Between the World and Me

I'm white, male, and have very little understanding or appreciation for black culture. My parents and siblings all watched Roots when I was about 8 years old. I encountered some black sailors when I was in the U.S. Navy - in fact, I had a roommate for six months or so that was a black male, but we maybe spoke a hundred words during that time. This book came recommended by a quasi-stranger, not for it's content but for its structure: letters from a father to a son. I'd mentioned that I was interested in writing that sort of book, and this was a resulting recommendation. I read a few reviews before buying it. Not the sort of book I'd otherwise pick up. After ordering it, I heard the author on NPR - without knowing it was the author of the book, mind you - and I thought "wow, this guy is really interesting, provocative, well-spoken, intellectually sound, and speaks from a world that I can only see from afar." So when the show host said his name, I knew I had to pick up the book and read it soon. I had that opportunity within days, on a flight to Atlanta, my first visit there in maybe fifteen years. I got through about 110 pages on the flight and it was perfect timing. Atlanta is a sea of black compared to most everywhere I've lived. Instantly, I could try and appreciate my surroundings in way that I'd never been able to before. Did I feel "white guilt"? Sure. I do. I've seen racism my whole life, especially toward black. This book, however, did much more than rekindle strong feelings of being a winner of Powerball proportions in the life lottery. It challenged me so fundamentally and starkly in a way that I have never been challenged, reading a book, in my life. At times I felt compelled to put the book down, that it was just conjuring up too much weight of history that I wanted to put back out of sight. But I kept going. Finishing it, I felt, like apparently many others do, that this should be required reading for every American. Even those outside of the USA will benefit from it, as it will certainly illuminate the tension and schizophrenia and contradictions and rewritten history of our country. I hope Mr. Coates continues writing until he draws his final breath.

great book delivered quickly (like two days after ordered), in perfect condition. it’s small but perfect purse/backpack sized doesn’t take up much room, also a good read

I have concluded that all books fall into three large categories: 1) books I like, 2) books that are good, and 3) books that are important. Not all books I like are important. Not all good books I like. Not all important books are necessarily good. Coates’ work, however, lives in the uncommon intersection of these groupings. Clearly, as a winner of the National Book Award, it is important…Coates is perhaps THE leading voice in the contemporary discussion of race in America. Furthermore, the book is very good. Coates writes with uncommon power and clarity. I felt myself drawn into his stories of growing up black in West Baltimore, an experience which is complete foreign to a white kid from rural Nebraska, but Coates succeeded in making that reality come alive for me. And, finally, at the end of the day, I have to say I liked the book. There’s an honesty here that is difficulty to match (and impossible to fake). Whatever else may be said of the book, it is clear that Coates is telling you what he really thinks; those who would accuse him of simply touting a “party line” haven’t read him well, I would say. Having said all that, there are aspects of the book that bothered me and, at the risk of sounding as if I’m exercising “white privilege,” there were arguments that were less-than-convincing. If I read Coates correctly, he treats the “American Dream” as the classical form of “white privilege.” Though that is not really made all that clear; the book would have benefited from greater clarity on that point. Of course, this is not a book addressed to “white” folk; it is a series of letters addressed to his son. There’s probably no need in that context to define “white privilege” when it is a shared reality. Coates’ critique of the education system also fell a bit flat. To be fair, Coates admits that he “resents” the schools more than the other challenges of growing up in the inner city. Though attending Howard University was clearly one of his most formative experiences), education—especially elementary education—is just another form of “shackling” (his image) black bodies. In a book so incredibly well-written, the point seems a little disingenuous. Nearly every page reveals how Coates’ intelligence and education has served to liberate his thinking, allowing him to broach the nagging questions of racism and white privilege from entirely new angles. Finally, and most concerning to me as a Christian theologian, is Coates’ outright rejection of religion and spirituality. He says early on (just after his tirade against education): “I could not retreat, as did so many, into the church and its mysteries. My parents rejected all dogmas. We spurned the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be white. We would not stand for their anthems. We would not kneel before their God. And so I had no sense that any just God was on my side.” He heartbreakingly concludes (reversing the words of King): “My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos and then concluded in a box.” These naturalistic presumptions permeate the work to the point