Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book is a monumental work about being black in America that every American urgently needs to read.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me checks
in at a trim 152 pages but lands like a major work, a book destined to
remain on store shelves, bedside tables, and high school and college
syllabi long after its author or any of us have left this Earth. In
recent years, Coates has staked his claim as one of the premier American
essayists of his generation, a prize-winning correspondent for the Atlantic whose 2014 cover story “The Case for Reparations” was the most widely discussed piece of American magazine writing in recent memory.
Between the World and Me was
originally slated for an October release but was recently bumped up to
July 14 in the wake of last month’s white supremacist terror attack in
Charleston. The timeliness is grim, but a book like this will always be
timely—not merely because its concerns are shamefully perennial, but
because it is a work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty. Between the World and Me unfolds
as a six-chapter letter from Coates to his 15-year-old son Samori,
prompted by his son’s stunned and heartbroken reaction to last
November’s announcement that no charges would be brought against
Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the killing of unarmed teenager
Michael Brown. The framing device is an explicit homage to James
Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time,
a similarly compact volume published in 1963 that begins with a
prefatory essay titled “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One
Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation.”
Between the World and Me is a love letter written in a moral emergency.
Baldwin’s
“Letter” runs just a few pages and is a work of ferocious urgency,
words of anguished wisdom imparted from an elder (“I have begun this
letter five times and torn it up five times,” he writes in the opening
line). Between the World and Me, in contrast, is not so much a
work of counsel as a lovingly, painstakingly crafted inheritance, a
reflection on fatherhood that often feels like a spiritual sequel to
Coates’ first book, The Beautiful Struggle, a memoir of his childhood in Baltimore that focused heavily on his own father. If The Beautiful Struggle was Coates explaining his father to himself, Between the World and Me is Coates explaining himself to his son, and, in doing so, explaining as best he can what it means to be black in America.
Much
of this happens through snapshots of Coates’ life, both prior to
fatherhood and during it. Some of these moments are immense and tragic,
such as the murder of Coates’ college friend Prince Jones
at the hands of police, an event that, Coates writes, “took me from
fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely
leave me on fire for the rest of my days.” Others are more quotidian if
still wrenching, such as a brief and heated confrontation with a
middle-aged white woman who shoves a 4-year-old Samori at a movie
theater. Still others are warm and joyful: every description of Samori’s
mother, for instance, or a fantastic meal shared with a new friend on
Coates’ first trip to Paris.
One
of the formative moments of growing up is the realization that our
parents are human, that raising us isn’t a predetermined rubric of
orders and obligations but rather an ongoing and confusing process on
their end as well, full of actions and decisions that are racked by fear
and doubt and love. Between the World and Me makes this
revelation public, and spectacularly so (hopefully Samori Coates is less
easily mortified by his parents than most 15-year-olds). And yet Between the World and Me is
not really a book about Samori Coates, or even Ta-Nehisi Coates, but
rather everything around them, the “world” of the book’s title. “Black
people love their children with a kind of obsession,” writes Coates to
his son. “You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we
would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the
streets that America made.”
Between the World and Me is
a love letter written in a moral emergency, one that Coates exposes
with the precision of an autopsy and the force of an exorcism. Taken as a
whole the book is Coates’ attempt to sever America’s ongoing romance
with its own unexamined platitudes of innocence and equality, a romance
that, in the writer’s telling, “persists by warring with the known
world.” In Between the World and Me this collective delusion is
known as “The Dream.” The Dream, writes Coates, “is perfect houses with
nice lawns. … The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like
strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the
Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has
never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding
made from our bodies.” The Dream is wrought from a legacy of white
supremacy so entrenched it nearly conceals itself, and Coates’ book is a
call to awakening. As such, it joins a tradition that stretches back at
least as far as Frederick Douglass and runs up through Barack Obama’s
Charleston eulogy just two weeks ago. The richness of this tradition is a
formidable thing, and its duration and continuing urgency do not speak
well of this country.
Coates
is frequently lauded as one of America’s most important writers on the
subject of race today, but this in fact undersells him: Coates is one of
America’s most important writers on the subject of America today. This
distinction might sound glib but is worth making, not least of all
because Coates repeatedly informs us that he isn’t much interested in
“race” as a subject of reflection in itself. “Race is the child of
racism, not the father,” he writes—while race is a fiction of power,
racism is power itself, and very real.
It’s also worth making this distinction because for many white Americans the word race simply translates to not us,
an invitation to defensive disavowal and aggrievement. Consider the
amount of times that Barack Obama has been accused of “injecting race
into the conversation” or “playing the race card” simply by making
reference to his own body, as he did in the aftermath of the killing of
Trayvon Martin. Or the inability of politicians and talk show hosts to
describe the actions of Dylann Roof for what they were, a terrorist act
committed on the imagined behalf of people who look like him. Or the way
a statement like “black lives matter” becomes shouted over with “all
lives matter,” a mass of people feeling insufficiently loved by people
they fear. To paraphrase an essay Coates wrote for Slate in 2008, many white Americans now treat “racism” like it’s a racial slur directed at them.
