Between the World and Me

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Average customer rating 4.1 (11 comments)

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Toni Morrison said, "This is required reading." Coates offers a magnificent perspective of the damages of racism and white supremacy that reach out for literally centuries, but also the hope one can have for a child to be able to move forward from that while simultaneously fearing that he may not be able.

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What an important 'letter' to his son. And yet, it is necessary reading for all of us. Coates is very honest about how he has had to 'survive the neighborhoods and shield my body.' And although his son has grown with more privilege he is still in the same predicament as his father, Coates, having to shield his body from this world. Living in terror and having a lack of safety because of your skin color is no way to live. Yet so many live with this fear. Thank you for sharing this with us Ta-Nehisi Coates.

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Written as a letter to the author’s teenage son, this is a powerful work about being black in America that has much to offer. It convincingly relates one man’s experience of race in the US, describing his struggles and hardships, both in his daily life and emotionally. For many of us, it is easy to take our privileges for granted, and not to recognize the reality of life for blacks, and especially black men, in this country. This book can help us to gain a better understanding of the disadvantages American blacks still experience, and hopefully can give us a foundation from which we can work towards a better future without prejudice.

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This book is OUTSTANDING and a must read for ALL.

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This was a very heavy read. I was somewhat speechless at the 3/4 mark and had to put it down, finishing it later. However, very few contemporary writers have put so precisely into words, the feelings , the helpless nature of living as a black person in the US. Helpless only as one cannot escape appearance which, let's face it, is deemed somewhat worth less and totally expendable in the US of A.

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"Between the world and me" is written as an African American man's letter to his adolescent son. It is a profound work which deals with the angst of an educated black man and his attempt to answer the questions on racism. Coates does agree that parts of him acknowledges that a black person's very vulnerability brings him closer to the meaning of life. This book is a beautifully written personal narrative.

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I used to attempt reading TNC in the Atlantic Monthly online. He wasn't much there and he is even less here. A rising tides lifts all boats and when the nation's chief executive elevates a murderous race fraud like Sharpton to the most senior position in the world of black spokesmen it is not surprising to see a work like this by a man likes this over-praised. Indeed it merits little praise at all. It is in fact much like his online magazine references - a veneer of education overlaying a spoiled child's distorted vision of himself and his relationship to the world. I pity his son.

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The book of the moment. Essential reading.

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The author of this book denounces God, quits school, instills fear, encourages separation of races, and calls firefighters who died during 9/11 “not human” and “menaces of nature”. All in letters instructing his son. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME starts out powerfully - as the book we need. He speaks sharply about the unjustified, tragic killing of black men and the lack of punishment for their killers. He writes, “The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.” He speaks heartbrokenly about each as someone’s child, whose vessel was filled with thread-bare tires from travel for sports and countless hours of teaching: “And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into him…” It is saddening. Coates offers such powerful statements as “But race is the child of racism, not the father.” He talks poignantly about growing up in Baltimore and the overall foundation of America “you cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.” Truly, this could have been the book that achieved his goal: “Perhaps I might write something of consequence someday.” But Coates is conflicted. When his son was little, he would rush carefree into a crowd of kids, full of joy, no concern. Coates writes, “you have never been afraid of people, of rejection, and I have always admired you for this and always been afraid for you because of this.” Back-and-forth, Coates weaves a tale of fear, a worry, a denial of hope. “Hate gives identity” is what Coates writes. And though there is horrific history and modern day evils, Coates offers no hint of light. He stays bunkered in segregation. He labels he and his son as “blacks” and those that believe in “The Dream” as “people that think they are white”. He calls the latter “dullards”, who celebrate Martin Luther King’s words and as people selfishly hoping for unity. Coates instead proscribes to the eye-to-eye ideologies of “Malcolm, his body bound in a cell, studying the books, trading his human eyes for the power of flight.” Coates believes that “The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.” It was his feelings toward 9/11 that hurt me most of all. As Coates stood on his balcony in New York, overlooking the plumes of smoke rising from the demolished Trade Center towers, he recalls of the police officers, firefighters, and rescue works that died, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could - with no justification - shatter my body.” Perhaps part of the issue is Coates sharp denouncing of God - Christian, Muslim, any. He repeatedly refers to himself as godless or ungodly to his son. His only god is found within “the body” of unified black men and women. They must resist “The Dreamers” ideology. Coates speaks sharply against getting an education. Again, the educational system belongs to The Dreamer (aka “the people who think they are white”). He refers to Howard University as “The Mecca”; he speaks highly of it throughout. Perhaps he forgot that he told his son early in these letters that he dropped out of school, out of “The Mecca”. That’s a large part of this book: off the top of his head thinking. He writes beautifully one moment, capturing attention, drawing honest conclusions. Then he’ll turn, contradicting, and - worst of all - driving wedges in already frail relationships. This book isn’t a message of hope. It is a message of fear and failure.

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Toni Morrison said "This is required reading," and it's plain to see why. This book is a thoughtful, personal, heartbreaking synthesis of the consequences of centuries of American injustice. Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses this book to his son, and any parent who reads it will understand the way that the world becomes more fraught and your interests in it shift when you bring a child into the world. I dare you not to be shattered when you read about Coates' feelings as he watches his son play with a new group of kids on a preschool tour and wishes he'd hold back a bit. "...now I understand the gravity of what I was proposing -- that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you submit to a loss of time. And now when I measure this fear against the boldness that the masters of the galaxy imparted to their own children, I am ashamed." Anyone who has studied abroad, who has left their home country behind for at least a few months, will recognize what happens to Coates in Paris. The experience gives you a new view not only of your host country, but also of your own people. Now imagine that what you see reveals to you that your hardships are even harder than you imagined on your worst days. That's what he sees: America has stolen not only his body, which was his fear all along, but also his eyes. Coates doesn't prescribe a fix for America. He ponders a future in which systems that have plundered black bodies begin to break down, but he suspects that their failure would only bring further pain down on his people. And, seeing the world through his eyes at least for a little while, it's hard to disagree.

