The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2008)

A memoir of growing up in Baltimore by the Atlantic writer and culture critic, author of Between the World and Me and We Were Eight Years in Power.

Book Review: The Beautiful Struggle isn't necessarily written for white people. I think Coates wrote it for himself. Maybe his family. Some close friends, perhaps. The young Ta-Nehisi Coates is a bit Oscar Wao (see the mythic map of "Old Baltimore" replete with serpent and dagger -- there's also a helpful family tree). He doesn't fit. He's into Optimus Prime, spells, elves, and not really tuned-in to the world around him. Which is dangerous because a beating or death can literally be around the next corner in the years of the crack crisis. He refers to a neighborhood as "a duchy," "a land of swords," but he also "knew that to be afraid while on the way to school was deeply wrong."  Coates and his father, Paul, are the two poles of this memoir (dedicated to his mother). His father was a vegetarian, veteran, former Black Panther, publisher, and librarian at Howard University, who had seven children by four women, but tried to be more or less present in their lives. Strict, even harsh, determined, asking "who would you rather do this: me or the police?" The memoir is stunningly and embarrassingly honest; it must've been wrenching to write.

A recent article places this memoir in sharp relief. "Ta-Nehisi Coates is the Neo-Liberal Face of the Black Freedom Struggle" is the title of Cornel West's December 17, 2017, critique of Coates in the Guardian, and a subsequent tweet by West, which was then re-tweeted approvingly by an American white supremacist. West considers Coates' view of black America too narrow, terming it "apolitical pessimism." West asserts that Coates doesn't address Wall Street, the military, the insular black elite, and "dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America." The emotional center of West's criticism appears to be what he considers Coates' illegitimate comparison of Barack Obama to Malcolm X in We Were Eight Years in Power. In The Beautiful Struggle, activist Paul Coates comes off as someone who Cornel West might've approved of far more than he does the son. The generational differences are telling, both for the history of the movement and the development of individual leaders today.

Maybe it's just me, but at the end of The Beautiful Struggle I got emotional. Probably I didn't realize how much I'd been pulled into the story, perhaps it was just a release of feelings. The focus on the idea and importance of Howard University, which Coates often calls the Mecca. Regardless, there's power in this unique book. Not many people lived this kind of life, it's not a universal story, but everyone can understand it.  [4½★]