In the Matter of Black Lives: Womanist Prose by Arica L. Coleman is a brilliant, energetic, and energizing meditation on Black history, American History, and the past decade of tumultuous, inspiring, radical and marginal change in this country we call America. Coleman is a scholar and public intellectual dedicated to relentless inquiry and the shattering of mythology and the challenging of conventional wisdom. As I read these essays which range from a journey to the plantation where her enslaved ancestors were held in bondage, to moving memorials to sheroes (journalist Gwen Ifill and Ida B. Wells among them) and heroes (W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin among many) to incisive political analysis that makes the past feel absolutely present, I wondered where else could a reader encounter discourse on Beyoncé, the mass murderer Dylan Roof, a discussion of the legacy of Black-Native relations, Black Lives Matter, discover the abolitionist Cassius Clay, whose namesake became Muhammad Ali, and a bracing examination of media coverage of Michelle Obama?
This is a book that is necessary for anyone who cares about this country, its past and especially its future. As I read these essays and as they stayed with me for days after, I thought how appropriate this collection would be for young people to read. Why should readers of Time Magazine, The Crisis and The Washington Post have all the fun and be the only ones to experience the exhilaration of witnessing a questioning and questing mind at work? These essays are jam-packed with historical facts, critical thinking, and the kind of contextual analysis that too few young minds are exposed to.
Coleman examines the major cultural and political schisms and changes of the last decade in essays that perfectly capture the frenzied roller coaster of change and retrenchment, the promise and failure of our political system and the courage of those who keep on pushing against it and forward every day, while keeping their eyes on the prize of justice and equality in a society addicted to instant gratification. This book is a map of where we have been and a GPS system for where we need to go, to survive, and to finally "discover" the America that has yet to be America to me (from the foreword by Marita Golden).
