Between the World and Me

I could not put it down. I thought it would probably take me weeks of bringing this book along with me for my solo meals out, which is how I do much of my reading. I'd get through a bit here, chew on it, bite off a bit more, etc. Instead, I read it from beginning to end in one sitting, staying up long past my bedtime because I prefered reading it to sleeping. I began the book as my accompaniment for a solo meal out, that meal ran into more than two hours, then I brought it home and continued to read it until I was surprised and saddened by the last page. This is at once a beautiful, touching, moving and profoundly insightful book. It answered, in one swiftly deft sweep of elegant prose, questions about racial identity in America that have puzzled me since I realized that I was "white" and there were other people, mostly distinguished by skin color and economic class, who were "colored." I would guess I was around four or five years old when I first wondered why white and colored people were so angry with each other. It was 1964. This book is written, earnestly and sincerely, as a letter to his son. There is no artifice in this. It is a letter from a black father frightened for his black son, who wants him to understand his situation and be able to discern lies from truth as he deals with it. He almost too-dryly lays out the dangerous situations over which his son will have no control other than over his own actions and mental repose, explaining each with simple equations of self-interest, power and brutality. He then details his own struggle and evolution with all this, honestly unearthing his own now-abandoned limited views of the world, some left on the streets of Paris and some left on the boulevards of a now-gentrifying Harlem, now strolled by white women with strollers, the very neighborhood in which I live today and read this remarkable book. He describes white people as "people who believe themselves to be 'white.'" This distinction is the central revelation of this book for me as a man of caucasian and European descent. I was primed and readied for this view because I've never felt my "white" identity was something real. I'm a little Northern European on my mother's side, a little Southern European on my father's. I've had my DNA sequenced, so I know that my father's ancestors emigrated from Northern Africa to Southern Europe fifty-thousand years ago, about twenty-thousand years before my mother's ancestors came out of the Caucus mountains and moved to Northern Europe. I have more in common genetically with people in the Basque region of Spain than any other currently identifiable region, but my father's family regards it's European roots as being in Alsace, we have record of a DeWald as a tax collector in the region in the eleventh century. However, the name DeWald has it's richest history in South Africa, at least for the last couple of centuries, and in German, it means "of the woods." So, WTF am I? A German/English/Basque/Alsatian/Afrikaner? I'm all those things, but according to the US culture, I'm "white" along with my friends whose ancestors followed an entirely different path. We share a skin color and assumedly "not one drop" of the adulterating "colored" blood. That's what makes us white, and it is the only thing that makes us white. We believe we are and so does everyone around us. This is the point that Mr Coates makes so eloquently. "White" isn't a race, as such, it's an identity, and the degree to which one possesses the identity (in their view and in the view of others) determines which side of the racial dividing (white vs. non-white) line one lives in the United States. The United States has, in Mr. Coates view, a heritage of enslavement, a history of violent oppression, and a continuing practice of violating non-white personhood. He points out, coldly and rationally, that non-white people, today, still lack boundaries and protections against institutional and state-sanctioned forms of systemic violence. White people, or as Mr. Coates reminds us, "people who believe themselves to be white" take inviolable boundaries and protections against these kinds of institutional and state-sanctioned manifestations of systemic violence for granted. This is what really makes them white. I live in Harlem. It would shock me to the very core of my being if a NYPD officer stopped and frisked me for drugs, weapons or contraband. It would be a turning point in my life, a story I would tell for years, something I would pursue remediation for to the full extent possible, with no fear of further persecution because I chose to do so. I walk by black men being stopped and frisked by NYPD on these same Harlem streets so routinely that I hardly take notice of it. There's nothing rhetorical about that. It's a fact of my own life. If I had a black son, I would require him to read this book. Today.

