在audible上听的一本小书。是黑人作者Ta-Nehisi Coates写给14岁儿子的书。睡前听总有一种苦大仇深的感觉。他通过历史、黑人遭惨死的各种新闻事件，来向自己的孩子讲述身为黑人成长的经历，必须面临的挑战。他不断重复“black body”，讲述那些摧毁黑人生命和摧毁黑人身体的故事。听起来感觉还是有点depressing，而且因为他们的生命体验跟自己的相差太多，所以听起来有种奇怪的隔阂、但又有不能完全共情的同情和感动：因为父亲对孩子的爱是可以理解的，但这种担惊受怕的感受又会让我question这种是不是担心过度。
“So I feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a reason. All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to “be twice as good,” which is to say “accept half as much.” These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile.”
Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.”
But race is the child of racism, not the father.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates被誉为是继James Baldwin之后的一个重要black intellectual。他在马里兰长大，也是一个黑人聚集区。他是历史最悠久的黑人大学Howard University的毕业生，这种成长学习的特殊性让他对于作为African american的特殊经历非常敏感。他目前是大西洋月刊的记者专栏作家。
Coates与奥巴马
Coates的声名鹊起是因为在民权法案签署50周年时，在大西洋月刊发表了长篇报道The Case for Reparations，揭露美国社会在经济、司法系统等存在系统性种族歧视，成为了大西洋月刊历史上引发最大反响的封面报道之一。
链接：http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
虽然同为黑人，但是coates和奥巴马常有争论。在奥巴马的任期中，他也曾多次撰文批评奥巴马没有在种族问题上有更多的作为。奥巴马在马丁案时的发言，曾经在美国引起巨大的震动。虽然我个人觉得是一个非常感人的发言，但coates认为奥巴马做的只是在”racilaized political fodder“。奥巴马的竞选团队曾经说黑人是绝对当不了总统，但一个天才的、前途无量的年轻人，碰巧是黑人，那他是有可能的。而奥巴马和他的team也深谙如何吸引黑人选民：
Obama doesn’t merely evince blackness; he uses his blackness to signal and court African Americans, semaphoring in a cultural dialect of our creation—crooning Al Green at the Apollo, name-checking Young Jeezy, regularly appearing on the cover of black magazines, weighing the merits of Jay-Z versus Kanye West, being photographed in the White House with a little black boy touching his hair.
摘自fear of a black president
奥巴马给黑人开出的建议，被coatesz总结成：Acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black. 不去address系统性的discrimination，要求个人承担更多的责任。
记得在听off message的podcast时，卡森对奥巴马成为总统的感受。我觉得是非常有趣的瞬间，但是主持人没有继续问下去了。卡森也是同样在巴尔的摩长大，贫民窟小孩，成为妙手神医，但他说，虽然作为美国人，为国家打破肤色壁垒选出黑人总统高兴，但意识到，奥巴马不是美国的african american，奥巴马是raise white。
特别想知道卡大夫觉得真正的黑人总统，应该如何处理美国的种族大难题。
在trump时期，族裔问题，奥巴马已经推动的这些criminal justice的改革到底会如何走向？
