established hierarchy is to dream, have hope, do better, and work harder because his destiny isn’t written in his DNA unlike “Tolstoy of the Zulus”. Although there are more examples throughout Coates’ text, I chose these two connected examples because I think it sums up and shows how Coates uses both his own experiences and reflections of complicated material he has come across to help us as a general audience to understand the purposes of those complicated materials to his main points that he is attempting to instill in his son.