Between the World and Me is, in important ways, a book written toward white Americans, and I say this as one of them. White Americans may need to read this book more urgently and carefully than anyone, and their own sons and daughters need to read it as well. This is not to say this is a book about white people, but rather that it is a terrible mistake for anyone to assume that this is just a book about nonwhite people. In the broadest terms Between the World and Me is about the cautious, tortured, but finally optimistic belief that something beyond these categories persists. Implicit in this book’s existence is a conviction that people are fundamentally reachable, perhaps not all of them but enough, that recognition and empathy are within grasp, that words and language are capable of changing people, even if—especially if—those words are not ones people prefer to hear. Coates has written a book about immense and ongoing failures of humanity that is a triumph of humanism in itself, a book that renders the injuries of racism brutally near and real.
Ta-Nehisi Coates.
The
“open letter” is the most overused mode of contemporary writing, a
one-sided conversation with someone famous in which the performative
bypass of audience creates an aloof sort of anti-intimacy. The open
letter form of Between the World and Me, on the other hand, is
entirely in the service of intimacy, a window into parental love, the
first and most fundamental intimacy all of us encounter.
Throughout
the book Coates employs similar concepts so primal as to be
indisputable. Among the most powerful of these is the human body, which
Coates mentions relentlessly. He invokes the body as the fundamental
unit of human existence and also explores the ways that white and
nonwhite bodies have functioned in the building of America. This starts
with the book’s opening sentence: “Last Sunday the host of a popular
news show asked me what it meant to lose my body,” as Coates recalls a
TV anchor’s skepticism to his claim that America was “built on looting
and violence.”
As
a descendant of slaves, Coates’ sheer presence on her show would seem
to be evidence of this. Recounting his adolescence, Coates describes his
awareness that “Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being
too violent could cost me my body.” Still later he writes of our
“sprawling prison system, which has turned the warehousing of black
bodies into a jobs program for Dreamers and lucrative investment for
Dreamers.” “Black life is cheap,” Coates grimly observes, “but in
America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.”
Throughout his book Coates writes about the theft of physical bodies,
from slavery up through the prison-industrial complex, and of bodily
agency itself, the lack of safety perversely wrought by constant
surveillance, when those sworn to protect you imagine themselves as
protecting other people from you.
Time
functions similarly. At one point, reminiscing on his son’s
toddlerhood, Coates ruminates on the longstanding parenting adage that
black children must be “twice as good to get half as much.” “It seemed
to me that our own rules redoubled plunder,” writes Coates.
It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of being drafted into the black race was the inescapable robbery of time, because the moments we spent readying the mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could not be recovered. The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in the moments we lose. It is the last bottle of wine that you have just uncorked but do not have time to drink. It is the second kiss that you do not have time to share, before she walks out of your life. It is the raft of second chances for them, and twenty-three-hour days for us.
This
is a beautiful passage whose beauty works in service of its political
heft, and vice versa, as images of romance are converted into objects of
loss and siege. To be white and live in the Dream is to live in
blissful absence of these fears, and yet Coates’ aim isn’t simply to
unsettle this absence, but to force his readership into confrontation
with presence, with empathy for those whom the Dream denies.
Between the World and Me isn’t
a perfect book, and given Coates’ prominence and a general tendency in
contemporary culture to take shots at whoever’s reaping acclaim at a
given moment, there will surely be critiques, and some will have merit.
For starters, while Coates has been quick to credit feminist theory with
inspiring his interest in the body, this is an inescapably male-centric
text—let’s hope we might soon see a book of similar profile and
prestige published with an eye toward daughters (or even nieces; The Fire Next Time isn’t
passing any Bechdel Tests either). Furthermore, given the extent to
which the menaces of “illegal immigrants” and “Islamic terrorists” have
been used to stoke the fires of white fear in the 21st-century U.S., Coates’ analysis of the contemporary American racial imagination may strike some as overly black-and-white.
Each
month, the Slate Book Review picks a great new comic and asks its
cartoonist to illustrate the articles in that issue. From touching
all-ages memoirs to artful short stories to sex-positive buddy comedies,
the comics featured in the Slate Book Review offer a perfect pocket
history of the past few years in graphic literature. Read 'em all!
But Between the World and Me isn’t
a work of scholarship, or theory, or journalism, even if it bears the
influence of all these things in the way great nonfiction should. The book will
certainly continue the comparisons between Coates and Baldwin, but the
differences between the two are instructive as well. The Fire Next Time is
a fiercely present-minded book that prefigures what would come to be
known as the New Journalism: references to contemporary politics abound,
and Baldwin’s meeting with Elijah Muhammad is recounted in vivid,
reportorial detail. History is largely left in the background, and
there’s little mention of other writers, living or dead. By its end the
book is basically a sermon, as the title suggests, Baldwin’s voice
exquisite and thunderous, equal parts preacher and angry god.
Coates
doesn’t really write like this (no one does). Coates is more teacher
than preacher, a polymath whose breadth of knowledge on matters ranging
from literature to pop culture to French philosophy to the Civil War
bleeds through every page of his book, distilled into profound moments
of discovery, immensely erudite but never showy. In this respect Between the World and Me bears the mark of a more recent literary elder, Toni Morrison, whose slim volume Playing In The Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination is
one of the most brilliant explorations of racial thought and American
writing ever published. (For what it’s worth Morrison contributes a
blurb to Between the World and Me in which she, too, likens
Coates to Baldwin.) Morrison is of course a renowned teacher herself,
and as any high school or college literature instructor will tell you,
few books on Earth teach as well as hers.
