Between the World and Me

What did I think? That's almost the wrong question. What did I feel seems like a better question. I feel tired and empty. This book was written, this book was published, the whole public conversation about this book has been completed and moved on from but wounds keep getting inflicted, new rending in the fabric of our sense of national selfhood. I have been reading Coates for nearly 10 years, and even the darkest of his writings in those years did not prepare me for the bleakness of the ending of this book.

It's my greatest hope that one day we will be able to read this as a cry of despair from a very poisonous moment in history, but I am a lot more hopeful than Ta-Nehisi Coates and I have nothing to stand upon except a faith in beauty and light.