Book Review: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.” 
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

*Warning: one of the quotes mentioned in this piece contains offensive language

In Between the World and Me, author Ta-Nehisi Coates uses his personal experiences to outline his definition of what it means to be black in America and to impart that definition to his teenage son.

Coates writes unsparingly about the greed, racism and ugliness that lies at the heart of the American Dream, and even personifies the Dream repeatedly throughout the text. The Dream, he says is "cookouts, block associations and driveways...treehouses and the Cub Scouts"; it's the anesthetizing fantasy we all long to escape to but which doesn't match the real world. The real world, says Coates, is a savage one; the American Dream, a myth that will break any body (and especially any black body) to perpetuate itself.

While unflinching in his assessment of the cost of the Dream to black America in particular, Coates is empathetic and unafraid of turning his searing questions on himself. For example, his acquaintance in college with a gay household forces him to confront his comfort with the word "faggot." "Maybe I would take another human's body to confirm myself in a community," he ruminates. "Perhaps I already had. Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, or of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe."

Between the World and Me reminds me of the wisdom books of the Bible; it is full of poetic truths, genuine questions, and cautious advice. Also, like much of the Bible's wisdom, it is written in the form of a letter from a father to a son. 

The book would be a thoughtful exploration of race in America without Coates having any skin in the game, but it is Coates's vulnerability as he addresses his son that gives the book its searing, gut-punch honesty. Coates discusses "the week [his son] learned that the killers of Michael Brown would go free," saying he didn't expect an indictment. "But," he continues heartbreakingly, "you were young and still believed." 

I absolutely recommend this book to anyone who wants to wake up from an American Dream which "thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers" and is "the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing."