Letter to my son, written by the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, not only is a personal and direct charge against American history and democracy, but also an outspoken statement about pessimism.
Being asked about his black body, he answered with a clear idea that the dilemma of race existence, and the possibility of improving the conditions of black men in America is a mere utopia. This is the so called “Dream”, the dream of a better world, of tolerance, of equality, the illusion of black men to be accepted by the white majority.
According to him, what man, especially black man have been mistaken in the course of history was not the acceptance of this dream but the belief in the need of a dream itself, which created our hopeless world: “[n]o one of us were “black people”. We were individuals . . .”.
His idea of pessimism is connected with the concepts of failure, impossibility and deification of democracy and depends on fear. There is no hope for impartiality in a world where, although the oppressors have made amends for their errors, black culture is still not integrated, not known, and black men who appears in history pages are always considered exclusively by reason of being the “firsts” of having achieved attention and respect.
His criticism finally reaches the peak when he explains his son that, being a coloured person, he will always have to carry more responsibility for his actions, he will need to fight in order to make black men’s history acknowledged, and those “who believe themselves to be white” will not probably abandon this idea “and begin to to think of themselves as human”.
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