that, if one disagrees with them, it becomes quite obvious that one must find an entirely different approach to the issues than the approach Coates espouses here. Though he fails to recognize it, Coates has precluded all grounds for hope and lost all sense of the future. There simply is the physical present. His advice to his son is reduced to survival tips. The sense that the world can be changed—even bettered—is extraordinarily thin, when it is present at all. Even as I write this, I wonder again why it is that I even liked this book, given that I disagree with Coates at the most fundamental level about the nature of human reality. I believe there are a couple interconnected reasons. First, there are some incredibly tender, moving moments in Coates’ addresses to his son. Though Coates has a formidable mind, it is clear that he is writing here from his heart. And even when his arguments do not convince, his love for his son still sways the heart. Secondly, Coates is incredibly honest; there’s a “calling it like I see it” quality here that is refreshing. He’s not concerned about “convincing” anyone he’s right (perhaps because he thinks white folk are too ensnared in the system of “white privilege” to ever find their way out); he simply lays out what he’s seen in his time in America for others to consider…and let the chips fall where they may. As I read, I could imagine several good friends of mine reading the same passage and throwing the book across the room in disgust. But I would still encourage them to read it, to consider what is said, to try for a few moments to inhabit this perspective on the world. Not because I think Coates has “the” answer to racial injustice in America but because he has moved the conversation along. Because of Coates, we can carry forward a more honest discussion about race in America, with the core issues more clearly defined. For that reason alone, this is a book everyone should like.

I’ve put off writing this review for a while. I find, as a straight, white, middle-class dude, conversations about race feel thorny. As I walk along this journey toward racial justice, however, I’m learning to embrace my feelings of discomfort and to not hesitate to speak up. I won’t let my sweaty palms stop me from pecking out notes about what I’m learning. Stumbling through a conversation about race is one of the best ways to learn sensitivity and empathy. Additionally, I was encouraged by the vulnerability of the author to describe his own failings and his progress as he learned about the role that race plays in this country. Sometimes I think reckoning with the complexities of race is a uniquely white problem for which I do not have any good answers. I’m encouraged to know that people of color walk this path of dawning understanding, horror, and aching for change. This insight may be remedial. In fact, I’m sure most of mine are. But I take pride in these tiny ignorances dispelled and in these small steps toward justice and equality. I know that I too can walk this bumpy path forward keeping an open heart and an eye toward my own missteps. Beyond the author’s honesty in his growing racial understanding, the book is poignant, insightful, and beautifully written. I particularly appreciated the author’s emphasis of what is really at stake when we talk about racial injustice: black lives (or, as Coates puts it in relating to the African American’s ongoing fight to escape from the historical chains of slavery woven into our society, the “black body”). He places preservation of the black body as the highest priority. This is no political point. It’s about ending pointless death based on nothing other than skin color. There is no abstraction here. The black body is what is at stake because the black body is what is most grievously endangered by racism and social injustice. Coates writes, “All our phrasing--race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy--serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body” (10). Coates’ focus on the real-world realities rather than intentions drives home the pervasive presence of racial oppression built into our modern world. Another important point is the power of forgetting. Denial and forgetting are key in upholding unequal power structures. We can advocate for equal treatment while forgetting that our ancestors (and even our younger selves) have already rigged the system in our favor. It’s a point I consider especially trenchant as I watch protests slowly waning across the country. Will we remember George Floyd in a year? Will we remember the gut-punch of black bodies destroyed needlessly on the streets? Or will we allow it to fade with time? We must, if we’re serious about our commitment to equality, remember. Remember every galling episode of racial injustice you can, keep it at the forefront of your mind, let your memory guide your actions toward change. I’m fumbling and bumbling to try to articulate points that Coates draws beautifully and with deep empathy. He often writes in the second person as a letter to his son to prepare him for the world: “You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold” (71). Coates’ story helped me to realize how very different my upbringing was because of my whiteness and social class. He expresses thoughts that I never had to consider because of the insulated childhood I enjoyed. For example, he writes, “When our elders present school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing” (26). Again, “My father beat me for letting another boy steal from me. Two years later, he beat me for threatening my ninth-grade teacher. Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out” (28). And, “All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to ‘be twice as good,’ which is to say ‘accept half as much” (91). Coates weaves history, personal experience, and informed insight beautifully. His story is honest and visceral and convicting and horrifying and encouraging. This is an important book that ought to be read with an open heart willing to listen and believe. A

