Between the World and Me
Ratings456
Average rating4.6
I usually give pros and cons for books, but that somehow feels inappropriate, or insufficient, for this. (Although I will say that, perhaps because Coates has a poetry background, much of the writing is smooth and pretty).
This doesn't feel like a book for me to critique, because 1) we come from very different social locations, and 2) it's so personal that critiquing the book on any serious level would simply be critiquing his life experience. Coates is writing a letter to his 15-year-old son about his upbringing and current life as a black man in America. This isn't merely a framing device, it really does read as an intimate diary, the kind of thing you write to your child in case you die, so they will have some guiding life advice from you.
Note: the purpose of this book isn't to “convince” you that America's systems often discriminate against black people. This book isn't an argument, it's a memento. If that's what you're looking for, perhaps try “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander or “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson as starting points.
This is a beautiful, sweet letter from a man to his son.
I think I was struck most about how Coates used words so well to deceive emotions and memories that I thought were indescribable without losing something in translation.
It's short, it's comforting but strict. Please read it.
As Toni Morrison proudly states on the cover of this book: this really is required reading! Coates talks so articulately and exquisitely about black identity in America. He has a frank and honest look at how American society historically has been constructed from the exploitation of the black body. This piece of text is addressed to his 15 year old son and it is brimming with Coates inner conflict between teaching his son the facts of life and sheltering him from the constant fear of knowing his black body is constantly under threat. This is such a poignant and heartfelt piece and it was so interesting to understand from the perspective of Coates himself how black spaces like ‘the streets' are a construct formulated by the dreamers (white people) to keep themselves protected from the real world. It is such a fascinating read and I cannot express all the interesting and valid points that Coates makes within this piece in this review. I will be discussing it in my February wrap up in more detail but to summarise. This is required reading for everyone so we can begin to understand that even race itself is a social construct and how we can all begin to take culpability for our inner histories regardless of where we were born or what skin colour we were born . It's a phenomenal read so please go and read it!
His insights are important and something everyone should read. I appreciate the inside look into his experience and would recommend this book.
Thoughtful and compelling conversation about the black body - its security and lack thereof, its currency in America, its commodification. It was unusual to me, the sensation of separation between the person and the body. I particularly appreciated Coates' thoughts on traveling through other countries where the black body is not treated in the same ways it is in America (but being unable to separate feelings and fears from a life experienced in the body); his perceptions of Sept. 11, that first responders are described as heroes but are of the same systems that destroy and eliminate black bodies; and his description of “people who think they are white” - something I had not thought before.
As a father, this book hits home.
Beautiful black bodies.
People who want to be white.
Coates touches on so many aspects of the lived experience of racialized person that you catch yourself nodding at the familiarity of his text.
The phrase that succeeded in yanking my head to an oblique angle came just one page into Ta-Nehisi Coates's polemic work.
“Americans who believe that they are white.”
It was a flip in perspective that instantly explained so much about my failure to understand “race” in America. It explained why I've always felt so awkward checking the “White” box on demographic surveys. My ancestors came from the desert by way of Eastern Europe and Russia. They endowed me with a broad spectrum of color. We're not white. We've never been white. “White” was a fabrication needed to justify the enslavement of a people. There is no white.
About a page later, Coates writes, “But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming ‘the people' has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.” That line twisted my head the rest of the way around.
This book is devastatingly clear minded and courageous. It's the manner of courage that only comes from anger engendered over generations. I wondered, of the thousands who have read his book, how many started off as I did believing they were liberal minded and enlightened only to be mercilessly slapped down and reawakened?
But surely this book isn't written for us – Americans who think of themselves as white – but for Coates' son and his generation and the children to follow. As Coates says in the final passages, “They made us a race. We made ourselves a people.” The struggle continues with little to point to in the way of progress as rare voices like Coates' make us feel equally ashamed and proud to be human.
A tough read. This book deals with the heart wrenching possibility of losing a child, with the added issue of race relations layered in.
What I appreciated the most in this book was the glimpse of a perspective of an urban black young man in America. The best books affect one's world view and Ta-Nehisi managed to do that for me, subtly. The concepts he weaves through the book - The Dream, “the people who think they are white,” the violation of the body - are interesting to ponder and useful to apply later. The book is not about solutions and that's okay. The illustration of problems, done in an emotional, personal, honest tone, is its strength. But it's not without flaws. Ta-Nehisi is weakest when he makes sweeping generalizations (e.g., why lump firefighters with police?) and overstates his claim (e.g., that suburbia is primarily a result of white flight).
The quotes that stood out to me, for one reason or another, are:
“Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds were children did not regularly fear for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television resting in my living room. In the evenings I would sit before this television bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world. There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and they're only want was a popular girlfriend and they're only worry was poison oak.”
“We could not get out. The ground we walked was trip-wired. The air we breathed was toxic. The water stunted our growth. We could not get out.”
“I was learning the craft of poetry which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me years ago – the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth – loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts... Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.”
