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Between the World and Me Kindle Edition

by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT

Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone)

NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly

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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One World
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July 14, 2015
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The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
Highlighted by 17,411 Kindle readers
And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do.
Highlighted by 15,986 Kindle readers
The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.
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From the Publisher

Toni Morrison says “required reading” & one of Oprah’s “books that helped me through”;Ta-Nehisi

A profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history…;Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates;books on racism;racism books;social justice;history;gifts for dad;race in america

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Between the World and Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow, Coates has received the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, and the George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story “The Case for Reparations.” He lives in New York with his wife and son.


	THE WATER DANCER	WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER	THE BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE	THE BEAUTIFU STRUGGLE (Adapted for Young Adults)

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	A boldly conjured debut novel about a magical gift, a devastating loss, and an underground war for freedom	A vital account of modern America, from one of the definitive voices of this historic moment; this collection includes the landmark essay “The Case for Reparations.”	An exceptional father-son story from the about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us	Adapted from the adult memoir, this father-son story explores how boys become men, and quite specifically, how Ta-Nehisi Coates became Ta-Nehisi Coates

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “The Mecca” for its revelatory community of black students and teachers—to the broader Meccas of New York and Paris. Coates describes his observations and the evolution of his thinking on race, from Malcolm X to his conclusion that race itself is a fabrication, elemental to the concept of American (white) exceptionalism. Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, and South Carolina are not bumps on the road of progress and harmony, but the results of a systemized, ubiquitous threat to “black bodies” in the form of slavery, police brutality, and mass incarceration. Coates is direct and, as usual, uncommonly insightful and original. There are no wasted words. This is a powerful and exceptional book.--Jon Foro

From School Library Journal

In a series of essays, written as a letter to his son, Coates confronts the notion of race in America and how it has shaped American history, many times at the cost of black bodies and lives. Thoughtfully exploring personal and historical events, from his time at Howard University to the Civil War, the author poignantly asks and attempts to answer difficult questions that plague modern society. In this short memoir, the Atlantic writer explains that the tragic examples of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and those killed in South Carolina are the results of a systematically constructed and maintained assault to black people—a structure that includes slavery, mass incarceration, and police brutality as part of its foundation. From his passionate and deliberate breakdown of the concept of race itself to the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, Coates powerfully sums up the terrible history of the subjugation of black people in the United States. A timely work, this title will resonate with all teens—those who have experienced racism as well as those who have followed the recent news coverage on violence against people of color. Pair with Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely's All American Boys (S. & S., 2015) for a lively discussion on racism in America. VERDICT This stunning, National Book Award-winning memoir should be required reading for high school students and adults alike.—Shelley Diaz, School Library Journal

Review

“I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.”—Toni Morrison

“Powerful and passionate . . . profoundly moving . . . a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Really powerful and emotional.”—John Legend, The Wall Street Journal

“Extraordinary . . . [Coates] writes an impassioned letter to his teenage son—a letter both loving and full of a parent’s dread—counseling him on the history of American violence against the black body, the young African-American’s extreme vulnerability to wrongful arrest, police violence, and disproportionate incarceration.”—David Remnick, The New Yorker

“Brilliant . . . a riveting meditation on the state of race in America . . . [Coates] is firing on all cylinders, and it is something to behold: a mature writer entirely consumed by a momentous subject and working at the extreme of his considerable powers at the very moment national events most conform to his vision.”—The Washington Post

“An eloquent blend of history, reportage, and memoir written in the tradition of James Baldwin with echoes of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man . . . It is less a typical memoir of a particular time and place than an autobiography of the black body in America. . . . Coates writes with tenderness, especially of his wife, child, and extended family, and with frankness. . . . Coates’s success, in this book and elsewhere, is due to his lucidity and innate dignity, his respect for himself and for others. He refuses to preach or talk down to white readers or to plead for acceptance: He never wonders why we just can’t all get along. He knows government policies make getting along near impossible.”—The Boston Globe