I’ve put off writing this review for a while. I find, as a straight, white, middle-class dude, conversations about race feel thorny. As I walk along this journey toward racial justice, however, I’m learning to embrace my feelings of discomfort and to not hesitate to speak up. I won’t let my sweaty palms stop me from pecking out notes about what I’m learning. Stumbling through a conversation about race is one of the best ways to learn sensitivity and empathy. Additionally, I was encouraged by the vulnerability of the author to describe his own failings and his progress as he learned about the role that race plays in this country. Sometimes I think reckoning with the complexities of race is a uniquely white problem for which I do not have any good answers. I’m encouraged to know that people of color walk this path of dawning understanding, horror, and aching for change. This insight may be remedial. In fact, I’m sure most of mine are. But I take pride in these tiny ignorances dispelled and in these small steps toward justice and equality. I know that I too can walk this bumpy path forward keeping an open heart and an eye toward my own missteps. Beyond the author’s honesty in his growing racial understanding, the book is poignant, insightful, and beautifully written. I particularly appreciated the author’s emphasis of what is really at stake when we talk about racial injustice: black lives (or, as Coates puts it in relating to the African American’s ongoing fight to escape from the historical chains of slavery woven into our society, the “black body”). He places preservation of the black body as the highest priority. This is no political point. It’s about ending pointless death based on nothing other than skin color. There is no abstraction here. The black body is what is at stake because the black body is what is most grievously endangered by racism and social injustice. Coates writes, “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” (10). Coates’ focus on the real-world realities rather than intentions drives home the pervasive presence of racial oppression built into our modern world. Another important point is the power of forgetting. Denial and forgetting are key in upholding unequal power structures. We can advocate for equal treatment while forgetting that our ancestors (and even our younger selves) have already rigged the system in our favor. It’s a point I consider especially trenchant as I watch protests slowly waning across the country. Will we remember George Floyd in a year? Will we remember the gut-punch of black bodies destroyed needlessly on the streets? Or will we allow it to fade with time? We must, if we’re serious about our commitment to equality, remember. Remember every galling episode of racial injustice you can, keep it at the forefront of your mind, let your memory guide your actions toward change. I’m fumbling and bumbling to try to articulate points that Coates draws beautifully and with deep empathy. He often writes in the second person as a letter to his son to prepare him for the world: “You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold” (71). Coates’ story helped me to realize how very different my upbringing was because of my whiteness and social class. He expresses thoughts that I never had to consider because of the insulated childhood I enjoyed. For example, he writes, “When our elders present school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing” (26). Again, “My father beat me for letting another boy steal from me. Two years later, he beat me for threatening my ninth-grade teacher. Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out” (28). And, “All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to ‘be twice as good,’ which is to say ‘accept half as much” (91). Coates weaves history, personal experience, and informed insight beautifully. His story is honest and visceral and convicting and horrifying and encouraging. This is an important book that ought to be read with an open heart willing to listen and believe. A

