Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s nonfiction book Between the World and Me was published 2015. The book takes the form of a long letter to Coates’s son Samori at age 15, and the title borrows from a poem by famed Black author Richard Wright. The text focuses on the psychological and physical trauma of racial violence that haunts generations of Black people, considering themes like The Precarity of the Black Body in the United States, The Danger of the Dream, and The Importance of Remembering the Past.

The book was met with critical acclaim upon publication, becoming a New York Times bestseller and winning the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction, the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in the biography/autobiography genre, and the 2016 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. In addition to Between the World and Me, Coates has authored numerous nonfiction books and articles, as well as several runs of the Marvel comics Black Panther and Captain America. He published his first fiction novel, The Water Dancer, in 2019.

Summary

The book opens with Coates explaining the bodily harm that institutionalized racism—from law to economics to public school systems—causes Black lives. Coates often references his body or his son’s body, emphasizing the corporal harm that results from America’s willful ignorance of its historical past, including slavery, genocide, and Jim Crow-era racism. Coates connects this history to contemporary life, in which Black youth are faced with police brutality as emphasized by the murders of children and young adults like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Renisha McBride.

Coates weaves personal experience into his social commentary. He recalls his son’s reaction to the verdict of Michael Brown’s case. After a five-month trial, the police officer who murdered Brown was charged with no crime. Coates recalls hearing his son cry in his room and choosing not to comfort him.

He recalls his own understanding of the fragility of his body as a Black man while growing up in Baltimore, Maryland. He describes the young men who used fashion and bravado as a shield against this fear of death and the corporal punishment he and many friends received from their parents, which served as a warning shot for the real world.

Witnessing injustice on the street and in school, Coates questions the version of Blackness white America has taught him. He turns to figures like Malcolm X to answer these questions of racism. When he arrives at Howard University in Washington, DC, which Coates lovingly calls “the Mecca,” he sees the complexity of African American and African identity and history. His professors break down the idealized version of Black legacy that he has constructed. He learns from the older poets around him how to write in a way that matches his curiosity about the world. The women Coates falls in love with at Howard expose him to different expressions of Blackness and different expressions of love.

After meeting “the girl from Chicago” (102), Samori is born. Fatherhood deepens Coates’s understanding of his survival; he is keenly aware that his death would have a reverberating effect on his child.

Shortly after Samori is born, Coates’s Howard University acquaintance Prince Carmen Jones, a high-achieving student from an affluent family, is killed by police. After Jones’s death, Coates understands on an even more visceral level the blatant disregard that US institutions have for Black life, regardless of class, accomplishment, or social standing.

Coates’s move to New York City further accentuates the gap he feels between himself and white Americans. He sees the level of entitlement on Harlem’s gentrifying streets. He recalls a white woman pushing four-year-old Samori, imploring him to walk faster. When Coates responds, a white bystander threatens to have him arrested.

These moments remind Coates of America’s foundational white supremacy. He reflects on America’s portrayal of the Civil War as a point of heritage rather than the protection of white people’s right to enslave and exploit Black bodies. He calls this willful ignorance of US history “the Dream.”

Coates ends the book by returning to the Mecca with his wife and son. He explains to Samori the powerful affirmation of community and encourages him not to forget his history, both the good and the bad. He encourages Samori to be aware of the responsibilities and burdens of Blackness—but not to internalize them.