How to Blow Up a Wall with a Heartbeat

摘要

A manifesto written in the form of a letter is a tradition in the African American canon, one that undergoes a radical revision in this essay. Whether in My Dungeon Shook, the first section of James Baldwin's 1963 classic The Fire Next Time or Ta-Nehisi Coates's 2015 Between the World and Me, the strategy was a pedagogical one. The double work being done in these texts was to use a stated reader, in each case a family member, to grant the writer an intimacy that guaranteed the larger claims made on racism in America. Yet both writers seemed ultimately to elude that stated reader for a not too implicit, liberal white reader. In How to Blow Up a Wall with a Heartbeat, the text reverses this tactic to ask what a new life teaches us about racism and the desire for human connection it frustrates. The time frame is the end of the Obama presidency, where there was a hint of hope, even if it was betrayed. It ends shortly after November 2016 when white Americans chose a president who threatened to initiate a new neo-Jim-Crow era and asks: How does the endless, generative power of life teach a man of color to love during a politically reactionary time?