Several years ago, I read an interview with members of the Brooklyn-based band TV on the Radio. Its members, several of whom are black, lamented the lack of political activism in art, music and journalism in the Bush-era. TVOTR had just released an anti-war song ("Dry Drunk Emperor"), but their frustrations went beyond foreign military interventions. In regards to enduring questions of race and racism, one band member asked: who would be the James Baldwin of this generation? At the time, I did not even recognize the name of the author of "Go Tell it on the Mountain" and "The Fire Next Time." I of course knew who Martin Luther King, Jr., was (or so I thought) and other black intellectuals, like Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, and Richard Wright. But Baldwin, along with his significance to the present, was unknown to me, a white teenager reading about the hottest new indie band. If the jacket quote from Toni Morrison on the cover of Between the World and Me is to be believed, however, we now have an answer to who is to be Baldwin's heir. I've been a reader of Ta-Nehisi Coates for a few years now, ever since I discovered his writing on race, history, and current events in The Atlantic. I knew that he had published a memoir, but I looked forward to what seemed the next logical progression: a book fusing the aforementioned themes, presenting them through Coates's measured, precise slow-burn prose. Between the World and Me is not quite that book, but it is a book with an immediacy and urgency that has emerged over the past year, since the events of Ferguson, Missouri and the emerging unavoidability of the question of police violence, the value of black lives, and white supremacy in the U.S. Though this is not the book that I anticipated, that is besides the point. This book is important and deserves a wide readership. Between the World and Me is written as an open letter, perhaps an overused genre in this age of social media and blogs, but one that works beautifully here. Coates writes as a father for his son, Samori, contemplating the degrees of continuity and change present in growing up as a black man since he grew up in West Baltimore. In reality, this book is a stellar example of the essay, a tradition with a great legacy in African American intellectual life. Coates moves between the arcs of history to the intensely personal revelations of his own life. One of the unifying themes of this book is the death of his friend Prince Jones at the hands of an undercover cop from Prince George's County, who stalked Jones across several jurisdictions. The fact that the undercover cop was black and P.G. County is home of one of the most black communities in the country makes the case more confounding. Reflecting on this experience and others, Coates arrives at a serious of pithy, impactful insights for his young black son, including: "it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage." Observations like these move towards a critical and thoughtful perspective on U.S. history, one that does not simply call out racism but that asks how and why racism and white supremacy works (though the abstraction of racism is recognizable throughout the text, the word "racist" or "racism" is rarely if ever deployed.) Coates explores and probes other ideas that he has previously explored in his Atlantic articles: deconstructing, for example, Saul Bellow's quip about Tolstoy and the Zulus. Moving (and new for me) was Coates's retelling of his struggle with history while a student at Howard University, which he alternately refers to as The Mecca: moving beyond a teleological vision of "first" black achievers (implicitly culminating in the "first black president") or alternative heroes representative of an essential, unquestioned "black race", and instead towards a vision of history as debates, disagreements, and overall struggle against given assumptions. If all Americans (those who believe they are Americans?) took this vision to heart, perhaps we could confront the contradictions of our national history and its enduring inequalities based on white supremacy and a disregard for black bodies and black lives. The book's description promises that it "clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward"--I'm not sure if this essay delivers on the last, nor could we expect it to do as much. Samori and the present generation will elaborate this vision (or at least that is the hope) and will do so in spite of and in response to the challenges of the present. Some criticisms also have highlighted the fact that "the destruction of the black body" discussed here appears to refer to the male body--at the expense of the specific destruction experienced by women of color. Sandra Bland comes to mind as a recent example, but women are indeed present in this narrative in a specific way, often as secondary or as support figures rather than as protagonists. This is less of a failing of Coates and more of a decision not to overextend beyond the framework of a father talking to his son--the relationship that social and cultural critics often imagine is somehow naturally absent in the black community. Let this book serve as a rejoinder to that narrative. In spite of these criticisms, this essay is succinct, tight, and often engrossing--one that you will read quickly but one to which you will need to return for reflection. I still await Coates's book of historical synthesis, in effect previewed in his landmark piece "The Case for Reparations" but for now, this is the intervention that we need. Read and, most of all, discuss.

I'm white, male, and have very little understanding or appreciation for black culture. My parents and siblings all watched Roots when I was about 8 years old. I encountered some black sailors when I was in the U.S. Navy - in fact, I had a roommate for six months or so that was a black male, but we maybe spoke a hundred words during that time. This book came recommended by a quasi-stranger, not for it's content but for its structure: letters from a father to a son. I'd mentioned that I was interested in writing that sort of book, and this was a resulting recommendation. I read a few reviews before buying it. Not the sort of book I'd otherwise pick up. After ordering it, I heard the author on NPR - without knowing it was the author of the book, mind you - and I thought "wow, this guy is really interesting, provocative, well-spoken, intellectually sound, and speaks from a world that I can only see from afar." So when the show host said his name, I knew I had to pick up the book and read it soon. I had that opportunity within days, on a flight to Atlanta, my first visit there in maybe fifteen years. I got through about 110 pages on the flight and it was perfect timing. Atlanta is a sea of black compared to most everywhere I've lived. Instantly, I could try and appreciate my surroundings in way that I'd never been able to before. Did I feel "white guilt"? Sure. I do. I've seen racism my whole life, especially toward black. This book, however, did much more than rekindle strong feelings of being a winner of Powerball proportions in the life lottery. It challenged me so fundamentally and starkly in a way that I have never been challenged, reading a book, in my life. At times I felt compelled to put the book down, that it was just conjuring up too much weight of history that I wanted to put back out of sight. But I kept going. Finishing it, I felt, like apparently many others do, that this should be required reading for every American. Even those outside of the USA will benefit from it, as it will certainly illuminate the tension and schizophrenia and contradictions and rewritten history of our country. I hope Mr. Coates continues writing until he draws his final breath.

