Between the World and Me
A New York Times Best Seller, National Book Award Winner, NAACP Image Award Winner, and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Between the World and Me offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
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Readers say *Between the World and Me* is a powerful, clear-minded memoir that challenges readers to rethink race and identity in America. Reviewers a...
I really enjoyed this book. There is so much truth and passion in what Coates is writing about. I recommend this for high school seniors and beyond.
This book is about the author's experience as a black man in The United States of America. Dear reader, who not a person of color, I recommend this book. The author delivers a powerful message of what is like to live as a black man in the USA. It is not pleasant.
The phrase that succeeded in yanking my head to an oblique angle came just one page into Ta-Nehisi Coates's polemic work.
"Americans who believe that they are white."
It was a flip in perspective that instantly explained so much about my failure to understand "race" in America. It explained why I've always felt so awkward checking the "White" box on demographic surveys. My ancestors came from the desert by way of Eastern Europe and Russia. They endowed me with a broad spectrum of color. We're not white. We've never been white. "White" was a fabrication needed to justify the enslavement of a people. There is no white.
About a page later, Coates writes, "But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming 'the people' has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy." That line twisted my head the rest of the way around.
This book is devastatingly clear minded and courageous. It's the manner of courage that only comes from anger engendered over generations. I wondered, of the thousands who have read his book, how many started off as I did believing they were liberal minded and enlightened only to be mercilessly slapped down and reawakened?
But surely this book isn't written for us -- Americans who think of themselves as white -- but for Coates' son and his generation and the children to follow. As Coates says in the final passages, "They made us a race. We made ourselves a people." The struggle continues with little to point to in the way of progress as rare voices like Coates' make us feel equally ashamed and proud to be human.
"Americans who believe that they are white."
It was a flip in perspective that instantly explained so much about my failure to understand "race" in America. It explained why I've always felt so awkward checking the "White" box on demographic surveys. My ancestors came from the desert by way of Eastern Europe and Russia. They endowed me with a broad spectrum of color. We're not white. We've never been white. "White" was a fabrication needed to justify the enslavement of a people. There is no white.
About a page later, Coates writes, "But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming 'the people' has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy." That line twisted my head the rest of the way around.
This book is devastatingly clear minded and courageous. It's the manner of courage that only comes from anger engendered over generations. I wondered, of the thousands who have read his book, how many started off as I did believing they were liberal minded and enlightened only to be mercilessly slapped down and reawakened?
But surely this book isn't written for us -- Americans who think of themselves as white -- but for Coates' son and his generation and the children to follow. As Coates says in the final passages, "They made us a race. We made ourselves a people." The struggle continues with little to point to in the way of progress as rare voices like Coates' make us feel equally ashamed and proud to be human.
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