For Monday,

Please read:

1. "My Dungeon Shook," by James Baldwin, from The Fire Next Time, originally published as "A Letter to My Nephew," here:

http://progressive.org/news/2014/12/5047/letter-my-nephew

Here's a video of Chris Rock reading it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3ZC7XpnVEE

Also, a couple of videos of Baldwin himself talking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnIjXmfTSYg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_hYraYI2J8

2. While you read/listen, think about how to relate Baldwin's "A Letter to My Nephew" to "Letter to My Son," by Ta-Nehisi Coates.


As an aid to your thought, here are the questions I gave you in class yesterday:

In “Letter to My Son,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates:         

• What is the “Dream”? Find a specific place where he defines it, and paraphrase/explain what he says, in your own words. (It may help if you re-read the essay and try to highlight all of the places where he either mentions the Dream, or is talking about something related to it.)  
• How does the “Dream” relate to the facts of history, as Coates sees it?        
• Coates says that American history has been understood according to a “comfortable narrative.”  What is that narrative? (According to him.) 
• How does the “Dream” relate to the “new and different history, myth really,” that Coates shows up to Howard University with? (What does the Dream ignore? What does the "new and different history" ignore?) 
• What does Ralph Wiley mean when he says, as cited in Coates, that “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus […] unless you find a profit in fencing off the universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership”? 
• What do you think Audre Lorde would say about the relationship between the “new and different history” and the “Dream”? What do you think she would say about “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” as opposed to “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus”? 
• What does Coates mean when he says that he realized that “black blood wasn’t black; black skin wasn’t even black”? What does he mean when he says that “without [the power of domination and exclusion] […] ‘white people’ would cease to exist”? Why are there quotation marks around “white people”?

(^^A full answer to any of these questions would make a good weekly response paper.)

It might also help you to read some of these--they're all articles that are responding in some way to Between the World and Me, the book that "Letter to My Son" is excerpted from:

http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/the-brutality-of-a-country/