“For someone who proudly calls himself an atheist, Coates gives us a whole lot of ‘Can I get an amen?’ in this slim and essential volume of familial joy and rigorous struggle. . . . [He] has become the most sought-after public intellectual on the issue of race in America, with good reason. Between the World and Me . . . is at once a magnification and a distillation of our existence as black people in a country we were not meant to survive. It is a straight tribute to our strength, endurance and grace. . . . [Coates] speaks resolutely and vividly to all of black America.”—Los Angeles Times

“A crucial book during this moment of generational awakening.”—The New Yorker

“A work that’s both titanic and timely, Between the World and Me is the latest essential reading in America’s social canon.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Coates delivers a beautiful lyrical call for consciousness in the face of racial discrimination in America. . . . Between the World and Me is in the same mode of The Fire Next Time; it is a book designed to wake you up. . . . An exhortation against blindness.”—The Guardian

“Coates has crafted a deeply moving and poignant letter to his own son. . . . [His] book is a compelling mix of history, analysis and memoir. Between the World and Me is a much-needed artifact to document the times we are living in [from] one of the leading public intellectuals of our generation. . . . The experience of having a sage elder speak directly to you in such lyrical, gorgeous prose—language bursting with the revelatory thought and love of black life—is a beautiful thing.”—The Root

“Rife with love, sadness, anger and struggle, Between the World and Me charts a path through the American gauntlet for both the black child who will inevitably walk the world alone and for the black parent who must let that child walk away.”—Newsday

“Poignant, revelatory and exceedingly wise, Between the World and Me is an essential clarion call to our collective conscience. We ignore it at our own peril.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Masterfully written . . . powerful storytelling.”—New York Post

“One of the most riveting and heartfelt books to appear in some time . . . The book achieves a level of clarity and eloquence reminiscent of Ralph Ellison’s classic Invisible Man. . . . The perspective [Coates] brings to American life is one that no responsible citizen or serious scholar can safely ignore.”—Foreign Affairs

“Urgent, lyrical, and devastating in its precision, Coates has penned a new classic of our time.”—Vogue

“Powerful.”—The Economist

“A work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty . . . Between the World and Me is a love letter written in a moral emergency, one that Coates exposes with the precision of an autopsy and the force of an exorcism. . . . Coates is frequently lauded as one of America’s most important writers on the subject of race today, but this in fact undersells him: Coates is one of America’s most important writers on the subject of America today. . . . [He’s] a polymath whose breadth of knowledge on matters ranging from literature to pop culture to French philosophy to the Civil War bleeds through every page of his book, distilled into profound moments of discovery, immensely erudite but never showy.”—Slate

“The most important book I’ve read in years . . . an illuminating, edifying, educational, inspiring experience.”—Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

“It’s an indescribably enlightening, enraging, important document about being black in America today. Coates is perhaps the best we have, and this book is perhaps the best he’s ever been.”—Deadspin

“Vital reading at this moment in America.”—U.S. News & World Report

“[Coates] has crafted a highly provocative, thoughtfully presented, and beautifully written narrative. . . . Much of what Coates writes may be difficult for a majority of Americans to process, but that’s the incisive wisdom of it. Read it, think about it, take a deep breath and read it again. The spirit of James Baldwin lives within its pages.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“Part memoir, part diary, and wholly necessary, it is precisely the document this country needs right now.”—New Republic

“A moving testament to what it means to be black and an American in our troubled age . . . Between the World and Me feels of-the-moment, but like James Baldwin’s celebrated 1963 treatise The Fire Next Time, it stands to become a classic on the subject of race in America.”—The Seattle Times

“Riveting . . . Coates delivers a fiery soliloquy dissecting the tradition of the erasure of African-Americans beginning with the deeply personal.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[Between the World and Me] is not a Pollyanna, coming-of-age memoir about how idyllic life was growing up in America. It is raw. It is searing. . . . [It’s] a book that should be read and shared by everyone, as it is a story that painfully and honestly explores the age-old question of what it means to grow up black and male in America.”—The Baltimore Sun

“A searing indictment of America’s legacy of violence, institutional and otherwise, against blacks.”—Chicago Tribune

