(Cover picture from bookswept.com)
Disclaimer: The views written in this article do not reflect Her Campus Auburn Chapter as a whole, but instead reflect the views of the individual author.
When it comes to campus life in a society that is increasingly racially tense—in response to and, more often than not, in favor of the growing racial inequality and injustice—many students of color feel unsafe, unrepresented, and unprotected by the same systems that white students like me swear by.
It is disingenuous to say that all students are equal in a place like Auburn, where our police force in a racial relations panel on Monday, Feb. 13, said they were working on helping (mostly black) students to “survive” police interactions. This rhetoric not only places emphasis on the danger of the police for black students but also demonstrates that police believe it is the burden of those black people they interact with to ensure the police don’t kill them. Sometimes, the police only protect and serve a certain number of people in Auburn rather than all of Auburn’s 28,000+ population of students.
(photo credit from The Plainsman article, “Students protest on Haley Concourse in response to Grand Jury decisions in Ferguson and New York City”)
Many students are ignorant, sometimes willingly, of these problems. This ignorance comes from not wanting to challenge their own perceptions of the world, which stems from fear. Fear is necessary—and if we want to change anything as white students at Auburn, getting informed is important.
The book Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates can be that wake up call for white students at Auburn who are willingly and unwillingly ignorant about how black and other non-white students are treated by police here in America. In a book-length letter to his son, Coates reveals and teases out the aspects of racism as it is inherent in many institutions in America, particularly American law and history. For many people, racism is over—and yet those same people do not see the problems of the increasing criminalization of their black peers. Those same people play a game called “spot the athlete” when looking at black students on Auburn’s campus, spotting if a black student is an athlete or “just black.”
A big part of this book is the dissection of the Dream, the idea that in America anyone who works hard enough can be successful and have everything that rich white families can have—or, rather, have what comfortable white middle-class families have, security and safety included. As Coates says, that Dream is exclusive to those who are not white. He talks about the deaths of black people in America like Trayvon Martin, like Mike Brown, like Rekia Boyd, like Sandra Bland, and like many others who were killed because they were seen as a threat. Answering the question, “What were they threatening?” Coates would respond, the (American) Dream.
(Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, photo credit from Yourblackworld.net)
Through his personal experiences in dealing with the different systems that daily disenfranchise and lie to black people in America—the education system, for one—Coates painfully reenacts the instances in which he realized that American society saw him as an unwanted other. When his son Samori at age 4 is pushed and yelled at by a white woman, Coates discusses how the white people around him defend the white woman instead of seeing that the attack on a black child was an instance of violence. Frankly, this is how some people at Auburn think.
And this thinking needs to change. By reading Coates’ book, it is possible that some people who view the world in Technicolor and as all good (who also ignore the atrocities within it) can start to understand through Coates’ life story and his ruminations on his life as a black person in America where white people can help to change the systems from which we benefit. I, as a white woman, will indefinitely be seen as thoughtful and possibly revolutionary for having read this book, a book I read for a class taught by a black professor who is infinitely more revolutionary than me in her placing herself at risk by teaching these kind of honest books.
(photo credit Black Lives Matter Instagram)
These are the kinds of power dynamics and thought processes that reading books like Coates’ can help us start to understand through the lens of non-white people in America. I encourage my fellow white students to read this—not because it’s assigned, but because if you can call yourself a good person, you will work to about the oppression of and violence used against black students and other students of color on campus.