Slightly More Than a Book Review
Why Everyone NEEDS to Read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Terrifyingly relevant, emotionally powerful, and thought-provoking.
Sitting innocently on my shelf for over three years, Between the World and Me was a book I convinced myself I would read in grade 10 on a journey to become “an intellectual.” I played myself, didn’t I, I thought to myself last week, only picking it up again because of my new goal to read 2–3 books a week. (Disclaimer: Still not an intellectual.)
What terrible foreshadowing that decision was. I finished this book a few days prior to the murder of George Floyd; I had no idea that those pages would come to life and take the form of pictures, videos, and hashtags spread throughout Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, repeating the patterns found after every case of police brutality. I have always been a skeptic (or disillusioned, pessimistic, existentialist: you choose), unsure at how effective the well-meaning but essentially virtue signalling re-posts and tweets were. Like it or not, we live in a society in which power lies with the system, not the individual, and writing 50 words on your Instagram story to 800 followers won’t change that.
In a slightly hypocritical move, I’m now writing this article.
The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
Between the World and Me was published in 2015, soon after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. It’s disturbing that this book is still exactly as relevant five years later — that nothing has changed. While I am a POC, as a light-skinned Asian female, I cannot pretend to come close to understanding what black people go through everyday. However, this book has given me an unprecedented view into the African American experience, which makes recent events all the more heartbreaking.
Coates writes his book in second-person, as a letter to his son. This makes every emotion all the more raw, his truths more vulnerable, and the actions of society more despicable than ever. He explains what it’s like to navigate life as a black male; dives deep into the prevalence of race in American history, “a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men”; and disseminates his hard-earned knowledge and wisdom while the themes of bodily autonomy, shared suffering, and racial divide ring throughout.
…the craft of writing [is] the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth — loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that the loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts.
In addition to his unparalleled argumentative structure and ground-breaking claims about “the Dream” (a clever extension of the classic American Dream), Coates is an amazing writer. His sentences flow like no other; his metaphors are so original yet so eloquent that I couldn’t believe no author had used them before (Example: “Now I was in a storm of French, drenched really, and only equipped to catch drops of the language — ‘who,’ ‘euros,’ ‘you,’ ‘to the right.’); and the interweaving of his personal narrative with political commentary and lessons to his son is done with such elegance that I couldn’t put this book down. It inspired me to write again, to make an impact with my words.
In another futile attempt to become an intellectual, I keep a notebook with my favourite quotes from every book I read. Between the World and Me takes a clear first place for sheer quantity as well as quality of the quotes recorded, only comparable to perhaps A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles — one of my favourite historical fiction novels, filled with elegant prose.
And it occurred to me, listening to your mother, that France was not a thought experiment but an actual place filled with actual people whose traditions were different, whose lives really were different, whose sense of beauty was different.
The universal relevance of this book comes from its lessons that pertain not only to race but also to life as a whole, to love, to education, and to humanity. We are not alone; we are part of a collective; we are “part of a world” as Coates says, multiple small worlds of “Jews or New Yorkers… of Californians, of Native Americans, or a combination of any of these, worlds stitched into worlds like tapestry,” that make up the entirety of civilization.
Especially moving was his exploration of the dichotomy between the lives of the Dreamers (e.g. white people) and those who suffer under the weight of the Dream (e.g. black people).
He uses his trip to France to illustrate his experience without the “low-grade, ever-present fear” in New York. He says, “it occurred to me that I was really in someone else’s country and yet, in some necessary way, I was outside of their country. In America I was part of an equation — even if it wasn’t a part I relished.” France represented a type of freedom that he never had, and even there he could not “shake the old ways, the instinct to watch my back at every pass.”
The passage as a whole is profound, and the imagery of Paris he creates is beautiful. It’s a lesson to his son, about the different ways to live life, about the feeling of freedom from fear, about how a lifetime of terror follows one everywhere, and about what the black life could be without the racial divide.
Yet, he doesn’t forget the struggles of his Haitian brothers and other marginalized populations throughout French history. We are prone to romanticizing foreign countries, imagining them with rose coloured lenses, and forgetting about their issues in lieu of the smell of fresh croissants from the boulangerie, the clinking of wine glasses, or the centuries old architecture that casually grace the streets. In another vein, yet quite related, non-Americans have a tendency to condemn American politics and society in times like these, again forgetting their own people commit the same crimes.
I happened upon a tweet that captured these sentiments.
In the following thread, she continues, “It’s not an excuse to place racism ‘beneath you’ as if it only concerns the United States. Because it’s something that I find often, even in my circle, this thought of ‘o la la Americans and racism.’ You try to dissociate yourself from Americans, as if you were not exactly the same. This prevents you from questioning yourself about the situation in France which directly concerns you.”
Case in point: In my home country, people are criticizing a trend, “meanwhile in Canada,” that diminishes the very real racism in Canada in light of the seemingly worse infractions of our neighbour to the south.
In times like these, it’s necessary to take a step back. Examine yourself. Your country. Change for the better.
The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.
— Toni Morrison
If you’ve already read this book, please share your thoughts with me — agree, disagree, or agree to disagree? If you haven’t, I hope what I’ve written today has convinced you to pick it up. (Support local bookstores, not Amazon!) If you still don’t believe me, listen to Toni Morrison.
Every police stop for a black person is a game of Russian roulette — will today be the day I die?
So please, sign this petition: Justice for George Floyd (And if you can, donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund.)
Disclaimer: I am not black and thus, I cannot say that I have accurately represented their experiences or thoughts. It’s critical that we make sure their voices are heard above all. Here are some recent articles written by both black women and men:
- Of Course There Are Protests. The State Is Failing Black People.
- I Have Not Missed the Amy Coopers of the World
- How We Spend Tells Us Whose Lives Matter
Thanks so much for reading. I don’t have any other articles as of yet, but please follow if you liked this; there’s more to come :) Leave a comment below with any thoughts or a book suggestion!
