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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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Community Reviews
It is a true talent to be able to write a piece of prose that is so assertively stark and bleak yet raw and honest and not come across as anything but real. So honestly real. The author doesn't go for any shock factor nor other cheap twists to try and persuade the reader if his point of view but just pure unemotionally heated story telling. I was hoping the book would end up with a bit of guiding light to the future, but that would not be true to the realism of this open letter of father to his race culture awakening son. I can see (and very much agree) why this book should be a vital read to all BLM and Black History Month reading lists.
Great book for anyone wanting to learn about the experience of parenting black children and raising them in a racialised society. 10/10 would recommend!
Beautiful, painful, essential; this was a life changing book that dug into my very soul and has never let go.
I held off on writing a review of this book for a few days after I finished it so it could really sink in and I could organize my thoughts a little more about this book. This book was intense reading for me in a good way, much like Ava DuVernay's stunning documentary 13th was the good kind of intense. It's the kind of intense that opens your eyes and squeezes your heart and sloshes your brain a little inside its comfortable little living space.
This book was important to me because it illustrated so much about the lived black experience. It also illustrated so much about my own privilege. Let's be real -- I'm a relatively young, middle class white woman. I might be a woman, but that's really where my struggle ends. I see people like me, telling my stories, in movies, books, and television, I can get quick help at a store, and I don't fear the police. All of these are due to my privilege. And, yes, I understood in a intellectual sense that even if they are successful, black people usually have significantly less privilege than I because of the history of racism and systemic injustice that continues to pervade our country and its institutions today.
But it's different to hear about it from a source that has lived both the experience of a young black man in a tough neighborhood and then "escaped" it and has the ability to look back and analyze his own experiences. Coates often brought up the idea of bodily autonomy, and that one really struck home for me. He put a name to the feelings of these black people who feel threatened by the police, by random white folks on the street, by other black people in their neighborhood. He pointed out so many examples of instances in which the way to punish black people was to take their bodies away from them, and it just opened a whole new door of making sense to me.
There were also lots of little gems. His discussion of the Civil War also really hit home for me. I know so. Many. White. People. who basically revere the Civil War (and, to a lesser extent, WWII... you know, the people who say Hitler was an awful person but he was still really good at what he did?). These people will learn all about the battles, the types of rifles, the generals and majors and colonels, the stories of the soldiers and the prisons, etc. But I feel like Coates is absolutely right when he says that these types of people are selectively ignoring the very reason for the Civil War: slavery. And in ignoring it, they are also choosing to ignore the problems that arose from it that are still around today. So many more people are wildly interested in the Civil War than Reconstruction, but every time I've taught American history, whether through the lens of black history like I do each February or in the grand scheme of our country, Reconstruction to me always stands out as the most important time period. The more research into it I do, the more I can directly see how its events and policies shape our world today. Today. We cannot take black people out of the equation of our country and we need to recognize what has been done to them in the past and what is still happening to them and we need to take more responsibility for that. He said that if you asked any rando white person if they were a racist, they'd say no. But they'd still cross the street to avoid a black person. They'd still move their purse closer to them if they saw a big black man nearby. These are racist things that, while perhaps unconscious, are unjust and unfair to black people and are affecting the way they live their lives.
Recently, a peer of mine expressed concern about educators teaching racism and issues surrounding racial tension. In this person's mind, slavery ended a long time ago and if we just let it be, things would be a whole lot better. It's easy to get sucked into that narrative, especially if you're not actively examining things you feel aren't about you and your world. It's easy to assume that we can just let bygones be bygones and that doing so will smooth over whatever problems we may have. But to ignore the history, to ignore how things got shaped, is to ignore how things are. This book powerfully illustrated to me that I know nothing about this topic, genuinely, and that we've got big, big problems in this country. I don't really know how to fix them, but I know pretending they're not there isn't the answer. This book makes it impossible to pretend they're not there.