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For his son, for himself, for anyone who recognizes the world as he sees it and for anyone who is part of that world, Ta-Nesihi Coates has written a masterful, deeply personal and profoundly moving memoir. Between the World and Me is structured as a letter to his son, a young man on the verge of adulthood. Coates, a writer for The Atlantic who has been helping form a national conversation on the state of race relations and the state of blacks in America, takes readers back to what his Baltimore neighborhood was like. He describes the difference between his black blocks and the ones he saw on his television set. Those people on TV are living the Dream. Their white world is not his, even though they could be in the same city and are in the same country. Black kids, he writes, have to be twice as good to be seen as half as worthwhile. Many of their parents treat them harshly out of fear that they will step out of line. Coates could have died as a teen when another boy pulled a gun out of his coat pocket, but he changed his mind and put it away. As he notes: "Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket." In college, Coates found his Mecca at Howard University. The glorious education he had there, in class and by meeting so many others, is brought to vivid life. Anyone who loved their time at university, who had the opportunity to know at the time they were learning about life and themselves, will enjoy this section. Coates does a marvelous job of depicting how important that time was to him, all the more important because it was Howard and all that represents. (Although Coates did not graduate but started carving out a career as a writer, the education he received there was fundamental to his joy in life and his continued search for knowledge. When Coates goes into a history book-recommending mode on Twitter, the depth of his knowledge is tremendous.) Before the tragedy after tragedy after tragedy of the last few years, from Travyon Martin to Michael Brown to John Crawford to Jordan Davis (whose mother Coates interviewed and to which he took his son in a powerful passage) to Freddie Gray, and on and on, a fellow Howard University student was gunned down by a cop. This cop followed Prince Jones out of his Prince George's County jurisdiction and shot him. The description of the man that the officer was looking for was 5 feet 4 and 250 pounds; Prince Jones was 6 feet 3 and 211 pounds. The wanted man had long dreadlocks and Prince Jones had very shortly cut hair. The officer drew a gun on Prince Jones but showed no badge. The officer claimed Prince Jones tried to run him over with his Jeep, the same Jeep his mother bought him for high school graduation. The mother of Prince Jones, herself a doctor and the child of sharecroppers, references Solomon Northrup of 12 Years a Slave in her talk with Coates. And how Northrup's home and work and family did not matter when he was taken. And how, years later and under different laws in the same country, the wealth and respect she built up and the things she gave her children did not matter. The structure Coates uses in what is essentially a long essay (the book is less than 200 pages) is similar to one James Baldwin used in addressing a work to his own nephew. Coates has been tied to Baldwin because of Toni Morrison's advance praise of this work, and both this work and Coates are now established in the line of black Americans writing about themselves and their society, and how that fits into what white Americans see of our society. The title comes from Richard Wright's poem of the same name: "And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me ..." The sooty details of what has happened to the man in the poem, to what happened black people, to what continues to happen to black people, and how their experience continues to be different from others in this country despite any laws, any cultural changes, are what keep Americans separated. Slavery was replaced by Jim Crow and has been replaced by housing projects, predatory loan sharks, voting laws, inequitable education and other shams. But it's not just legal structures, or the way banks handle loans or companies hire people without "ethinic-sounding" names. White people still cross the street to avoid black men in suits who are still followed in stores. Black women are told by boutique clerks that they cannot afford pricey clothing. Black people who do not become shining models of making it (Coates calls them the Jackie Robinson elite) are told it's their fault, despite any obstacles in their way. When Coates took his son to a movie on the Upper West Side and they were coming off an escalator too slowly, a white woman pushed the child for going too slowly for her. When Coates yelled at her for pushing another person's child, a crowd gathered and a white man got in his face and, when Coates dared to push him away, was told: "I could have you arrested." Coates writes he felt shame for endangering his child and himself by the act of standing up for them. This is an essential point to this work. Because those of us who are not black cannot have the same experience, any of us who care about the state of the country need to find out as much as we can, to educate ourselves. This is an eloquent, thoughtful and honest work to use in the pursuit of knowledge that may, in time, become wisdom. It is a point on which Coates frames this entire work. His thesis acknowledges that the powerful always work to keep those without power from gaining it. But America, he notes, was supposed to be different. America says so: "Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, ... "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." Acknowledging that exceptional moral standard means recognizing that individuals operate under the burdensome belief of American exceptionalism. It also means that those who expound this belief in exceptionalism need to apply it not only to other individuals, but to the society as a whole. For in that application is the possibility of a new understanding of what means to have those sooty details affect every aspect of an individual's life. He quotes Solzhenitsyn in this regard: "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 inconformity with natural law." Coates notes this is the foundation of the Dream that he refers to throughout. It's how a black police officer could shoot Prince Jones, how black officers could take part in Freddie Gray's death. Coates says that he has continued his studies, in part, to try to find the right question to ask. The "gift of study", he adds, is "to question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers." That questioning is a gift he passes along to his son and other readers. The killing of Prince Jones, the murders that continue, the sorrow that Coates's son felt when learning that Mike Brown's killer received the same treatment as the killer of Prince Jones, form the backdrop to the final words Coates has for his son. While Coates is reluctant to aspire to hope, expressing the need to be honest, one statement toward the conclusion of this work is something on which hope can be built: "They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people." Taking pride and celebrating that pride sounds like an honest way to live with eyes that can see into and beyond sooty details, not ignoring them, never ignoring them, because, as Coates tells his son: "...there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else's country, but in your own home."