Book and Audiobook Review: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Audiobook Publisher: Random House Audio
Release Date: July 14, 2015
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Publisher’s Description:
“This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. 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
Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote Between the World and Me as a letter to his fifteen year-old son. He is writing to tell his son about his personal experience as a black man in America today. His son is starting to get to a point in his life where he is confused and hurt by the way black people are treated.
Coates starts out by explaining that race is a social construct. He refers to black people as people with a black body and white people as people who need to believe they are white. I thought the way he laid it out was one of the best explanations of why humans are divided into races that I’ve heard. People who believe they are white divided people into different races because they wanted, needed to have power over other groups of people and skin color was the easiest way to make that division.
Coates attended Howard University, which he refers to as the Mecca. He talks about his friend Prince Jones, who even though he was a Howard student and raised in an affluent home, could not escape being the victim of violence because of his black body. He talks about how black people know from an early age that they have to work twice as hard and expect half as much.
This book isn’t meant lay a guilt trip on white people. I think it’s meant to give them insight into the black experience. In fact, people of all races can learn something from this book. I first read this book in print and then went back and listened to the whole thing on audiobook. I gained an even deeper understanding of what Coates is trying to impart on the second pass. Coates narrates the audiobook himself and the way he reads it makes it sound like poetry.
It’s hard for me to put into words the impact this book had on me. And I’m a person who has read many books on race and consider myself fairly educated on the subject. I agree with Toni Morrison, Between the World and Me should be required reading for everyone.
