tallahassee coates between the world and me

It is not a guidebook like Kendi’s How to Be An Antiracist, though Between the World and Me is a call to arms in its own way. There’s plenty more to this story: Coates’s struggle with education, brushes with police, danger on the streets, unjust deaths… These may sound like topics you’re expecting in any book speaking on racism, but even at five years old already, this is still a book that adds new angles to the conversation, no matter how many antiracist books you may have picked up in recent months. “Perhaps being named ‘black’ was just someone’s name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah.” All this from something that’s not said directly, which I think speaks to how much Coates accomplishes when he is direct. Here we can find the persistent root of racism. More significant perhaps than the color of someone’s (white) skin is the desire of that person to claim it, and why. It makes a statement about those to whom race- particularly whiteness- is important. Even that small adjustment in how people are named is thought-provoking, shifting the way we see societal power balances and the motivations behind that hierarchy.

One choice that particularly struck me (as a non-Black reader) was that Coates never calls the villains of this story ‘white people.’ he says, ‘people who want to be white,’ ‘people who call themselves white,’ ‘people who think they are white,’ etc.

Coates’s writing is persuasive and astute, and I imagine it being a very affective experience for readers from all walks of life.

It’s not written for a white audience to find anything favorable or relatable in these pages, but I think that makes it all the more important a piece for included and excluded audiences alike. This is a very short but very powerful book between the second-person address, Coates’s recounting of his own education (social and beyond), and the raw honesty involved in telling difficult truths to someone beloved and innocent, it feels intimate and revelatory. “ 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.’ These words would be spoken with a veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the hand in our pocket.” It is an exploration of why things are the way they are, Coates’s own learning process, and his hopes and fears for his son’s future. In Between the World and Me, a father writes about his experience with racism in America in an open letter to his teenage son.

Tallahassee coates between the world and me