I could not put it down. I thought it would probably take me weeks of bringing this book along with me for my solo meals out, which is how I do much of my reading. I'd get through a bit here, chew on it, bite off a bit more, etc. Instead, I read it from beginning to end in one sitting, staying up long past my bedtime because I prefered reading it to sleeping. I began the book as my accompaniment for a solo meal out, that meal ran into more than two hours, then I brought it home and continued to read it until I was surprised and saddened by the last page. This is at once a beautiful, touching, moving and profoundly insightful book. It answered, in one swiftly deft sweep of elegant prose, questions about racial identity in America that have puzzled me since I realized that I was "white" and there were other people, mostly distinguished by skin color and economic class, who were "colored." I would guess I was around four or five years old when I first wondered why white and colored people were so angry with each other. It was 1964. This book is written, earnestly and sincerely, as a letter to his son. There is no artifice in this. It is a letter from a black father frightened for his black son, who wants him to understand his situation and be able to discern lies from truth as he deals with it. He almost too-dryly lays out the dangerous situations over which his son will have no control other than over his own actions and mental repose, explaining each with simple equations of self-interest, power and brutality. He then details his own struggle and evolution with all this, honestly unearthing his own now-abandoned limited views of the world, some left on the streets of Paris and some left on the boulevards of a now-gentrifying Harlem, now strolled by white women with strollers, the very neighborhood in which I live today and read this remarkable book. He describes white people as "people who believe themselves to be 'white.'" This distinction is the central revelation of this book for me as a man of caucasian and European descent. I was primed and readied for this view because I've never felt my "white" identity was something real. I'm a little Northern European on my mother's side, a little Southern European on my father's. I've had my DNA sequenced, so I know that my father's ancestors emigrated from Northern Africa to Southern Europe fifty-thousand years ago, about twenty-thousand years before my mother's ancestors came out of the Caucus mountains and moved to Northern Europe. I have more in common genetically with people in the Basque region of Spain than any other currently identifiable region, but my father's family regards it's European roots as being in Alsace, we have record of a DeWald as a tax collector in the region in the eleventh century. However, the name DeWald has it's richest history in South Africa, at least for the last couple of centuries, and in German, it means "of the woods." So, WTF am I? A German/English/Basque/Alsatian/Afrikaner? I'm all those things, but according to the US culture, I'm "white" along with my friends whose ancestors followed an entirely different path. We share a skin color and assumedly "not one drop" of the adulterating "colored" blood. That's what makes us white, and it is the only thing that makes us white. We believe we are and so does everyone around us. This is the point that Mr Coates makes so eloquently. "White" isn't a race, as such, it's an identity, and the degree to which one possesses the identity (in their view and in the view of others) determines which side of the racial dividing (white vs. non-white) line one lives in the United States. The United States has, in Mr. Coates view, a heritage of enslavement, a history of violent oppression, and a continuing practice of violating non-white personhood. He points out, coldly and rationally, that non-white people, today, still lack boundaries and protections against institutional and state-sanctioned forms of systemic violence. White people, or as Mr. Coates reminds us, "people who believe themselves to be white" take inviolable boundaries and protections against these kinds of institutional and state-sanctioned manifestations of systemic violence for granted. This is what really makes them white. I live in Harlem. It would shock me to the very core of my being if a NYPD officer stopped and frisked me for drugs, weapons or contraband. It would be a turning point in my life, a story I would tell for years, something I would pursue remediation for to the full extent possible, with no fear of further persecution because I chose to do so. I walk by black men being stopped and frisked by NYPD on these same Harlem streets so routinely that I hardly take notice of it. There's nothing rhetorical about that. It's a fact of my own life. If I had a black son, I would require him to read this book. Today.

