Between the World and Me

“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.” 

After the lack of accountability for the murder of Michael Brown, Coates’s son realizes for the first time that his life is vulnerable to the historical racism and violence of the police force. Like Brown, his life could be taken from him at any moment without the law holding those who took it responsible. Though watching his son come to this realization is painful, Coates does not comfort him, believing it wiser for his son to fully understand the reality of racial violence in the United States so that he may better survive.

“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.” 

Coates clarifies that he does not believe the police officers who murder black people are evil; rather, they are merely carrying out the agenda of a legal and social system meant to disadvantage black people.

“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.” 

Coates returns to the central theme of the book, which is the precarity of the black body in America. His expresses his disinterest in intellectualizing and debating race, reducing its effects to the killing of black people, the extermination of black bodies.