Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me
Author Ta-Nehisi Coates
Country United States
Language English
Subject Biography, American history, race relations[1]
Published July 2015
Publisher Spiegel & Grau
Pages 176[2]
ISBN 978-0-8129-9354-7 [1]

Between the World and Me is a 2015 book written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It is written as a letter to the author's teenaged son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being black in the United States. Coates recapitulates the American history and explains to his son the "racist violence that has been woven into American culture." Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore, detailing the ways in which institutions like the school, the police, and even "the streets" discipline, endanger, and threaten to disembody black men and women. The work takes inspiration from James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time. Unlike Baldwin, Coates sees white supremacy as an indestructible force, one that black Americans will never evade or erase, but will always struggle against.

Novelist Toni Morrison wrote that Coates filled an intellectual lacuna in succession to James Baldwin. Editors of The New York Times and The New Yorker described the book as exceptional. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times felt that Coates overgeneralized at times and did not consistently acknowledge racial progress over the course of centuries. The book won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction[3][4] and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.[5]

Publication

Coates, 2015

Coates was inspired to write Between the World and Me following a 2013 meeting with sitting United States President Barack Obama. Coates, a writer for The Atlantic, had been reading James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time and was determined to make his second meeting with the president less deferential. As he left for Washington, D.C., his wife encouraged him to think like Baldwin and Coates recalled an unofficial, fiery meeting between Baldwin, black activists, and Robert Kennedy in 1963. When it was his turn, Coates fought with Obama over how his policy addressed racial disparities in the universal health care rollout. After the event, Obama and Coates spoke privately about a blog post Coates had written in criticism of the president's call for more personal responsibility among African Americans. Obama thought the criticism was unjust and told Coates not to despair.[2]

As Coates walked to the train station, he thought of how Baldwin did not share Obama's optimism, the same optimism of the civil rights movement that believed in the inevitability of justice. Instead, Coates saw Baldwin as "cold", without "sentiment and melodrama", as he acknowledged that the movement could fail and that requital was not guaranteed. Coates found this idea "freeing" and called Christopher Jackson to ask "why no one wrote like Baldwin anymore". Jackson, the book's editor, proposed that Coates try.[2]

Between the World and Me is Coates's second book, following his 2008 memoir The Beautiful Struggle. Since then, and especially in the 18 months including the Ferguson unrest leading up to his new book's release, Coates somberly believed less in the soul and its aspirational sense of eventual justice. Coates felt that he had become more radicalized.[2] The book's title comes from a poem by Richard Wright,[6] which, although now published in numerous collections, was first published in the July/August 1935 issue of the journal Partisan Review.[7] Despite many changes in Between the World and Me, Coates always planned to end the book with the story of Mabel Jones. The only endorsement Coates sought was that of novelist Toni Morrison, which he received. Between the World and Me was published by Spiegel & Grau in 2015.[2]

Summary

"You must always remember," Coates writes to Samori, "that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body."

“
”

From Between the World and Me as excerpted in New York magazine[2]

Between the World and Me adopts the structure of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. The latter is directed, in part, towards Baldwin's nephew, while the former addresses Coates's 15-year-old son.[2] This letter contemplates the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being black in the United States.[6] Coates recapitulates the American history of violence against black people and the incommensurate policing of black youth.[8] The book's tone is bleak, which is guided by Coates's experiences growing up poor and always in the way of bodily harm. He prioritizes the physical security of African-American bodies over the black, Christian tradition of optimism, "uplift", and eventual justice (i.e., being on God's side). His background, which he describes as "physicality and chaos", puts more emphasis on the daily corporeal concerns of being an African-American. Coates's position is that absent the religious rhetoric of "hope and dreams and faith and progress", only systems of white supremacy remain along with no real evidence that those systems will change.[2] In this way, he disagrees with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s optimism towards integration and Malcolm X's optimism towards nationalism. Coates does not believe there is reason to be optimistic, and does not expect the association between America and white supremacy to ever change. He feels that even the death of white supremacy would just lead to "a new peon class".[2]