Way back at the beginning of time, that is, the 1960’s, Richard Wright and James Baldwin were obligatory reading for me, and I have read much of their work. I still recall a black woman in Atlanta damning me with faint praise: “I think you are a moderate liberal.” Likewise, the lyrics of an old Phil Ochs song, “Love me, I am a liberal” have rolled around in my head: “…and I knew all the old union hymns.” Nowadays, I suppose, Wright and Baldwin ARE “the old union hymns.” America has made so much progress in race relations since the “Amos and Andy Show” was the only authorized black presence on TV, and Jackie Robinson proved that a black man could play in professional sports. Some blacks are now “truffled” in my neighborhood. There is a Black Caucus in Congress, and then there is the matter of the President… Progress. But there is also the stagnation, and backlash. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book concerns the latter. His first name is derived from an old Egyptian word for Nubia, the area to the south of them that was inhabited by blacks. The New York Times review of this book underscored the similarities, and delineated the differences between this work and Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time . Both take the structure of an older black man telling a much younger black man the (racial) “facts of life” in America. In Baldwin’s case, it was to his nephew, in Coates, it is to his son. Coates grew up “on the wrong side of the tracks” in Baltimore. At least, that is what it was called in Baldwin’s time. Perhaps it still is. A tough neighborhood. A war zone, literal, and of sorts. A lot of psychic energy is spent just trying to stay alive… of watching for what is out of place on the “trail” to school, and does that bring danger? Coats quantifies this, in terms of brain time, at 33%. Cuts down on your time for writing the next “killer app.” Another quantification: “At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combine, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies – cotton – was America’s prime export. The richest men in America lived in the Mississippi River Valley, and they made their riches off our stolen bodies.” He provides no basis for the four billion figure… and for those who would dispute it, is it double or half? I recently read and reviewed Ghosts Along The Mississippi: The Magic of the Old Houses of Louisiana, New Revised Edition , with the subtitle that includes “magic”. There was nothing magically about it. Far more than an abstract four billion, those “ghosts” of old mansions quantify what was stolen. His is a staccato writing style; the “takeaways” of a 1000 page book. Concerning schools, quotes worthy of Paul Goodman: “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance…Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them.” He questions the meek acceptance and embrace of the “tear gas” of passive resistance. He admires Malcom X. Coates names 10-15 black men who have been killed by the police, the police that he says are so instrumental in fulfilling America’s will on race relations. Coates went to the black “Mecca,” Howard University, in Washington, DC, and was dazzled by the variety that is encompassed by that word: “blackness.” He finds love on more than one occasion. Prince Jones, a fellow classmate of his at Howard was murdered by the police. He described this killing in detail, and has a heart-breaking visit to his mother, a medical doctor, who had worked her way up from scrubbing white people’s floors in Louisiana. His eulogy for Jones is haunting and beautiful. Accountability? There never is any. “And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of ‘race,’ imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. They typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force on nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.” Scathing, as good as Baldwin ever wrote. Coates seminal work is an update on the much “progress” that has NOT been made. Normally I would give it my special rating for an exceptional work, 6-stars. However, I did have some problems with it. He goes to France, his first trip abroad, and is enthralled… I’ve been there… figuring the 6eme arrondissement is the “center of the universe.” However, he never mentions an essential word for understanding France, “les banlieues,” literally, the suburbs, with such a different connotation than in America. A fellow reviewer has mentioned that he has become more critical after his first visit. And then I would also be critical of his use of the term “Dreamer,” of which there are many, for sure, but are not a monolithic block that seems to mean “non-black.” And he never develops the implications of the fact that the cop who killed Prince Jones was black also. Like “les banlieues,” “Tom,” of an avuncular nature, does not appear in his work either. Still, overall, a very important work, for America today, and for those still singing those “old union hymns.” 5-stars.

