Tag: Black History Month

Written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Published by Spiegel & Grau in 2015. 152 pages. Rating: 4/5.

In his national book award winning memoir, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates explores issues of race by describing how it was like growing up in 1980s Baltimore and attending Howard University. Coates is a distinguished writer, author, and journalist and has authored many books including The Water Dancer, We Were Eight Years in Power, and The Beautiful Struggle! He has also written for Marvel comics, producing a series of Captain America and Black Panther Comics. He’s worked for a few different magazines, such as the New York Times Magazine, but is better known for his work with The Atlantic. Between the World and Me gives insight into what it’s like growing up in a country that neglects its racist past.

Although Between the World and Me is a memoir, it is also an open letter to his son, Samori. Coates warns a fifteen year old Samori that he will be judged because of the color of his skin. People will tell him to be “twice as good” to get ahead in life. Ta-nehisi is opposed to this adage, equating it to be twice as good is to “accept half as much.” It’s a salient point, why is there an expectation for African Americans to work twice as hard but accept half as much?

This book got me think of all these questions about race that I otherwise wouldn’t have had. The book brought these ideas into my consciousness.

The streets of the Baltimore of Coates’s youth were dangerous. It wouldn’t be strange to witness a fight on your way home from school. Shootings were common, anyone in his neighborhood could name a person affected by street violence. Coates recalled a boy in a ski jacket brandishing a gun and pointing it at him. He was saved by luck; the boy’s friends calmed the armed boy down. This scene, and many others, cause Coates to liken his upbringing to a game. To survive you must learn the rules of the game, which feeds back into much of the behavior that makes the streets so dangerous. Coates found an escape though, through writing and consciousness building. He was able to leave Baltimore to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C., it was a way for him save himself.

When reading this book I picked up on a common theme of one’s own body and how it was constantly at risk. Coates describes his youth as:

“To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law did not protect us.”

Between the World and Me, page 17

These elements of the world battered the youth of Baltimore. The feedback loops generated from the violence, drugs, and poverty produced a harsh environment where it was nearly impossible to flourish. Black bodies had the rules against them in this game. Coates wants his son to be prepared for the institutionalized problems that lie ahead in his future.

Between the World and Me is a great book that looks at societal issues of race in a personal manner. It took me a week or so to dwell on it and absorb its contents, but I think it was well worth it. I’m a white guy living in the predominantly white state of South Dakota, so a lot of these issues tend to go over my head. Most of my exposure to racial issues come from the news and textbooks, but this memoir gets into the mind of someone who’s been experiencing it first-hand! I recommend this book if you want to know more about contemporary issues of race. It’s a short book and you could finish it quickly, but its message will linger after the fact.