The last thing that was really great about this book was that it pointed out how little reading I really have done on this topic. I read Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin ages ago (but I soooo didn't get it), and I've read a few books here and there in the YA category about black people (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; Bud, not Buddy; Color Me Dark; The Watsons Go to Birmingham, etc.). But I haven't read any Toni Morrison. I haven't read any Zora Neale Hurston. I haven't read much Langston Hughes. I haven't read bell hooks. I haven't read so, so much. I need need need need to read more. If you have books that you would recommend that would add to my education, throw them my way. It'll probably take me years to get through them all, but who doesn't like reading for years?
Go read this book. It's important. Go now.
This book was important to me because it illustrated so much about the lived black experience. It also illustrated so much about my own privilege. Let's be real -- I'm a relatively young, middle class white woman. I might be a woman, but that's really where my struggle ends. I see people like me, telling my stories, in movies, books, and television, I can get quick help at a store, and I don't fear the police. All of these are due to my privilege. And, yes, I understood in a intellectual sense that even if they are successful, black people usually have significantly less privilege than I because of the history of racism and systemic injustice that continues to pervade our country and its institutions today.
But it's different to hear about it from a source that has lived both the experience of a young black man in a tough neighborhood and then "escaped" it and has the ability to look back and analyze his own experiences. Coates often brought up the idea of bodily autonomy, and that one really struck home for me. He put a name to the feelings of these black people who feel threatened by the police, by random white folks on the street, by other black people in their neighborhood. He pointed out so many examples of instances in which the way to punish black people was to take their bodies away from them, and it just opened a whole new door of making sense to me.
There were also lots of little gems. His discussion of the Civil War also really hit home for me. I know so. Many. White. People. who basically revere the Civil War (and, to a lesser extent, WWII... you know, the people who say Hitler was an awful person but he was still really good at what he did?). These people will learn all about the battles, the types of rifles, the generals and majors and colonels, the stories of the soldiers and the prisons, etc. But I feel like Coates is absolutely right when he says that these types of people are selectively ignoring the very reason for the Civil War: slavery. And in ignoring it, they are also choosing to ignore the problems that arose from it that are still around today. So many more people are wildly interested in the Civil War than Reconstruction, but every time I've taught American history, whether through the lens of black history like I do each February or in the grand scheme of our country, Reconstruction to me always stands out as the most important time period. The more research into it I do, the more I can directly see how its events and policies shape our world today. Today. We cannot take black people out of the equation of our country and we need to recognize what has been done to them in the past and what is still happening to them and we need to take more responsibility for that. He said that if you asked any rando white person if they were a racist, they'd say no. But they'd still cross the street to avoid a black person. They'd still move their purse closer to them if they saw a big black man nearby. These are racist things that, while perhaps unconscious, are unjust and unfair to black people and are affecting the way they live their lives.
Recently, a peer of mine expressed concern about educators teaching racism and issues surrounding racial tension. In this person's mind, slavery ended a long time ago and if we just let it be, things would be a whole lot better. It's easy to get sucked into that narrative, especially if you're not actively examining things you feel aren't about you and your world. It's easy to assume that we can just let bygones be bygones and that doing so will smooth over whatever problems we may have. But to ignore the history, to ignore how things got shaped, is to ignore how things are. This book powerfully illustrated to me that I know nothing about this topic, genuinely, and that we've got big, big problems in this country. I don't really know how to fix them, but I know pretending they're not there isn't the answer. This book makes it impossible to pretend they're not there.
The last thing that was really great about this book was that it pointed out how little reading I really have done on this topic. I read Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin ages ago (but I soooo didn't get it), and I've read a few books here and there in the YA category about black people (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; Bud, not Buddy; Color Me Dark; The Watsons Go to Birmingham, etc.). But I haven't read any Toni Morrison. I haven't read any Zora Neale Hurston. I haven't read much Langston Hughes. I haven't read bell hooks. I haven't read so, so much. I need need need need to read more. If you have books that you would recommend that would add to my education, throw them my way. It'll probably take me years to get through them all, but who doesn't like reading for years?
Go read this book. It's important. Go now.
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