A Beautiful Struggle

How not to love Ta-Nehisi Coates?

Not too dissimilar from a drug. It is really no secret that Coates most attractive characteristic—at least for me—is being this soft, sweet underdog who, despite it all, made it. Take this conversation between father and son: Where is your head? What are you thinking, boy? I am thinking of Sunday waffles and Morning Star. I am staring three desks over and dreaming of Brenda Neil, dancing in a pink and white gown. I guess that took over almost too much in this case. I really should have gone around Baltimore a bit more when I had the chance.

I found myself a few times lost. For someone who grew up in Europe in the late 80s, some of the things Coates talks about are just plain unknown. I talked a lot, laughed in such a way that I gave the hardest kids around me permission to laugh. Jun 02, Book Riot Community added it Shelves: One of our foremost intellectuals takes a look back at his Baltimore childhood, his complicated relationship with his father, and his circuitous journey toward self-awareness.

Ta'Nehisi Coates tells of his life in Baltimore growing up with his family in the ghetto. His father had been a member of the Black Panthers and raised his children to get knowledge by reading what most people did not know existed. I did not always understand what Ta'Nehisi was saying but I understood what his father was teaching him and his siblings. I also liked the history that we do not get in school.

Jan 01, Kam rated it really liked it. The story is especially gripping because of the tails about places and events that I grew up around. Great coming of age story for a Black Baltimore boy. Aug 23, Winter Sophia Rose rated it it was amazing.

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Oct 08, Will rated it really liked it Shelves: I've been lucky enough to hear Ta-Nehisi Coates speak twice, and both times I've left the auditorium reflective and inspired. Having lived in, covered, and I've been lucky enough to hear Ta-Nehisi Coates speak twice, and both times I've left the auditorium reflective and inspired. Having lived in, covered, and experienced Baltimore over the past year and a half, I've heard a lot of talk on race relations, racism, and the black experience. But I've never had it explained so clearly and viscerally as when Coates explains it, either verbally or in writing.

Reading about his youth gave me a new perspective through which to see his work. Coates grew up in a black conscious family, where his father was dominant and where Africa and its culture were idealized. None of his friends had fathers, and that's a significant factor that Coates takes into account when analyzing his childhood. However, he was drawn to the real world around him, the street culture of the Baltimore of the late 80s and early 90s, right after the height of the crack epidemic that destroyed the city.

He wanted to fit in with his neighborhood friends and rivals; he wanted to dominate, get the girls, and have a powerful reputation. Coates cites the impact that his father had on his childhood, from forcing him to read countless reams on black empowerment and unity to making sure he went in the right direction with a heavy hand, as a primary reason why he didn't succumb to the alluring violence that gripped the streets of Baltimore and which continues to dominate those same street corners.

Over people have been killed in a city of just over , this year. Coates writes about how lucky he was that people gave him endless chances because, as he so candidly admits, he screwed up too many times to count. He got into Poly, a magnet school in Baltimore, and then got kicked out after outbursts in class. His father would beat him mercilessly because he did not want his son to turn out like other boys Coates' age, either in prison or too embroiled in the gang lifestyle to ever leave it.

Coates writes about his experiences, his mistakes, and his opportunities: But this book has its flaws. He often passes over the role that black women play in Baltimore, as matriarchs and community leaders, but he does make it very clear that the sory is about a black boy growing up, not a black girl. He writes repetitively much of the time, relating every time that he squandered an opportunity that was presented to him. While I'm glad he recognized the improtance of these opprounites that are not afforded to every black boy in Baltimore, it was a lot of the same.

When I heard Coates speak for the second time, less than a day after winning the National Book Award for Nonfiction, I had a new perspective on how he became such a fine journalist and inspiring man.

We cannot trivialize race in America, and reading Coates' memoir reinforced that fact. A memoir from one of our greatest minds.

A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood

Unfortunately, it felt pushed and, to me, sounded like a long list of summary sentences, rather than a flow of events. It seemed like every significant event - which we can see are significant events - needed to be concluded with a Great Insight. This was originally published in , so written by a considerably younger man. Then, growing up in Baltimore in the crack-infested 80s: I could feel the falling all around.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' 'Beautiful Struggle' To Manhood : NPR

We all thought our battles were homegrown and personal, but like an evil breeze at our back, we felt invisible hands at work, like someone else was still tugging at levers and pulling strings. He was an intellectual, born as it happened among people who could not see a college campus as an outcome. My Dad had to be different, though. I had to be a nation. Mar 22, Glee rated it it was amazing. Not exactly a companion piece or a precursor to Between the World and Me, but maybe a bit of both.