“I know that this book is addressed to the author’s son, and by obvious analogy to all boys and young men of color as they pass, inexorably, into harm’s way. I hope that I will be forgiven, then, for feeling that Ta-Nehisi Coates was speaking to me, too, one father to another, teaching me that real courage is the courage to be vulnerable, to admit having fallen short of the mark, to stay open-hearted and curious in the face of hate and lies, to remain skeptical when there is so much comfort in easy belief, to acknowledge the limits of our power to protect our children from harm and, hardest of all, to see how the burden of our need to protect becomes a burden on them, one that we must, sooner or later, have the wisdom and the awful courage to surrender.”—Michael Chabon

“Ta-Nehisi Coates is the James Baldwin of our era, and this is his cri de coeur. A brilliant thinker at the top of his powers, he has distilled four hundred years of history and his own anguish and wisdom into a prayer for his beloved son and an invocation to the conscience of his country. Between the World and Me is an instant classic and a gift to us all.”—Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns

About the Author

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. His book Between the World and Me won the National Book Award in 2015. Coates is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I.

. . . we sprawl in gray chains in a place full of winters when what we want is the sun

Amira Baraka, “Ka Ba”

Son,

Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote studio on the far west side of Manhattan. A satellite closed the miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week.

The host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she turned to the subject of my body, although she did not mention it specifically. But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history.

There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies—torture, theft, enslavement—are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of “government of the people,” but the means by which “the people” acquired their names.

This leads us to another equally important ideal, one that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them—inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.

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. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of this new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.

These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.

The new people are not original in this. 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, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. 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. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ignore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I have never truly had that luxury. I think you know.

I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible.

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

That Sunday, with that host, on that news show, I tried to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared picture of an eleven-year-old black boy tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then she asked me about “hope.” And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indistinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a calm December day. Families, believing themselves white, were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the Dream persists by warring with the known world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families, I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I was sad for you.

That was the week you learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free. The men who had left his body in the street like some awesome declaration of their inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 p.m. that night, waiting for the announcement of an indictment, and when instead it was announced that there was none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself.

This must seem strange to you. We live in a “goal-oriented” era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained American glory. In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live—specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I have asked the question through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother, your aunt Janai, your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.

And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young life, though I had not always recognized it as such.

It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear, and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered ’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T‑shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

I saw it in their customs of war. I was no older than five, sitting out on the front steps of my home on Woodbrook Avenue, watching two shirtless boys circle each other close and buck shoulders. From then on, I knew that there was a ritual to a street fight, bylaws and codes that, in their very need, attested to all the vulnerability of the black teenage bodies.

I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00SEFAIRI
Publisher ‏ : ‎ One World; 1st edition (July 14, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 14, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 5392 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 155 pages

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Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Between the World and Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. A MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow, Coates has received the National Magazine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, and the George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story “The Case for Reparations.” He lives in New York with his wife and son.

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Amy Breedlove

Dreamers and Strugglers

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Every new month brings with it a flood of new names forever lost to this life, here and now. Trayvon, Brown, Garner, Tamir, Emanuel 9, and Sandra, with innumerable names before and many more to come. True tragedies. Unspeakable evils.

Those who bear the inhumane weight of racism seemingly burst with grief constantly. How can a human endure such relentless onslaught? The truth of being a person of color in America, is that this country was not built for all. This country was, though, built on the backs and bodies of black lives.
"Whites" that benefit from white supremacy and privilege don't want to understand the insidious cost of an empire with a history (and ongoing reality) that diminishes and devalues non-"white" persons and cultures.

I've read "Between the World and Me" in the wake of Sandra Bland's murder. "Suicide!" some will vehemently counter. No, Sandra was murdered.

I will never know the struggle to survive that a woman, a black woman, has to daily endure, moment by moment, her whole life long. Being non-white, non-male, non-evangelical, non-heterosexual, and non-abled bodied is a constant struggle in the empire of America.

Sandra Bland never had a day of her brief life where she did not have to struggle against a history and future always set against her. I'm not saying I know what precisely ended Sandra's life, the specific mechanism of her death, but I do know that she was murdered. All black lives are daily being murdered by the "white" empire of America.

Race is a construct. It is true that we, whatever shade of hue, all are human. But, some constructs of race are fuel and plunder for the militant machinery of empire.

Coates explains,

"Plunder has matured into habit and addiction [for "white" America]; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline."