It's hard to know what to say about a book about which so much has already been said. If you're familiar with Coates' writing from The Atlantic Magazine or elsewhere you already know that, in terms of style, he is a gifted writer who is always a pleasure to read, regardless of the subject matter he writes about. The subject matter here, however, is what is most important about "Between the World and Me." Coates' uses the experience of young African Americans and his own experiences growing up to create a poetic and impassioned letter to his son and, indeed to the world, about what it means to be a person of color in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century. My personal belief is that the issue of race and institutionalized racism is the most important issue we as a country face right now. The events of the past two years have focused a bright light on issues that many of us were only dimly aware of. Or, more accurately, that we knew about but didn't want to face. For those who realize that they MUST be faced, no matter how painful we find them, Coates provides a remarkable first step with this compelling, poetic, and sometimes heartbreaking expressionistic book. The inability to see what causes pain, even though it is right in front of us, is a very human defense mechanism. But it is a defense mechanism that does not serve any of us or our country well. Empathy and a desire to understand that which we haven't personally experienced but that we know are pernicious facts of modern Anerican life are key to the changes we must make. As an upper-middle class white woman, I've lived through very few of the events and feelings Coates describes in "Between the World and Me." Which is all the more reason for me to read it and recommend it. This is undoubtedly one of the most important books of the last 50 years. If I could gift a copy to every single American, I would.

Way back at the beginning of time, that is, the 1960’s, Richard Wright and James Baldwin were obligatory reading for me, and I have read much of their work. I still recall a black woman in Atlanta damning me with faint praise: “I think you are a moderate liberal.” Likewise, the lyrics of an old Phil Ochs song, “Love me, I am a liberal” have rolled around in my head: “…and I knew all the old union hymns.” Nowadays, I suppose, Wright and Baldwin ARE “the old union hymns.” America has made so much progress in race relations since the “Amos and Andy Show” was the only authorized black presence on TV, and Jackie Robinson proved that a black man could play in professional sports. Some blacks are now “truffled” in my neighborhood. There is a Black Caucus in Congress, and then there is the matter of the President… Progress. But there is also the stagnation, and backlash. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book concerns the latter. His first name is derived from an old Egyptian word for Nubia, the area to the south of them that was inhabited by blacks. The New York Times review of this book underscored the similarities, and delineated the differences between this work and Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time . Both take the structure of an older black man telling a much younger black man the (racial) “facts of life” in America. In Baldwin’s case, it was to his nephew, in Coates, it is to his son. Coates grew up “on the wrong side of the tracks” in Baltimore. At least, that is what it was called in Baldwin’s time. Perhaps it still is. A tough neighborhood. A war zone, literal, and of sorts. A lot of psychic energy is spent just trying to stay alive… of watching for what is out of place on the “trail” to school, and does that bring danger? Coats quantifies this, in terms of brain time, at 33%. Cuts down on your time for writing the next “killer app.” Another quantification: “At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combine, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies – cotton – was America’s prime export. The richest men in America lived in the Mississippi River Valley, and they made their riches off our stolen bodies.” He provides no basis for the four billion figure… and for those who would dispute it, is it double or half? I recently read and reviewed Ghosts Along The Mississippi: The Magic of the Old Houses of Louisiana, New Revised Edition , with the subtitle that includes “magic”. There was nothing magically about it. Far more than an abstract four billion, those “ghosts” of old mansions quantify what was stolen. His is a staccato writing style; the “takeaways” of a 1000 page book. Concerning schools, quotes worthy of Paul Goodman: “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance…Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them.” He questions the meek acceptance and embrace of the “tear gas” of passive resistance. He admires Malcom X. Coates names 10-15 black men who have been killed by the police, the police that he says are so instrumental in fulfilling America’s will on race relations. Coates went to the black “Mecca,” Howard University, in Washington, DC, and was dazzled by the variety that is encompassed by that word: “blackness.” He finds love on more than one occasion. Prince Jones, a fellow classmate of his at Howard was murdered by the police. He described this killing in detail, and has a heart-breaking visit to his mother, a medical doctor, who had worked her way up from scrubbing white people’s floors in Louisiana. His eulogy for Jones is haunting and beautiful. Accountability? There never is any. “And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of ‘race,’ imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. They typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force on nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.” Scathing, as good as Baldwin ever wrote. Coates seminal work is an update on the much “progress” that has NOT been made. Normally I would give it my special rating for an exceptional work, 6-stars. However, I did have some problems with it. He goes to France, his first trip abroad, and is enthralled… I’ve been there… figuring the 6eme arrondissement is the “center of the universe.” However, he never mentions an essential word for understanding France, “les banlieues,” literally, the suburbs, with such a different connotation than in America. A fellow reviewer has mentioned that he has become more critical after his first visit. And then I would also be critical of his use of the term “Dreamer,” of which there are many, for sure, but are not a monolithic block that seems to mean “non-black.” And he never develops the implications of the fact that the cop who killed Prince Jones was black also. Like “les banlieues,” “Tom,” of an avuncular nature, does not appear in his work either. Still, overall, a very important work, for America today, and for those still singing those “old union hymns.” 5-stars.

