thinking about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me
By Rachel Amaru, Co-Founder of Good Trouble For Kids
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me is not an easy book — although its language is very accessible. It is difficult because it addresses the tragic and terrible consequences of systemic racism in this country, and it begs its audience to engage. Ta-Nehisi Coates — like James Baldwin — makes it personal. You, the reader, are being asked to read a long letter written to his son. On one level, this makes the writing feel almost intimate at times, but Coates, certainly a brilliant writer, knows the tradition he is drawing upon. Look carefully at the black and white photographs — the family album — inserted in these pages. Everything is intentional — even the white spaces in this book, and its size. I think we are meant to feel comfortable holding it — to relish how it feels in our hands, to note the absence of color on its cover (other than the recommendation in red print by Toni Morrison that “this is required reading”). I cannot help but think of blood in the context of Coates’ writing — the very same that runs through the veins of all of us. I think this extended essay is meant to be both personal and political — a definitive response by Coates to the sin of racism in this country, and a deeply private commitment to his son that he is the man in those pictures, the father of that baby, that his body is extraordinarily real, and that its existence must be acknowledged. Lest anyone forget: this is a father and his son.
This is not a book to read once, or even twice. I did not appreciate the value of re-reading until I was much older. I think my first introduction to Coates was reading his June 2014 article in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.” It made me feel the same way I felt when I heard Obama give his speech at the Democratic convention in 2004: this was a voice I needed to pay attention to. After reading that article in The Atlantic, I read his memoir, The Beautiful Struggle (2008), and then Between the World and Me came out in 2015. I didn’t read it in one sitting the first time — I took it in in bits and pieces. What I remembered most was Coates’ visceral anger, and how much that resonated with me — a white, Jewish woman who could not make sense of what was happening in America. Trayvon Martin, 17 years old, had been murdered in 2012, and Michael Brown in 2014. Two of so many. Say their names, say their names. But I want to go back to that time specifically because a switch went off in me. So much of what I’d managed to contain went haywire after Trayvon Martin. I don’t know if it was because I’d succumbed to magical thinking that with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, things were going to change. Or whether it was because in 2012, my oldest daughter was 19-years-old, and just starting George Washington University. She is biracial, and we raised her in the white bubble of Boulder, Colorado. I was almost desperately happy that her world was going to expand. She had an overall good experience growing up in our predominantly white and liberal university town. I had been asked inappropriate questions about where she came from and asked about her hair (!), and she’d had a few unfortunate encounters with racism (at school and in a synagogue youth group), and more than her share of being exoticized. But I had never seriously considered her being killed because of the color of her skin. The school shooting at Columbine in 1999, when my daughter was six, insured that I never felt safe again dropping her off at school each morning; Trayvon Martin being murdered in the street in 2012 insured that I think about the dangers to her Black body every day.
That danger is what Coates’ is addressing head-on in Between the World and Me. The title of the book speaks to a tragic Black ephiphany: of coming to that moment of recognizing that there is a gap between the world as it is for whites and the world as it is for people of color.
Coates’ title is taken from a poem of the same name by Richard Wright — a really viscerally difficult poem about lynching (you can read it here in its entirety). Coates publishes the first few lines as an epigraph. Reading it makes me hold my breath. And that breath-holding moment is what I think much of Between the World and Me is about.
I don’t want to analyze this book for you. I do want you to take a pencil and mark it up as you read it. Write down your questions. Write what you are feeling. I know a wonderful high school teacher, Julie Ascarrunz, using this book in her class this year. She gave her students the assignment of creating group digital magazines based on their reading of three hard books on race: this one, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Ibram X. Kendi’s, How To Be An Antiracist. Her goal was to expose them to the voices and ideas contained in these books. The students’ magazines had to include memes, responses to quotes, and a poem written in response to what they’d read. I was given permission to include a link to it here. I love how creative Julie got with this assignment, and I hope other educators follow her lead.
As someone who facilitates poetry therapy sessions, I am particularly taken with the suggestion of writing a poem in response to Coates. In some ways, I think this is what Coates has done — but in reverse. Aside from Wright’s poem, look at how he introduces section one with lines from the poem “Malcolm” by Sonia Sanchez. You can read it in its entirety here, in another piece by Coates in The Atlantic in 2010. [That poem — especially its first line “Do not speak to me of martyrdom” — makes me think of 2019 Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown’s phenomenal poem “Bullet Points.”]
Coates’ includes a poem by Amiri Baraka at the beginning of Part II — an acknowledgment of the beauty of Black lives, celebrated similarly by Langston Hughes in poems like his “My People.” And then, in Part III, Coates cites Baldwin with this charge against white America: “And have brought humanity to the edge of/oblivion: because they think they are white.”
Coates is in dialogue with all these voices. He is telling his son: We do not need any more Black martyrs. We need Blacks living, breathing, creating. We need sons to be the suns. (Note how in her poem, Sanchez calls Malcolm “the sun that tagged the western sky”; Baraka writes of “what we want is sun”; and in Wright’s poem, “the sun poured yellow/ surprise into the eye sockets of the stony skull….”, then “died in the sky,” and ends with the stomach tightening line: “Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in/ yellow surprise at the sun….”).
Coates’ is not surprised by this breach in the world. Horrified, yes, but I don’t think he is surprised. His life and his body do not allow him to be so. Whiteness and our perceptions of it blind us to what is right before us. In an interview with The Paris Review, Baldwin writes of having to be taught to see differently by the artist Beauford Delaney:
“I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, ‘Look.’ I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, ‘Look again,’ which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw.”
Between the World and Me is meant to shed radical light on American racism; to make Blackness visible in all its multifacetedness. It is a call to bear witness to what we see around us — to not flinch in the face of the horrors perpetrated by white supremacy, especially because Blacks cannot; to refuse to be indifferent to Coates and his son. Coates’ anger, his righteous rage, which is what I remembered from my first reading, is still palpable, but this time I was also struck by a terrible sadness reverberating from start to finish. It ends with rain — a metaphor perhaps, but not for god’s tears (since Coates explicitly cites his departure from religious faith), but tears nonetheless — his? ours? maybe tears America has not yet shed?
This is a book to return to. Pay heed to the moments of profound joy in it too — most especially in Coates’ expression of love for his wife and son. But do not shy from its message, that the Dream experienced by white America is not the lived experience of far too many Black Americans, and Coates is most definitely calling out that Dream. Books were “rays of light” for Coates (34), and I so hope that a book like this can be that for all of you hearing his voice for the first time.
Originally published on Story Remedy and Good Trouble For Kids.
