Ta-Nehisi Coates
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Ta-Nehisi Coates and a Generation Waking Up
By Brit Bennett
“The book, written as a letter to Coates’s teen-age son, begins as Coates struggles with how to help his child after Michael Brown’s killer is not indicted. He does not offer comfort, which would feel, to him, dishonest, and instead sets out to explore the question of how to “live free in this black body.” To Coates, a defining feature of black life is that your body can be taken from you easily, and with little consequence. Throughout the book, he awakens repeatedly to this reality: when, as a child, a boy points a gun at him; when he loses his temper at a white woman who shoved his son and a man threatens to call the police; when Prince Jones, a Howard University classmate, is gunned down in front of his house by a police officer who faces no charges. Coates begins to see patterns in the brutality within his own community as people try to protect their bodies and the bodies of those they love against all the easy ways those bodies can be destroyed. ‘This was the war for the possession of his body,” Coates writes, “and this would be the war of his whole life.’ ”
The New Yorker, July 15, 2015 (Read full review)
Publisher’s Presentation
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.