An uncompromising father and two of his sons: A father who was determined to know everything he could about the black diaspora in America, African roots, and dedicated to making that alternative to the usual rendering of American history available Not exactly a companion piece or a precursor to Between the World and Me, but maybe a bit of both.

A father who was determined to know everything he could about the black diaspora in America, African roots, and dedicated to making that alternative to the usual rendering of American history available through his own basement publishing efforts.

He was a Black Panther and an autodidact. He was also determined to keep his sons from succumbing to the violence and the crack epidemic that was the plague of West Baltimore of the late 80's and 90's. That he did some of that through considerable violence to his own children was not ironic, but not without cost, either. This book is somewhat rambling and anecdotal, but not unfocused. It remarkably powerful prose, delivered in such complicated, situational, and from a specific point of view and community that I do not share, that I needed a lot of extra time for looking up things that I simply had no context for.

A dictionary probably would have helped some, but Google was a much better friend for this trip. Anyway, not easy, occasionally hilarious, often horrifying, but always honest. Coates as a writer is so well read and has integrated so much knowledge from such different universes that he is a wonder to experience.

This is a worthwhile read for those who have read and appreciated Between the World and Me. It fills in the back story of Coates' young years in Baltimore up to the time he goes to college. Much of the story focuses on his father. Coates father was a Vietnam vet, turned Black Panther, turned Afrocentric publisher.

He had 7 children with 4 women, being married to 2 of them, one Coates' mother. During Coates' teen years, his father focused on his publishing business that brought Afrocentric classi This is a worthwhile read for those who have read and appreciated Between the World and Me. During Coates' teen years, his father focused on his publishing business that brought Afrocentric classics back into print. His children were subject to strict discipline including a meatless diet except for occasional treats of turkey hot dogs.

Despite this unorthodox, both father and son believed it was important to have a father's involvement. Ta-Nehisi becomes obsessed with African drumming after a lackluster start. The practice and community comes to mean so much to him he considers during down admission to Howard to stay in Baltimore. Those who have read Between the World and Me know the choice he made. Oct 20, Seth rated it really liked it. So much fun to read. Coates is a stylist, and pays close attention to his sentences. The layers of details will sometimes get past you if you're not familiar with 80s rap or fashions, for example , but you can't miss the heartbreak, the yearning of a young man.

Most impressive is how he tells his own, very specific story against the broader story of black West Baltimore in the s. Here you can see the way to Between the World and Me , and Coates' writing is powerful. It just felt a bit disjointed to me. Jan 10, Danika rated it liked it. Another memoir by Coates.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' 'Beautiful Struggle' To Manhood

Mostly about his childhood and adolescence in Baltimore. Worth reading, but doesn't hold a candle to "Between the world and me". An hour, a pen, a pad and I was plugged in, the material plane falling away, and the world remade along the lines of my yearning imagination. In those years, hip-hop saved my life p.

A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood , describes the way that he struggled through middle and high school, as period where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers p. In Coa An hour, a pen, a pad and I was plugged in, the material plane falling away, and the world remade along the lines of my yearning imagination. In Coates' memoir, the larger culture laid traps for young black males and females , which made it difficult survive and succeed — unless Conscious.

On the other hand, Coates offered a three-dimensional picture of himself, his family, and his community, showing all at their worst and best — and everywhere in between. The larger community, set a minefield for young blacks, but blacks were also culpable, not only because of the crack epidemic, at its peak when Coates came of age, but because we forgot ourselves and went cannibal—the next brother became a meal to feed our rep p. Coates' parents fought hard for their children, helping them become Conscious, gain the Knowledge, and reach for Mecca Howard University , which would help their sons recognize and attack discrimination and oppression in all of its forms.

To be Conscious Man was more than just the digestion of obscure books that happen to favor your side. It was a feeling, an ingrained sense that something major in our lives had gone wrong. My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.

You are not a mean kid, but because of your size you will do things that will be seen as a threat. You need to be conscious especially around white people. You are big, and you are a young black man. You need to be careful about what you do and what you say. We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us p.

I had difficulty with the language and referents of his first chapter, as this old, white woman is not really Coates' target audience. By Chapter 2, I was able to read and understand his poetic language better. A young, Conscious black would be able to decode Beautiful Struggle more fully and more rapidly than I did. I also read it differently, as this was a clear, nonacademic description of oppression and its consequences.

I have understood the many ways that I am privileged, but Coates offered a very compelling description: Beautiful Struggle focused on Coates' journey to gain Knowledge and become Conscious his capitalizations , but he also talked about himself as a gifted child, interested in model trains, Captain Marvel, and chemistry sets, who read the Knowledge his father gave him or left lying around their home, but also one who immediately lost interest when given a school assignment. Read this book as a coming of age story that could describe any bright child. Read this as an indictment of our culture and our educational system.

