What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. The men who had left his body in the street would never be punished. That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. Then she asked me about “hope.” And I knew then that I had failed. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of a 12-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. That Sunday, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. As for now, it must be said that the elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice-cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term people to actually mean. At the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely being aspirational.
In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. Democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies-torture, theft, enslavement-are specimens of sin, so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. This defiance is not to be much dwelled upon.
Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. There is nothing extreme in this statement. This article is adapted from Coates’s forthcoming book.
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