Coates also contrasts dreamers and strugglers.

Dreamers want to be "white". The dream of equality is really a desire to be "white"; that is, to benefit from this empire, instead of being churned by empire, one has to be white. Coates does not quite say it like this. This is my interpretation of his term, "dreamers".

Strugglers have awaken from the dream, and strugglers just want to live their brief lives, they only desire to be human. Strugglers are under no dreamy illusion that they will ever fully be equal in this empire. The empire of America is not interested in or built for equality. Empire is built for and by domination. Again, this is my interpretation of Coates, and not his words.

Coates writes (and lives) with an immediacy of the here and now. His writing style is hauntingly poetic and sobering. He doesn't use the phrase, "black lives matter," but he is clear that his physical body matters. His son's life matters. His book is a memoir for his son's benefit-- a matter of life and death.
Coates' own awakening from the temptation to dream, and to succumb to illusion, is born out of a grounding revelation that his life, his physical body, is all he gets.

Coates explains:
"I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us—Christians, Muslims, atheists—lived in this fear of this truth. Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional."

Practically too, Coates exposes some often touted anthems of the white empire of America:

“'Black-on-black crime' is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return."
Some further contextual reflections as I read "Between the World and Me":
White privilege serves white supremacy, the social construct [of my] "whiteness" hides in the cloak of normalcy, "it is what it is", left unquestioned & unexposed for what it really is, a sinister systemic evil.
Someone recently asked me "What if what happened to Sandra Bland was about a 'black' officer and a 'white' civilian?"

Police brutality is perpetrated and experienced by various persons of all constructs of race. But, what happened to Sandra is not as frequent of an experience for "white" persons. Officers operating from a position and system of white supremacy (even officers of color) are extra cruel, historically speaking, toward persons of color.

Consider that our present moment in history is not far removed from slavery followed by segregation, then by Jim Crow, then by the unsettled civil rights struggle, and then still yet by an uphill climb for minorities. An African American person in his forties might only be two to three generations from slavery.
This country, with all of its history, is only 4-5 generations old (depending on how one accounts for a generational span of time), that's a pretty young country. And, if an unfolding history ebbs and flows, like a pendulum swinging forward and then slightly backwards, then true progress is slow.

So, to answer the hypothetical (fantasy) question (switching the race roles of the Sandra Bland injustice), considering that African Americans are about 13% of USA population, and that black officers are a lesser percentage of the USA police force, then the frequency of "black" officer violence against "white" civilians is far less frequent then the more frequent way around. Plus, history has largely not been kind to minorities in this country.

Back to Coates, even as a person of faith (clergy), I too sense in my own self that perhaps this physical life is all we get. And, to survive is to struggle; to know any degree of joy is a struggle.

And, if one is a person of color (non- "white"), then the history and ongoing reality of the American empire will always be against them.

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An older buyer

A Must-Read Book

Reviewed in the United States on March 7, 2024

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“Between the World and Me” is written as Ta-Nahisi Coates’ attempt to help his son understand the challenges that lie ahead of him in life and to know what the boy’s grandparents in their generation and Ta-Nahisi in his had to deal with. It is meditatively written, full of nuance and complexities, and is one of the best books I have read in the past year or so. As Nobel-prize winning author Toni Morrison said, “This is required reading.”

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P. McCollum

I felt I pretty understood Coates concept of living the dream--it meant having ...

Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2015

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This book was a bit eye-opening for me as a white person, though I don't think it transcends any racial divides.

I am a 30 something white male who Coates language believes that I am white and comes from the dream. The "belief in ones whiteness" and the "dream" are two fundamental themes of the book.

The "dream" is to live a free life. Its a life freedom from fear of physical vulnerability and pain, free from fear of the the system, and free from fear of economic want among other freedoms. The dreamers, according to Coates, also have a lack of consciousness about what sustains their life style.

