Between the World and Me

Coates describes his study of the Civil War. He is struck by the tone of innocence and benevolence with which the Civil War is spoken about in history books, documentaries, and tours of the battlefields. Coates reports on a story in Chicago on the history of segregation in the urban North. He accompanies police officers as they arrest and evict a man in front of his family. The arrested man rants at the police, and Coates notes the familiarity of this response to powerlessness—how the man exaggerates his physical presence “to conceal a fundamental plunder that they could not prevent” (109). Coates meets elders who have made homes for themselves in Chicago, worked three jobs to put their children through high school and college, and become pillars of their communities. Though Coates admires them, he regards them as “survivors,” the ones who successfully endured contemptuous banks, realtors who steered them back toward “ghetto blocks,” and lenders who tried to take advantage of them (110).

Coates takes Samori to meet a mother whose son was killed by a white man for playing his music too loud. The man is convicted not for murdering the boy but for shooting at the boy’s friends as they retreated.