Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, published in 2015 and winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction, is written as an extended letter to his teenage son, Samori. Framed by the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the broader Black Lives Matter moment, the book moves between Coates’s upbringing in Baltimore, his years at Howard University, and his later life in New York and Paris. Its central argument concerns what he calls the “Dream”: the comforting American narrative of progress, meritocracy, and innocence that, in his account, depends on the exploitation and destruction of Black bodies. Against that Dream he sets the “question of the body”—the idea that the struggle for Black Americans has never been chiefly about abstract ideals but about physical safety and the right to control one’s own flesh. The letter form lets Coates braid autobiography with history and polemic. He recounts his father’s work with the Black Panther Party, his own encounters with fear and police power in Baltimore, and friendships shaped and sometimes ended by violence. A pivotal section describes his time at Howard, which he calls “the Mecca,” where he encountered a range of Black identity and intellectual life that complicated the narrower world he had known. He also recounts visits to Civil War battlefields and to Paris, and his meetings with the parents of victims of police killings, including Mamie Till and the family of Prince Jones, a Howard classmate killed by a police officer. The book rejects easy consolation or a redemptive ending; Coates tells his son that the Dream’s promise of eventual triumph is false, and that the most honest aspiration is to live awake to the world as it is.