Coates did not grow up living the dream. His story starts in his childhood in an inner city Baltimore neighborhood where he was always worried about his physical security when he was walking to school figuring out how many friends he was with and who was around him. In the Baltimore inner city, "might often made right" and if you were not aware of theses things, people would steal your bike, people would bully you, steal from you, and possible even kill you according to Coates. Coates once had another kid pull a gun on him when he was a pre-teen. Living the dream by contrast is walking down the street holding hands with your significant others oblivious to your surroundings while your children run up and down the street also oblivious to your surroundings. Living the dream is about having nice things and not questioning how those things came to be in your possession (cheap labor) By Coates's standard I am definitely somebody who grew up in the dream. I wasn't afraid growing up and had freedom to pursue my interests and hobbies growing up (reading history and playing sports). I grew up not too far from Coates in Maryland, both my parents were federal government workers. I felt I pretty understood Coates concept of living the dream--it meant having freedom--and I definitely had it. It meant having a lack of consciousness when it came to material wealth. Just like a lot of people become vegetarians after watching slaughtering houses if they never thought about the slaughter that went into creating their food, likewise dreamers have no consciousness of the the brutality that created their material wealth according to Coates. The dreamers lack of consciousness is mostly intentional according to Coates, though he really does not delve too deep into how much of the lack of consciousness is intentional vs. unintentional.

The death of a Howard student Prince Jones also plays a critical part of the book. Jones was a friend of Coates at Howard University (Coates calls Howard University the black community's "Mecca"). Jones was killed by the PG County Police when they mistook him for a petty criminal that they were looking to arrest and it ended in some type of altercation whose exact details will be hard to ascertain. Jones death was the result of bad police work. It also underlies why the African American community distrusts the police so much because incidents like this are typical of the police interaction with underprivileged communities. The Police don't fear consequences if they do sloppy police work in poor neighborhoods the way they do else. I had my own encounter with the PG County police. When I was a student at the University of Maryland I got arrested and punched in the face. I had participated in a riot after a Maryland-Duke where some of the students vandalized local businesses, but I had not participated in any vandalism myself. I tried to shield another student that the police were trying to arrest by blocking the officer's path. I got punched in the face and wrestled to the ground. I had enough blood on me that they took me to the hospital as a precaution though my injuries were not serious. Eventually I agreed not to sue the PG County police (I really didn't have any serious injuries) and the charges against me were dismissed. After reading Coates book I did wonder if I had been underprivileged and African American would I have been able to get the charges against myself dismissed as a potential law suit from a white middle class person who are already hired a well known lawyer probably seems more threatening than the threats the PG County police usually get. Also my attorney pressured the police department by telling them I would get expelled from the University of Maryland if I was convicted and they may have played a part in it too. The prosecutor brought the case but all the cops who were witnesses didn't show up (my attorney arranged that ahead of time and the case was dismissed). That said a huge gulf between African Americans and whites is how much African Americans distrust the police. After my incident I was a little more cynical about the police, but still trusted the PG County police to do the right thing as I called them for help a couple times thereafter (e.g. somebody threw a rock at my window and shattered it) and my car was broken into. I wasn't disillusioned with the PG County police by my incident like the underprivileged black community was. I still expected the PG County Police to treat me well (which they did).

I struggled a lot more to understand Coates concept of "believing oneself to be white". It seems to mean having a sense of entitlement. Coates doesn't believe a sense of entitlement is exclusive for whites. As mentioned in the preceding paragraph he invokes the middle class African Americans of PG County multiple times as having a sense of entitlement and being callous to the suffering of others. Going back to the concept of "believing oneself to be white" Coates seems to think its about equals and unequals. He quotes John Calhoun as saying the biggest stratification in Ante-Bellum southern society is not between rich and poor but between whites and blacks. You are either one of the entitled or one of the people that the entitled class exploits. Coates doesn't think the entitled class (the ones who believe themselves to be white) is strictly based on ones skin color though there is a strong correlation. He mentions that other races including African Americans can be exploiters and that segments of the white population can be the exploited (he used the example of hostility towards Irish immigrants, but he just as easily could have used a more modern example of the current hostility towards Mexican and Central America immigrants who are genetically pmostly of European ancestry with a significant though minority strand of Native American ancestry.

