In the 150 years since the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, the story of race and America has remained a brutally simple one, written on flesh: it is the story of the black body, exploited to create the country’s foundational wealth, violently segregated to unite a nation after a civil war, and, today, still disproportionately threatened, locked up and killed in the streets. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can America reckon with its fraught racial history?
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to answer those questions, presented in the form of a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his own awakening to the truth about history and race through a series of revelatory experiences: immersion in nationalist mythology as …
In the 150 years since the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, the story of race and America has remained a brutally simple one, written on flesh: it is the story of the black body, exploited to create the country’s foundational wealth, violently segregated to unite a nation after a civil war, and, today, still disproportionately threatened, locked up and killed in the streets. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can America reckon with its fraught racial history?
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to answer those questions, presented in the form of a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his own awakening to the truth about history and race through a series of revelatory experiences: immersion in nationalist mythology as a child; engagement with history, poetry and love at Howard University; travels to Civil War battlefields and the South Side of Chicago; a journey to France that reorients his sense of the world; and pilgrimages to the homes of mothers whose children’s lives have been taken as American plunder. Taken together, these stories map a winding path towards a kind of liberation—a journey from fear and confusion, to a full and honest understanding of the world as it is.
Masterfully woven from lyrical personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me offers a powerful new framework for understanding America’s history and current crisis, and a transcendent vision for a way forward.
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 '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
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 '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.
Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
I wouldn't say I'm old, really, but I've been around long enough to have developed a pretty mature world view, to have become less intellectually malleable than I'd like to be. So I appreciate this book more than any I've read in years for its having shaken my brain a bit, dislodging some of my cobwebs. The facts and myths of race and racism had gone almost wholly unexamined in my life. These had seemed issues not particularly relevant to me, as though I were not the beneficiary of a society biased in my favor. Now I have much more thinking to do.
Review of 'Between the World and Me' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Whatever someone told you to expect from this book, it is better. You are peeking in on an open letter from a father to his son about what it's like to grow up thinking you are black and why you think that and what it means and what it costs and