One of the best books I've read in ages. Coates can really write, and between impeccable style and his amazing combination of deep emotion with an analytical mind, you can't get much better. I suspect the African-American reader will love it because it will resonate with their experiences; for the rest of us, it really describes the experience and I'd challenge anybody to read it and not come away knowing and understanding more than they did before. That is, if they're open to it; we used it for a book group and one person who read it cover to cover kept spouting all the regular prejudice and "they need to do this" and "they need to do that" kind of talk. So if someone already has their prejudices so firmly in place that they are unwilling to be moved, I can't say; but for the rest of us, for anybody with even a teensy bit of an open mind, this short and very readable volume will open it further. My only caveat/suggestion: It starts sort of slowly, and confusingly. The first sentence, even pages, just didn't make any sense to me (he starts out by talking about his body: " . . . the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body," and that's not at all how the person phrased their question, or at least I gathered so as I continued reading). Even 10 or 12 pages in, I still didn't understand what he meant and I felt it was unnecessarily obtuse. But then it turns out that he spends the entire volume explaining what he means by that, and so by the end of the book I really understood. But I was extremely frustrated at first -- I'm not overly naive, I read a lot of great literature, I do a lot of writing and analysis, and I didn't know what on earth he was talking about! -- but keep reading and you'll find out. And then you'll want to start again from the very beginning, with your new understanding, and read it all over again. Which isn't difficult, because it's really short book with more content per word than most books I've read in my lifetime.

Coates wrote this as a letter to his son, and if you want to understand what white privilege and black fear (particularly if you have a black son) is really all about, then this is the book to read. He shows how completely ingrained this is in American culture, independent of race. Two lines in the book really jumped out at me. One is that race is the child of racism, not the father. So true, so simple, so profound, and so completely opposite of what our culture teaches us. We know now that genetically, skin color is no different than the size of one's nose. It's just an artificial tribal construct (my words). The second is a quote from Saul Bellow, who asked, who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? Meant as a racist quip, the answer to this question comes from another writer, which is of course, that Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus. Bellow has no more, or less, claim on Tolstoy that does a Pygmy bushman (my words). I've thought about the white/black perspective on race, and I have what I call the old white engineer's theory. We engineers like numbers. Let's say we all agree that in the 60's race relations were 80% bad and 20% good. From a white perspective, we focus on what is good, but from a black perspective, we focus on what is bad. And let's say that now in 2016 we see race relations as 60% bad and 40% good. From a white perspective, we see things going from 20% to 40% good, and think, wow, race relations are twice as good as they were when I was a child. It appears to us as amazing progress. But from a black perspective, we would see things as going from 80% bad to 60% bad, because it's the negative aspects of racism that affect us. So now we're looking at only a 25% improvement in the quality of one's life, which seems far, far less impressive. While this book is written as a letter from Coates to his son, this is really less a book for African American males than it is a book for white American males. Like the book we read last year for our book group, The Warmth of Other Suns, this will change your perspective on race and American culture.

Ta Nehisi Coates has written a modern classic. It is about race, but not quite; it is about growing up and raising your own child under the shadow of inter-generational trauma; it is about so much more, I can only urge you to read it. A sample passage: "I have spent much of my studies searching for the right question by which I might fully understand the breach between the world and me. I have not spent my time studying the problem of “race”—“race” itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time to time when some dullard—usually believing himself white—proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all beige and thus the same “race.” But a great number of “black” people already are beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead “races” (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose—the organization of people beneath, and beyond, the umbrella of rights. [...]"

It is a view into another world and culture. When you reside or grow up in cosmopolitan cultures like those of the Arabian Gulf, it is hard to know the kinds of lifelong fears and doubts that many African Americans experience from a young age.

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.

Excelente

A book I finished reading with abated breath. This might be your first hand experience of the 'black world' and their myriad oppresions. The events in the book are narrated with a rare vividity possible only to gifted writers. Its arguments are so compulsive that you will find yourself closing the book and entering a lot of relflection. Read it with an urgency that you can't postpone to tomorrow because it helps you understand the world a lot better and its hidden realities.