In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to …
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
I agree with Toni Morrison that "this is required reading". Whether or not Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this precisely for his son vs. His son and others, the book was short yet profound. Personal, brutally honest, compelling, and very powerful. Highly recommended.
"Race is the child of racism, not the father." - Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me, which was book #7 in my 2022 journey of reading books that have been challenged or removed from Texas libraries or schools.
The antilibrarians feign concern for reader "DISCOMFORT." But to me, the readers who find most discomfort in Coates or Kendi will be those whose starting-place was that of TAKING COMFORT in (their belief in) their own "whiteness."
Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Jeg tror aldri før jeg i så stor grad har vært i nærheten av å forstå hva det vil si å vokse opp som svart - uansett hvor det er - som mens jeg har lest denne krevende men usigelig vakre og smertefulle boken, et brev fra far til sønn.
Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Just to be clear - I am a white, middle aged (plus...) upper middle class heterosexual male with stable childhood and great family. I am, as John Scalzi wrote in his brilliant blog post, playing the game of life on The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is. My single interaction with the police was a weird one when a crazy person tried to attack my car with a baseball bat - I'll be glad to tell you that story over a beer some day. But it was more humorous than dangerous. We have a cop living in our neighborhood and, while my daughters played with his daughters, we didn't have much to do with each other, but it was nice to have the feeling our neighborhood got a little more coverage than the normal one.
All of that is to say that I just can't imagine what life as a …
Just to be clear - I am a white, middle aged (plus...) upper middle class heterosexual male with stable childhood and great family. I am, as John Scalzi wrote in his brilliant blog post, playing the game of life on The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is. My single interaction with the police was a weird one when a crazy person tried to attack my car with a baseball bat - I'll be glad to tell you that story over a beer some day. But it was more humorous than dangerous. We have a cop living in our neighborhood and, while my daughters played with his daughters, we didn't have much to do with each other, but it was nice to have the feeling our neighborhood got a little more coverage than the normal one.
All of that is to say that I just can't imagine what life as a black male in today's, yesterday's, last year's, last decade, last century, America must feel like. Coates wrote this 5 years ago and, as you are all well aware, things have not gotten at all better, especially it seems this year of awfulness that is 2020. Friends were murdered by the police and he never knew if he would be next. He writes the book like a letter to his growing son, relating a tough life in Baltimore growing up, finding redemption in the quadrangle at Howard and struggling as a writer and as a black man.
I loved his turn of phrase in discussing "the people who think they are white", and actually how he is a bit jealous that they (we!) can be so comfortable in our own lives. He writes extensively about how, even now, a black person is not the owner of their own body, that the powers that be can take it away without any fear of retaliation. How, when a woman pushed his 4 year old son and said get out of the way, when he "made the mistake" of sticking up for him, he was told "he could be put in jail".
It is just heart breaking to read this and realize, once again, just how little has changed. It's like Kenneth Clark said before the Kerner Report committee in 1968:
I read that report . . . of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’35, the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of ’43, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot. I must again in candor say to you members of this Commission—it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland—with the same moving picture re-shown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.
Coates is open and honest and raw about how "people who think they are white" are the ones who need to change, and change quickly. I hope that change starts today. It has with me, for sure.
Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This book is a chronicle of the mental and emotional changes of a sensitive man living in a black body in America. It's at times poetic and honest about deep emotion, and though most of the time he's addressing his son, the author speaks to the silent observer who takes their white body for granted in the luxury of ignorance. He never uses the term "white privilege," and he's less accusing than James Baldwin, but he welcomes the reader into his head and to see with his eyes.
"I wanted you to see different people living by different rules."
Coates has a complicated relationship with the place that he grew up. He complains that he was in a fight for survival, keeping his body safe, and putting him at the very bottom rung of Maslowe's hierarchy of needs. However, he justifies the very system of violence that he abhors, he …
This book is a chronicle of the mental and emotional changes of a sensitive man living in a black body in America. It's at times poetic and honest about deep emotion, and though most of the time he's addressing his son, the author speaks to the silent observer who takes their white body for granted in the luxury of ignorance. He never uses the term "white privilege," and he's less accusing than James Baldwin, but he welcomes the reader into his head and to see with his eyes.
"I wanted you to see different people living by different rules."
Coates has a complicated relationship with the place that he grew up. He complains that he was in a fight for survival, keeping his body safe, and putting him at the very bottom rung of Maslowe's hierarchy of needs. However, he justifies the very system of violence that he abhors, he casts it as an act of defiant identity creation and protection for the people living in his community from outsiders. It's very complicated for him as he talks to his son. He wants the best for his son, and he doesn't want him "blinded by fear" when dealing with the rest of the world, but he still wants him to remember where he came from and the struggle of his people, who are they his people? Are they really a race? Race is a concept created by the oppressor, so it can't be that. The conflict of wanting to pass on your child a Heritage, but not the negative aspects of that heritage hold universal appeal.
His experience of feeling free from all of the racial baggage that he experienced every day in New York City is not uncommon among American people in Paris. The idea that learning French in school seems pointless because you don't know any French people to talk to transforms into realizing subjects like French are Bridges to other universes with a different culture, with an entirely different way of thinking, and an entirely different way of perceiving beauty.
Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
A short book, but not an easy one. Purportedly written to his 15-year old son, possibly as a hard-copy version of the talk that every black male teenager gets. But published. Which raises the question of who exactly is the book's intended audience. I felt like a voyeur reading it. The structure of the book is loose, more stream of consciousness than anything else. And the vocabulary is hard to follow, with "people who think they are white" turning into "Dreamers" by the end of the book.
A letter to a teenage son, of the father's lived experience of growing up to recognize the complex ways that black bodies are valued less to not at all in a world of and for "people who believe they are white". Personal, compelling, and short, definitely reminiscent of Baldwin but more focused on the pain of black loss than the need for white disavowal of our ongoing racist privilege, though that too is in this book's message.
Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'LibraryThing'
5 stars
Short Version, two words: Required Reading.returnreturnMore to follow. My Five-stars are rare: The Jungle, Main Street, The Metaphysical Club, and Between the World and Me. That's it out of 400 rated.
Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
When I think of my long struggle to "try and be a writer", my confidence is shattered upon reading such a poetic, insightful, heartfelt piece as this. This is writing — the naked intimacy of it. Even if I cannot fully grasp the primordial fear documented in this book, Coates's excellent writing gives me a peek into a world I cannot — by definition of my class and race — ever truly know.
I cannot know the fear, but I can understand it. And it can move me.
Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'LibraryThing'
No rating
 Short, potent, powerful essays addressed to the author's son, explaining how whiteness blinds those who "think they are white" to the fundamental injustice of slavery that the U.S. was built on, contrasted to the "dream" which poisons attempts to come to grips with reality and with the constant fear and risk and distorted masculinity that characterizes the lives of black men in America. I found it difficult and enlightening in large part because it isn't addressed to me, while also being entirely aware of how white readers would read it.
Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
This book started off as though a Noam Chomsky-acolyte had written it, e.g.:
This leads us to another equally important ideal, one that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.
I found it very powerful, that the author negates and questions the muddled concept of "race"; the fact that he has written the book as though it were a letter to …
This book started off as though a Noam Chomsky-acolyte had written it, e.g.:
This leads us to another equally important ideal, one that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.
I found it very powerful, that the author negates and questions the muddled concept of "race"; the fact that he has written the book as though it were a letter to his teenage son does not make it any less magnificent:
I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury. I think you know.
It's as though this book is a breath of air that's been breathed too many times, but this exhale of sorts, is poetic; the author really wants to reader to react to sheer reason, to his anger and analyses:
I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.
I really liked Coates' way of self-criticising:
Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing—myself.
His way to look at youth culture, gangsta culture, rap á la Mobb Deep and OutKast, how the toughs are really scareds, is interesting:
I was attracted to their guns, because the guns seemed honest. The guns seemed to address this country, which invented the streets that secured them with despotic police, in its primary language—violence. And I compared the Panthers to the heroes given to me by the schools, men and women who struck me as ridiculous and contrary to everything I knew.
Still, what strikes me as slightly flawed with this short book, is the lack of feminism; while Coates analyses the male perspective in detail, and goes far to acknowledge and attack centuries of white "plunder". Women have little part of this book.
The controlled anger is most of what's really exciting and beautiful about this book (to me):
Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better man for you. He would not be your morality. Malcolm spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the laws that proscribed our imagination.
[...]
“If you’re black, you were born in jail,” Malcolm said.
A lot of this book related to my own experiences, mixing Chomsky with Chuck D, the brutalism of Conrad and CNN:
Almost every day I played Ice Cube’s album Death Certificate: “Let me live my life, if we can no longer live our life, then let us give our life for the liberation and salvation of the black nation.” I kept the Black Power episodes of Eyes on the Prize in my weekly rotation. I was haunted by the shadow of my father’s generation, by Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. I was haunted by the bodily sacrifice of Malcolm, by Attica and Stokely. I was haunted because I believed that we had left ourselves back there, undone by COINTELPRO and black flight and drugs, and now in the crack era all we had were our fears.
[...]
Your mother, who knew so much more of the world than me, fell in love with New York through culture, through Crossing Delancey, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Working Girl, Nas, and Wu-Tang.
[...]
It must have been around that time that I discovered an essay by Ralph Wiley in which he responded to Bellow’s quip. “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
Coates is a very good and poetic author. I'm keen to read his other work. One of the quotes in this book that I like the most is this:
“We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any,” writes Solzhenitsyn. “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.”
I'll let James Baldwin conclude the review:
"And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white."
Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'LibraryThing'
4 stars
This book started off as though a Noam Chomsky-acolyte had written it, e.g.:
This leads us to another equally important ideal, one that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of âraceâ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racismâthe need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy themâinevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.