Every new month brings with it a flood of new names forever lost to this life, here and now. Trayvon, Brown, Garner, Tamir, Emanuel 9, and Sandra, with innumerable names before and many more to come. True tragedies. Unspeakable evils. Those who bear the inhumane weight of racism seemingly burst with grief constantly. How can a human endure such relentless onslaught? The truth of being a person of color in America, is that this country was not built for all. This country was, though, built on the backs and bodies of black lives. "Whites" that benefit from white supremacy and privilege don't want to understand the insidious cost of an empire with a history (and ongoing reality) that diminishes and devalues non-"white" persons and cultures. I've read "Between the World and Me" in the wake of Sandra Bland's murder. "Suicide!" some will vehemently counter. No, Sandra was murdered. I will never know the struggle to survive that a woman, a black woman, has to daily endure, moment by moment, her whole life long. Being non-white, non-male, non-evangelical, non-heterosexual, and non-abled bodied is a constant struggle in the empire of America. Sandra Bland never had a day of her brief life where she did not have to struggle against a history and future always set against her. I'm not saying I know what precisely ended Sandra's life, the specific mechanism of her death, but I do know that she was murdered. All black lives are daily being murdered by the "white" empire of America. Race is a construct. It is true that we, whatever shade of hue, all are human. But, some constructs of race are fuel and plunder for the militant machinery of empire. Coates explains, "Plunder has matured into habit and addiction [for "white" America]; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline." Coates also contrasts dreamers and strugglers. Dreamers want to be "white". The dream of equality is really a desire to be "white"; that is, to benefit from this empire, instead of being churned by empire, one has to be white. Coates does not quite say it like this. This is my interpretation of his term, "dreamers". Strugglers have awaken from the dream, and strugglers just want to live their brief lives, they only desire to be human. Strugglers are under no dreamy illusion that they will ever fully be equal in this empire. The empire of America is not interested in or built for equality. Empire is built for and by domination. Again, this is my interpretation of Coates, and not his words. Coates writes (and lives) with an immediacy of the here and now. His writing style is hauntingly poetic and sobering. He doesn't use the phrase, "black lives matter," but he is clear that his physical body matters. His son's life matters. His book is a memoir for his son's benefit-- a matter of life and death. Coates' own awakening from the temptation to dream, and to succumb to illusion, is born out of a grounding revelation that his life, his physical body, is all he gets. Coates explains: "I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us—Christians, Muslims, atheists—lived in this fear of this truth. Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional." Practically too, Coates exposes some often touted anthems of the white empire of America: “'Black-on-black crime' is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return." Some further contextual reflections as I read "Between the World and Me": White privilege serves white supremacy, the social construct [of my] "whiteness" hides in the cloak of normalcy, "it is what it is", left unquestioned & unexposed for what it really is, a sinister systemic evil. Someone recently asked me "What if what happened to Sandra Bland was about a 'black' officer and a 'white' civilian?" Police brutality is perpetrated and experienced by various persons of all constructs of race. But, what happened to Sandra is not as frequent of an experience for "white" persons. Officers operating from a position and system of white supremacy (even officers of color) are extra cruel, historically speaking, toward persons of color. Consider that our present moment in history is not far removed from slavery followed by segregation, then by Jim Crow, then by the unsettled civil rights struggle, and then still yet by an uphill climb for minorities. An African American person in his forties might only be two to three generations from slavery. This country, with all of its history, is only 4-5 generations old (depending on how one accounts for a generational span of time), that's a pretty young country. And, if an unfolding history ebbs and flows, like a pendulum swinging forward and then slightly backwards, then true progress is slow. So, to answer the hypothetical (fantasy) question (switching the race roles of the Sandra Bland injustice), considering that African Americans are about 13% of USA population, and that black officers are a lesser percentage of the USA police force, then the frequency of "black" officer violence against "white" civilians is far less frequent then the more frequent way around. Plus, history has largely not been kind to minorities in this country. Back to Coates, even as a person of faith (clergy), I too sense in my own self that perhaps this physical life is all we get. And, to survive is to struggle; to know any degree of joy is a struggle. And, if one is a person of color (non- "white"), then the history and ongoing reality of the American empire will always be against them.

It's hard to know what to say about a book about which so much has already been said. If you're familiar with Coates' writing from The Atlantic Magazine or elsewhere you already know that, in terms of style, he is a gifted writer who is always a pleasure to read, regardless of the subject matter he writes about. The subject matter here, however, is what is most important about "Between the World and Me." Coates' uses the experience of young African Americans and his own experiences growing up to create a poetic and impassioned letter to his son and, indeed to the world, about what it means to be a person of color in the United States at the beginning of the 21st century. My personal belief is that the issue of race and institutionalized racism is the most important issue we as a country face right now. The events of the past two years have focused a bright light on issues that many of us were only dimly aware of. Or, more accurately, that we knew about but didn't want to face. For those who realize that they MUST be faced, no matter how painful we find them, Coates provides a remarkable first step with this compelling, poetic, and sometimes heartbreaking expressionistic book. The inability to see what causes pain, even though it is right in front of us, is a very human defense mechanism. But it is a defense mechanism that does not serve any of us or our country well. Empathy and a desire to understand that which we haven't personally experienced but that we know are pernicious facts of modern Anerican life are key to the changes we must make. As an upper-middle class white woman, I've lived through very few of the events and feelings Coates describes in "Between the World and Me." Which is all the more reason for me to read it and recommend it. This is undoubtedly one of the most important books of the last 50 years. If I could gift a copy to every single American, I would.