“This is your country, this is your world, this is your
body, and you must find some way to live within the all of
it.” In a profound work that pivots
from the biggest questions about American history and ideals
to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son,
Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for
understanding our nation’s history and current crisis.
Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a
falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the
bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through
slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up,
and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to
inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And
how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and
free ourselves from its burden?
Between
the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer
these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates
shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening
to the truth about his place in the world through a series
of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil
War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris,
from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose
children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully
woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and
fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World
and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts
our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
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