Coates gives an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth "always on guard" in Baltimore and the fear he felt towards both the police and the streets—both of which threatened physical harm. He also feared the rules of code-switching to meet the clashing social norms of the streets, the authorities, and the professional world. To this experience, he compares neat suburban life. Coates calls this life "the Dream" in that it is an exclusionary fantasy for white people enabled by and largely ignorant of their history of privilege and suppression. To become conscious of their gains from slavery, segregation, and voter suppression would shatter that Dream.[6] The book ends with a story about Mabel Jones, the daughter of a sharecropper who worked and rose in social class to give her children comfortable lives with private schools and European trips. Her son, Coates' college friend Prince Carmen Jones Jr., was mistakenly tracked and killed by a policeman. Coates uses his story to argue that race-related tragedy affects black people of means as well.[2][9][10]

Reception

After reading Between the World and Me, novelist Toni Morrison wrote that Coates fills "the intellectual void" left by James Baldwin's death 28 years prior.[2] A. O. Scott of The New York Times said the book is "essential, like water or air".[2] David Remnick of The New Yorker described it as "extraordinary".[2][8]

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote that Between the World and Me functioned as a sequel to Coates's 2008 memoir, which displayed Coates's early talents as an emotional and lyrical writer. Coates's use of "the Dream" (in reference to paradisal suburban life) confused her, and she thought Coates stretched beyond what is safely generalizable. In particular, she felt that his comment on the 9/11 first responders was phrased so as to be easily misread. Kakutani felt that Coates did not consistently acknowledge the racial progress that has been made over the course of centuries. Some parts read like the author's internal debate.[6] Benjamin Wallace-Wells of New York said that a sense of fear for one's children propels the book, and Coates's atheism gives the book a sense of urgency.[2]

On November 18, 2015, it was announced that Coates had won the National Book Award for Between the World and Me.[11] NPR's Colin Dwyer had considered it the favorite to win the prize, given the book's reception.[3]

The book topped the New York Times Best Seller list for the week of January 24, 2016.[12]

The book was selected by Washington University in St. Louis as the book for all first year students must read and discuss in the fall 2016 semester.[13]

Tom Eley and David Walsh, writing on the World Socialist Web Site, criticized Coates's book as narrow, parochial, nationalist, and dystopian. They said that the book was not a protest of the reality of the vast majority of Americans, as it left out discussion of key social conditions such as poverty.[14]

Editions and translations

References

  1. 1 2 "Between the World and Me". Bowker Books in Print. Retrieved July 13, 2015. (Subscription required.)
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Wallace-Wells, Benjamin (July 13, 2015). "The Hard Truths of Ta-Nehisi Coates". New York. Archived from the original on July 13, 2015. Retrieved July 13, 2015.
  3. 1 2 Dwyer, Colin (October 14, 2015). "Finalists Unveiled For This Year's National Book Awards". NPR. Retrieved October 14, 2015.
  4. ↑ Alter, Alexandra (19 November 2015). "Ta-Nehisi Coates Wins National Book Award". The New York Times. Retrieved 19 November 2015.
  5. ↑ "Finalist: Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Spiegel & Grau)". pulitzer.org. Retrieved 19 April 2016.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Kakutani, Michiko (July 9, 2015). "Review: In 'Between the World and Me,' Ta-Nehisi Coates Delivers a Searing Dispatch to His Son". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 13, 2015. Retrieved July 13, 2015.
  7. ↑ Butler, Robert, ed. The Richard Wright Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 2008. p. 38.
  8. 1 2 Remnick, David (June 19, 2015). "Charleston and the Age of Obama". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on July 13, 2015. Retrieved July 13, 2015.
  9. ↑ Norris, Michele (10 July 2015). "Ta-Nehisi Coates Looks At The Physical Toll Of Being Black In America". Morning Edition. NPR. Retrieved 16 August 2015.
  10. ↑ Gross, Terry (13 July 2015). "Ta-Nehisi Coates On Police Brutality, The Confederate Flag And Forgiveness". Fresh Air. NPR. Retrieved 16 August 2015.
  11. ↑ Alter, Alexandra (November 18, 2015). "Ta-Nehisi Coates Wins National Book Award". The New York Times.
  12. ↑ Adams, Tim (September 20, 2015). "How Ta-Nehisi Coates's letter to his son about being black in America became a bestseller". The Guardian.
  13. ↑ First Year Reading Program selects ‘Between the World and Me’ May 9, 2015
  14. ↑ Walsh, David (15 October 2016). "Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates: The dystopian vision of racial politics". World Socialist Web Site.

External links

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