KatieV
I don’t go anywhere without a book and I make a lot fo typos 30 She/Her 🎇🌻🌊🌞
66444 points
September 2026
4.07 average · 542 reviews
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The Everlasting
Alix E. Harrow
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates
One of the things that I think Coates does really well in this book is explaining what it means that whiteness and blackness are socially created. It's a difficult concept to explain when so much of American culture and history is built around race-based prejudice and discrimination.
He starts by referring to "all those people who believe they are white" and calling attention to the fact that Irish and Jewish people were not originally considered "white" in America. In this case, whiteness is a signifier of power and is used to ostracize "non-white" groups and keep people distracted from thinking critically about who really holds power in our country.
This idea comes up again when he goes to Howard and is confronted with the diversity among people who all identify as black. This diversity is not just within the US but globally.
And then toward the middle, Coates talks about people who say that the solution to racism is for all of us to intermix so much that there is no longer white and black but only brown. Coates points out that that "solution" ignores the fact that people have always been able to create hierarchies and we live in a country where race isn't the only determinate of discrimination. And secondly, we do live in a country where there are mixed race people and they are not free from racism either. Because race is socially constructed, we would still find ways to create racism because it is more complex than white or black.
