“This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.” 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.
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My boss told me, "you have to read this, it is the most important work of 2015." And I completely agree. As a white person, I don't think anything I say about it will be profound or worth the space because as a white person I have the privilege to speak and be listened to every single day. My recommendation could never and should never hold a candle to Toni Morrison's, but she is right when she says this is required reading.
0As someone watching the U.S.A from the sidelines, on the other side of the world, I found this palpably sobering, demanding, and illuminating. Coates offers no easy solution, or that it will all be OK in the end for any body nourished with melanin in the U.S.A. It is deeply personal, crushingly intimate, and brutally honest essay to his 15 y.o. about Coates' assessment about living in America and how it has evolved. From his early days in West Baltimore contending with the streets and the schools, to his experience Howard University, moving to New York, going overseas for the first time, and struggling with the death of Prince Jones. His throughout prose is beautiful - so much so that it compelled me to finish it in one sitting.
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