I found it very powerful, that the author negates and questions the muddled concept of "race"; the fact that he has written the book as though it were a letter to …
This book started off as though a Noam Chomsky-acolyte had written it, e.g.:
This leads us to another equally important ideal, one that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of âraceâ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racismâthe need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy themâinevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.
I found it very powerful, that the author negates and questions the muddled concept of "race"; the fact that he has written the book as though it were a letter to his teenage son does not make it any less magnificent:
I propose to take our countrymenâs claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury. I think you know.
It's as though this book is a breath of air that's been breathed too many times, but this exhale of sorts, is poetic; the author really wants to reader to react to sheer reason, to his anger and analyses:
I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someoneâs grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.
I really liked Coates' way of self-criticising:
Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizingâmyself.
His way to look at youth culture, gangsta culture, rap á la Mobb Deep and OutKast, how the toughs are really scareds, is interesting:
I was attracted to their guns, because the guns seemed honest. The guns seemed to address this country, which invented the streets that secured them with despotic police, in its primary languageâviolence. And I compared the Panthers to the heroes given to me by the schools, men and women who struck me as ridiculous and contrary to everything I knew.
Still, what strikes me as slightly flawed with this short book, is the lack of feminism; while Coates analyses the male perspective in detail, and goes far to acknowledge and attack centuries of white "plunder". Women have little part of this book.
The controlled anger is most of what's really exciting and beautiful about this book (to me):
Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man Iâd ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better man for you. He would not be your morality. Malcolm spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the laws that proscribed our imagination.
...
âIf youâre black, you were born in jail,â Malcolm said.
A lot of this book related to my own experiences, mixing Chomsky with Chuck D, the brutalism of Conrad and CNN:
Almost every day I played Ice Cubeâs album Death Certificate: âLet me live my life, if we can no longer live our life, then let us give our life for the liberation and salvation of the black nation.â I kept the Black Power episodes of Eyes on the Prize in my weekly rotation. I was haunted by the shadow of my fatherâs generation, by Fred Hampton and Mark Clark. I was haunted by the bodily sacrifice of Malcolm, by Attica and Stokely. I was haunted because I believed that we had left ourselves back there, undone by COINTELPRO and black flight and drugs, and now in the crack era all we had were our fears.
...
Your mother, who knew so much more of the world than me, fell in love with New York through culture, through Crossing Delancey, Breakfast at Tiffanyâs, Working Girl, Nas, and Wu-Tang.
...
It must have been around that time that I discovered an essay by Ralph Wiley in which he responded to Bellowâs quip. âTolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,â wrote Wiley. âUnless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.â And there it was. I had accepted Bellowâs premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone elseâs dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
Coates is a very good and poetic author. I'm keen to read his other work. One of the quotes in this book that I like the most is this:
âWe would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there arenât any,â writes Solzhenitsyn. âTo do evil a human being must first of all believe that what heâs doing is good, or else that itâs a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.â
I'll let James Baldwin conclude the review:
"And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white."
Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Framed as a letter to his son, it often felt like I was reading it surreptitiously. Ostensibly, it wasn't written for me, but I think actually, it was, and the feeling of being an outsider was intended.
Although his experiences growing up were not mine, they were also not foreign to me. I was never a Dreamer, his term for one sleepwalking through life enraptured by a belief in the American Dream. I had the privilege of believing myself White (a turn of phrase I believe he borrows from James Baldwin) but I was small and bullied both at home and in school, brought up by a family who thought they were different (that is to say, better) than their neighbors. I went through life fearful of my body being destroyed, though with a lot less reason to feel that way than he did.
Still, psychology being the way it …
Framed as a letter to his son, it often felt like I was reading it surreptitiously. Ostensibly, it wasn't written for me, but I think actually, it was, and the feeling of being an outsider was intended.
Although his experiences growing up were not mine, they were also not foreign to me. I was never a Dreamer, his term for one sleepwalking through life enraptured by a belief in the American Dream. I had the privilege of believing myself White (a turn of phrase I believe he borrows from James Baldwin) but I was small and bullied both at home and in school, brought up by a family who thought they were different (that is to say, better) than their neighbors. I went through life fearful of my body being destroyed, though with a lot less reason to feel that way than he did.
Still, psychology being the way it is, I was an angry, though terrified child who read Malcolm X and wanted revolution. I remember Malcolm discovering the larger Muslim community outside the U.S.A., an event similar to Coates experience of Paris. There's a whole world out there, not free of craziness, but with a different craziness than the one which had seemed like all there was, in that way in which one's childhood sets the stage for everything experienced afterward.
In this book, he's trying to give his son the advantages of his experiences. We all think we can give others a short cut, but I have to wonder if we really can. We save our children from some of the errors we made, only to discover they make their own new ones. Just being alive condemns us to participate in some way in that beautiful struggle.