Between the World and Me
- Mar 14, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 13
★★★★★
For anyone paying attention (which is to say, me—and Megan, who so patiently listens to these reviews once written), each year, over the past few anyway, I choose a theme around which to pick my books. Some years are more obvious than others, but after Uncle Tom’s Cabin, slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northup, and now Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, I’d say this year’s focus has made itself pretty clear.
I’d gone to the library expecting to pick up a copy of W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk but it hadn’t yet arrived from the transferring branch. I pulled up my reading list to see what my local branch might have on hand and was overcome with an inexplicable and unexpected giddiness when I pulled the book from the shelf. It’s not that I wasn’t excited about picking up the Du Bois. I most certainly was. But brief though the hunt might have been, it felt like I’d been looking for treasure and was surprised that I’d found some. Anyway, with either Du Bois or Coates, I was ready to move on to a different facet of the Black experience.
If you don’t know by now, these days (or should I say these decades?) I am rarely at the vanguard of anything. I get around to books, movies, television shows, etc. in my own time—and rarely while they are still in vogue. And so it is with Coates’s 2015 Between the World and Me, that, if you hadn’t heard, was winner of the National Book Award, #1 New York Times Best Seller, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and made pretty much any Top 10 list you can imagine. It’s only natural then that I’d wait until everyone who was likely to read it had already done so, including a good number of my Goodreads friends.
It occurs to me that at this point in my review, as I drag on and on with a lengthy and largely unnecessary preamble, that I am at a loss for words to describe the impact and import of this book. While I hesitate to say this book was not written for me as its audience, which is to say it was not written for white people as its audience, or, as Coates would put it, “people who think they are white,” this is, as Toni Morrison states firmly on the cover, “required reading.” In the parlance of our times, I like to think I am fairly “woke.” Intelligent and reasonably well-read, yes, but I am a middle-aged, middle-class “white” man working in the largely “white” field of advertising who has little contact with others who don’t look like me. I may believe that this is not by design, and though I personally may not be driven by nefarious intent, it neither reflects nor changes the reality of the world I inhabit.
Written as a letter to his 15-year-old son, Coates, in an incredibly vulnerable way, opens the door—blows it off the hinges really—to what the world, past, present, and future, looks like from the lens of someone who is Black. Intellectually I’ve understood what this means, but I did not and cannot know. My understanding came with what amounts to little more than unwanted, perhaps even condescending, sympathy. Coates isn’t looking for sympathy. He’s looking for truth, for knowledge, for a way for himself and his son and those who are Black—and for all of us, really—to find a way to inhabit and navigate a world fraught with racial division, violence, exploitation, and the struggle for power. Through this deeply intimate work, we can, each of us, choose to look without blinking, to see the world as it is and not as we imagine it to be, and, if nothing else, begin to see people and worlds and lives that are not our own with empathy and not merely sympathy. As Coates so eloquently put it, “race is the child of racism, not the father.” What a changed world we would have if we could remake it in this way, but to find a path forward we first have to see, truly see, each other. Between the World and Me is a powerful way to start.
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