The Black Immigrant's View Of America: "The Dream Is Real"
Jason D. Hill wrote a "letter" to Ta-Nehisi Coates in Commentary Magazine. The letter is a response to Coates' book, Between the World and Me, written to his son on "the question," as Coates put it, "of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the [American] Dream."

Well, Hill, an immigrant from Jamaica who came, at 20, with his grandmother and $120 in his pocket, sees America as a place of possibility. An excerpt from his piece:

In the 32 years I have lived in this great country, I have never once actively fought racism. I have simply used my own example as evidence of its utter stupidity and moved forward with absolute metaphysical confidence, knowing that the ability of other people to name or label me has no power over my self-esteem, my mind, my judgment, and--above all--my capacity to liberate myself through my own efforts. On this matter, you have done your son--to whom you address your book--an injustice. You write: "The fact of history is that black people have not--probably no people ever have--liberated themselves strictly by their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we see the hands of events that were beyond our individual control, events that were not unalloyed goods."

I do not believe you intended to mislead your son, but in imparting this credo, you have potentially paralyzed him, unless he reappraises your philosophy and rejects it. In your misreading of America, you've communicated precisely why many blacks in this country have been alienated from their own agency and emancipatory capabilities. The most beleaguered people on the planet, the Jews, who have faced persecution since their birth as a people, are a living refutation of your claim. When they labored in slavery in Egypt, clamored in Palestine, made magnificent contributions to human civilization in European capitals, sojourned in Africa and Asia, and founded the modern State of Israel, no one gave these heroic people an affirmative-action plan to work anywhere. In spite of vitriol and invidious comparisons to vermin and pigs, and despite being subjected to countless pogroms and mandated ghettos, they thrived and flourished because not for one moment did they ever believe that their struggle for liberation lay in any hands other than their own.

Your beliefs threaten to alienate your son from his country and afflict him with a sense of moral inefficacy and impotence. This could squash his chance of being an engine of change in the course of history. You tell him simply: "The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are." But this is the United States of America--a country born with a terrible birth defect, slavery, but still a work in progress. It is a country that says to me; to Vanessa, a woman too black to feel at home in her own predominantly black country; to Thai; to Dinesh, whom no one would dare touch in his homeland: I am an open canvas. Write your script on me. Without you and your story and your narrative, the story of America is incomplete. This is America, where you can suffuse the country's vast landscape with who you are and participate in its dialogue of national becoming. Yet you have told your son that by constitutional design his voice does not, cannot, and will not ever matter. If he accepts this, you will have banished him to a lifetime of emotional separation from his birthplace and, a fortiori, emblazoned upon his soul the moral hazards of passivity and resignation. Let us hope he refuses them.

You have, of course, already tried to preempt any counterbalancing influence on your son. "The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you, though I know, each day, there are grown men and women who tell you otherwise," you write. If the birth of a better world is not up to him, then on whose shoulders does the responsibility fall? Does he not have an obligation to himself to shape the world with values and virtues of his own making; does he not have an ethical responsibility to create, in his own moral character, the world he desires to see before him? Whom do you expect to manufacture a better world for your son? You have communicated to him, that, in effect, his place in the world is that of an aborted inchoate being, with limbs unformed and incapable of effort, screaming in terror and hopelessness at a world that you describe as both terrible and beautiful but that he cannot change. He is, you tell him, the legatee of a personal destiny over which he has no control.

via @Ayaan