“The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its wheel and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.”
“Malcolm made sense to me not out of a love of violence but because nothing in my life prepared me to understand tear gas as deliverance, as those Black History Month martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement did.”
“You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this is essential fact.”
“Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.”
“The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons in ghettos.”
Listening to one another's stories without judgement is the most powerful agent for change that we have within our grasp. His story is vastly different from mine and so this is an educational story. It is an emotional story.
I don't know that I can assume this is everyone's story, but it is his story and could be the story of others. It is clearly stated without a manipulation of emotion. It is honest in its assessment of self and place. He gives language to feelings and observations.
The only exception that I take is his language to discuss religion. He doesn't believe in anything and he doesn't have to, but his words take away from those who do. He doesn't leave room for other possibilities. This is a letter to his son and every parent wants to pass on their beliefs systems, so my reaction to those parts might be misplaced.
Part letter, part sermon, part stream-of-consciousness, part autobiography. On the history of America's deep ingrained racism, and what it means to grow up with, live with it, learn to understand it, and find ways to not pass on all the anger yet still the knowledge of what-has-been to your son.
I feel conflicted for not handing out more stars. But while being very engaging, the voice never really reached me, probably as I'm neither American nor very familiar with its history. Also, he told small personal stories and generalised outwards, and sometimes I wished to hear a wider range of voices instead.
I would say that this should be required reading, but I know that the people who need to read this never will and the ones that do either relate or understand it in the way Coates has tried to convey or they will dismiss it as an “angry black man rant” (I have seen this in a one-star review) who blames all white people for his hardships.
But I found it compelling and packed with emotion and I wish that everyone would read it and “get it”.
Written in the form of a letter to his 15 year old son, this book is about the author's experience and understanding of growing up and living as a black man in America. As such, reading it had the quality of listening in on a conversation I wouldn't otherwise have a chance to hear as a middle aged white lady.
Coates writes beautifully and thoughtfully about the grim subject of violence against black people throughout American history and comes to the conclusion that this is actually the tradition of America, built in from the start and taken as a birthright by those who “think they are white” and those who are aspiring to “the Dream” of upward mobility, a nice home in the suburbs and an unlimited stream of material belongings. He doesn't offer any solutions, other than clear-eyed, undeluded struggle, yet this book comes across as a very kind, loving communication from father to son.
The blurb on the front of my copy says, “‘This is required reading.' – Toni Morrison.” I agree. Let all with eyes to see, read.
I don't think I have anything to add here that hasn't already been said more eloquently by more intelligent people. Coates has written an extraordinary letter to his son, and anyone who reads it will be better for it. Those are both vast understatements of the importance of this work.
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.
A powerful read - although I personally find the writing less direct than I prefer and therefore harder to understand.
The Must Read of our Generation
Every couple of years, a book comes along that perfectly encapsulates the cultural issues of a generation. This is that book. It was one of the most powerful books I have ever read. It is a small book, but every sentence seems to pack its own punch.
Coates tackles the idea of race and racism in the wake of the recent public displays of police officers murdering black people. This book is brutally honest . It does not glorify black history, it does not speak of faith or the belief in equality. It tells you what it is like to be “them” in the Us vs. Them world of the United States. It tells you why a kid in an impoverished neighbourhood run by gangs doesn't see the value of learning French in school. It tells you why the author is not at all surprised to find that the officer who killed Trayvon Martin would not be charged and would receive a pension.
Perhaps the reason I found this so powerful was that because he was raised without religion, he does not look to God for answers or believe in an ultimate justice. Instead, he questions the “Dreamers” and wonders why Black people are taught to idolize nonviolence in a country founded on violent revolutions. His perspective is just so raw, so open and so clear, it is as if his consciousness is tangible.
I recommend this to literally everyone. I can only hope this becomes a book that everyone reads in school some day, because it is vital for every person. Whether you are a privileged white man like me or someone who for whatever reason feels like they're less than their peers, this book is crucial to understand the world we live in.
I found this author to be so articulate in communicating his experiences. I can see that my mind has been opened to things that I wasn't aware of previously. It is a book that I will be digesting for a long time. Highly recommend!
This feels like an important book. It's very honest, insightful, personal and a much-needed perspective. I am glad it exists, glad I read it, and I think most people could benefit from reading it and really thinking about it.
That being said, I feel like I'm not exactly its intended audience, as a white person who does try to unpack my own biases. I feel cynical about whether the message will reach the so-called Dreamers, the people who are perpetuating the harmful narratives in the first place. After all, not being willing to listen to black voices and do honest self-examination is sort of their defining characteristic.
Of course this is probably also an important read for the folks to whom it's ostensibly addressed, the ones who are on the receiving end of the violence perpetrated on them by ongoing American racism and injustice and who have to figure out how to exist – let alone thrive, raise families, etc. – within that power structure. But I can't and won't try to speak for them as to whether or not Coates' story resonates.