Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)
“A father writes his Black son the letter every generation prays it won't have to write — and explains why America has always depended on destroying Black bodies to sustain itself.”
At a Glance
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes a long letter to his fifteen-year-old son Samori in the aftermath of the non-indictment of the officer who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Drawing on his childhood in Baltimore, his education at Howard University, the murder of his college friend Prince Jones by a police officer, and his travels to France, Coates argues that the plunder of Black bodies is not a deviation from the American Dream — it is the foundation of it. The letter is a warning, a love offering, and an act of witness.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015. Sold over two million copies. Spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Introduced Coates to a mainstream readership he had been building for years in the Atlantic. Credited with returning the tradition of Baldwin-style prophetic Black essay writing to American cultural prominence. Read widely in college courses in literature, African American studies, political science, and sociology. Its publication in the same year as the Charleston church massacre, the Baltimore uprising, and the escalating Black Lives Matter movement made it feel less like a book than a document of the present tense.
Diction Profile
Highly literary — Baldwin-influenced, long subordinate clauses, precise vocabulary, no hedging
Moderate