I found Coates interesting, but his analysis a bit narrow. I found his concept of the dream more convincing than some of the other narratives and themes he explored, though his understanding of the dream was perhaps a bit shallow. As somebody who grew up and is permeated in Coates "Dream" I feel like Coates analysis of the people in the "Dream" is shallow. Coates feels like people who live in the dream are implicitly okay with the exploitation of the underprivileged as long as that exploitation is not brought too close to their senses. I think there is truth in that, I live a solid middle class lifestyle and certainly benefit from cheap labor in the sense that it lowers costs of the goods that provide me a middle class lifestyle and that I will cite things like economic mobility and the land of opportunity if people draw my attention to the wealth inequality and the life of the working poor. At the same time, people living in the "Dream" are not living in a vacuum and most of our attention is on other people living in the "Dream". That means my priorities are beating out peers to get into good schools, get good jobs, and beating out other guys for my dream woman. That is where 95% of my energy is. John Calhoun almost certainly lied, a lot of southern planters in the ante-bellum south almost definitely looked on poor whites with disdain considering them dirty, uneducated hillabilities. Further while people raised in the dream have a head start on leading a happy fulfilling life on those not raised in the dreams, there are a lot of miserable people "who believe themselves to be white" because they made poor personal choices. If Coates wants to better understand white people he'll need to understand the role the concept of "personal responsibility" plays in the dream and how it both legitimately explains results (my father was born poor in a house with no electricity in a rural school with one classroom for grades K-5, who ate fried flour cause there was no other food in the house and went to school without shoes when he destroyed his only pair of shoes, but he joined the military, worked a second job when he had two young children one of which had a medical condition not covered by insurance to pay for treatment) and gave his children a middle class life in the Dream and also how the concept of personal responsibility is used as a crutch by haves to justify their exploitation of the have nots.

I think to transcend racial understandings, you would have to address the concept of personal responsibility which is maybe the most central belief of the dreamers. Personal responsibility is not a rigid concept for dreamers it means slightly different things to different people. Ultimately the concept breaks down to the idea that people have to live with their decisions. I don't think the concept is as simple as the idea that honest people will always finish ahead of cheats. I think even dreamers recognize that external factors (even if it only be luck) play a role in ones outcomes. But it does emphasize the role that our own decisions play in our life and minimizes the role of external factors. Coates talks about personal responsibility here and there talking about Prince Jones mother or his grandmother working as a maid and going to night school, but in his world view external factors are the primary driver of success and failure. Coates focuses on external factors and as such he won't resonate with a lot of white readers cause he is starting with a premise that they only begrudgingly accept. If you couldn't tell from my own aside about my factor, I more or less buy into the concept of personal responsibility and was annoyed by Coates focus on the external. And yes, of course, I am aware that external factors play a significant role in outcomes. I think Coates was surprised when Prince Jones's mother said she was treated with respect by well to do whites, but I think that illustrates Coates lack of understanding of the significance of the concept of personality responsibility in dreamers world vview.

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Danni

Must read!!

Reviewed in Canada on December 29, 2023

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Truthfully, I couldn’t put it down and have recommended it to almost everyone I know. Definitely a “must read”!!!

Kinky Kid

Hermoso. triste y lleno de rabia, una lectura obligatoria

Reviewed in Mexico on December 30, 2021

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Doloroso y triste, pero al mismo tiempo hermoso, en esta carta hacia su propio hijo, Coates analiza la situación racial de Estados Unidos desde un enfoque muy personal. El libro escrito de manera magistral te hace sentir la rabia sobre las injusticias vividas por los afroamericanos solo por el color de la piel. Recomendadisima.

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liviar

A must-read if you're interested in current (and historical) Afro-American issurs

Reviewed in Italy on February 25, 2024

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I admit I have read very little so far, concerning the issues people of color are facing worldwide and in the US specifically. This is not fiction, yet quite gripping. It's a good starting pointo to dicover a whole new world of emotions. I'll recommend this to anyone interested in understanding.

SP

Heart wrenching

Reviewed in India on April 30, 2023

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The real face of US. If it doesn’t make us to cry, we are in all probability, a piece of stone.

Aline de Almeida Gandra

Incredible book

Reviewed in Brazil on July 20, 2020

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I loved it. It changed my life.
I also wrote about this book for my Postcolonial Literature course at the University, and it was a great pleasure to analyze it as an academic person.
Great book!

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