Apr 27, Lynn added it. He challenges conventional assumptions about black boys like him. After two assaults on his teacher and a bloody fight in a cafeteria catch up with him, he is expelled from high school. Coates describes his anguish at disappointing his father and himself, despite his best intentions. Readers looking for black-dysfunction porn will be disappointed. The memoir is no cautionary tale pretending to document the loud, salacious bits of inner-city life, all the while glorifying or indicting them. Each small observation on his more-or-less mundane adolescence lures you into greater understanding; each comment on the ironies of race draws you further from apathy or political slumber.

Fatherhood is a vexed topic, particularly so for an author such as Coates. Having become a father himself, Coates wrote his celebrated, bestselling epistolary essay to his son. With a MacArthur fellowship, a National Book award and commanding robust speaking fees, he has become a fixture in the firmament of literary celebrity. The lovely irony is that he enjoys the renown his dad so keenly sought for his dusty library of neglected Afrocentrists. The Beautiful Struggle is published by Verso. But now was the hour of ' Now was the time to reverse our debased years, to take over, grab our guns again and be men.

By then I had met the great lion, Afeni Shakur, most famous of the Panther She'd moved to Baltimore some years earlier, and among the Conscious she was legend. Afeni was an old comrade of my father's, but when the Panthers went to war with each other, they came down on different sides. They had comrades who'd killed their comrades, but still, all through another decade the human touch pulled them back together.

I had heard the tales, and measured against the everyday sameness of my father, Afeni was large. But what struck me was that the legend was human—that she smiled when she saw me, cooked spaghetti, and found my baby brother amusing. Her son and daughter spent time among us. Bill and Tupac traded lyrics. I took Sekiywa to see Snow White. But even then their clan was glamorous, and of that final faction that held out a Marxist hope of the empire's ruin. Here is how it all came together: Bill, Sekyiwa, all of us, we knew who we were, in the rote manner of knowing where two streets intersect.

But anything more than that, a feeling for why any kid would grab a black beret, guns and law books, was only partially there. Sekiywa looked up, "That's my aunt. But Sekyiwa only partially understood how the name Chesimard had come to Chuck D. The next day I went to my father for the story. The story was all of two sentences, and then Dad, reaching up to his bookshelf for the Knowledge Of Self.

On the cover, her face was off-center. She wore an Afro, and glanced over her shoulder. On the cover was her name—Assata Shakur. I'd started down this path a few months earlier, burrowing through African Glory, a book my father republished. But now I truly became a seeker. This was not my father's story and then it was, for there, inside the tale of one Panther, was the story of them all. The cowboy impulse took me first, the thought that I, for all my awkward hands and crazy-glued glasses, was rebel blood, and that thought filled me with a stupid, childish pride.

But all of us need myths. And here out West, where we all had lost religion, had taken to barbarian law, what would be our magic? What would be our sacred words? I took to Consciousness because there was nothing else, no other logic to counter death for suede, leather, and gold. My father bet his life on change. For the glory of ex-cons, abandoned mothers, and black boys lost, he had made peace with his end.

I was a coward, mostly concerned with getting from one day to the next. How could I square my young life with this lineage? What would I say to the theology of my father, which held that the Conscious Act was worth more than sex, bread, or even drawn breath? There were no answers in the broader body, where the best of us went out like Sammy Davis, and spoke like there had never been war.

I will avoid the cartoons—the hardrocks loved Billy Ocean, Luther was classic, and indeed, I did sit in my 7th period music class eyeing Arletta Holly, and humming Lost In Emotion. But you must remember the era.

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Niggers were on MTV in lipstick and curls, extolling their exotic quadroons, big-upping Fred Astaire and speaking like the rest of us didn't exist. I'm talking S-curls and sequins, Lionel Ritchie dancing on the ceiling. I'm talking the corporate pop of Whitney, Richard Pryor turning into the Toy. It was like Parliament had never happened, like James Brown had never hit. All our champions were disconnected and dishonored, handing out Image Awards, while we bled in the streets.

First, Chuck, then KRS, and then everywhere you looked MCs were reaching for Garvey's tri-color, shouting across the land, that self-destruction was at end, that the logic of white people's ice had failed us, that the day of awareness was now. Across the land, the masses fell sway to the gospel. Old Panthers came out in camouflage to salute Chuck D. Cold killers would get a taste of "Black is Black," drop their guns and turn vegan. Brothers quoted Farrakhan with wine on their breath.

Harlots performed salaat, covered their blonde french rolls in mudcloth and royal Kinte. Dark girls slashed their Appolonia posters, burned their green contacts, cut their hair, threw in braids. Gold was stashed in the top dresser. The fashion became your father's dashiki, beads, and Africa medallions.