Ta-Nehisi is the author and narrator of the book Between the World and Me. Most African American scholars, authors, and journalists awaited impatiently Tan-Nehisi's most personal piece of writing. The slim volume, published in 2015 in the wake of police violence in Ferguson, New York City and Baltimore, is written as a letter to Ta-Nehisi's then fifteen-year-old son, a child born when the author and his wife were both twenty-four, still students at Howard, the historically black university in Washington. DC. Ta-Nehisi had wanted to attend the university, a place that he calls The Mecca, a place of transformation and growth. As his own son is soon facing college choices, Ta-Nehisi feels responsible to tell more about these formative years, cut short when he decided to embrace the care of his newly born child and left Howard.
In this sense, the book can also be read as the memoir of an African American male who grew up in the streets of Baltimore where he barely managed to escape daily violence and jail, witnessed the relentless will to destroy the Black Body and understood that Howard was not only a choice but the only university made for him. There, his story echoed the other students' story. There, he found home but also the harsh answer to his quest: the black bodies of African Americans had to be destroyed.
This harsh reality gives to the book a tone that alternates between tenderness and defiance. The author is highly protective of his son and to all young African American males, but his writing is a cautionary tale. Ta-Nehisi's love for his teenage son is palpable through the entire book. His deep affection for every African American boy is also present on each page. He's profoundly, viscerally connected to all of them. However, he refuses to distill false hope in his lyrically written book. Ta-Nehisi wants his son and all African American males understand that there is no possible change for African Americans in the United States since racism is engrained.
“Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”
Although the book is written to a young African American boy, more likely to meet more police brutality that young African American girls, the author is a true feminist. He acknowledges the more severe violence geared toward African American females. Ta-Nehisi’s wife went through her own transformative journey when she went to Paris alone. She came back so moved and changed that he agreed to go with her. Later, they returned with their very young son. As it is often the case when one travels abroad and navigates through a new language and culture, Ta-Nehisi first experienced an immediate feeling of freedom in Paris. He felt that “his color and his son’s color were no longer their distinguishing feature. Their broken French represented their American-ness.” He also writes that their bodies were not enslaved in France. However, soon enough, he is “ aware that much of what they had done [in Paris] was built on the plunder of Haitian bodies, on the plunder of Wolof bodies, on the destruction of the Toucouleur, on the taking of the Bissandugu.” He is then reminded that the Black Body across the world has always been subject to violence.
Between the World and Me is not written for a white audience but for young African Americans, primarily men, in an era of growing racial tension but also social conscience awareness. In this measure, white readers must accept that the author asks significant questions but leaves the reader without any specific answers. How can we stop the violence that affects African American males in such large numbers? How can we remedy to the physical segregation between white and black Americans? How can we stop spreading the idea that African American males are doomed to fail?
It is doubtful that Ta-Nehesi doesn’t have any answer to these harsh questions. Perhaps Between the World and Me will have a sequel in which one of the most important African American contemporary voices will once again challenge his readers.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of the memoir Between the World and Me. An acclaimed writer and correspondent for The Atlantic, he wrote Between the World and Me as a letter to his then-fifteen-year-old son, Samori, whom Coates and his wife had when they were both twenty-four. In the book, Coates recounts growing up learning the “language of the streets” in Baltimore, Maryland, in the 1980s, and then attending Howard, a historically black university in Washington, D.C. Coates refers to Howard as “the Mecca” because it draws such a diversity of black students, teachers, scholars, and artists. While a student, he spent a great deal of time reading in the Howard library and, later, learning from older poets and writing for a local alternative newspaper. He also met his wife, Kenyatta Matthews, at Howard. Coates eventually dropped out to pursue writing and to help raise their new son. The family moved to PG County, Maryland, where Coates learned that a PG County police officer had killed his Howard classmate Prince Jones, leading Coates to become increasingly outraged at the area’s history of police brutality and at the broader systemic racism of which it is a part. Coates, Kenyatta, and Samori later moved to New York City, where Coates began to establish himself as a writer. He continued to be deeply concerned with racial injustice and police brutality, with the basis of the “Dream” of American prosperity and innocence in oppression, and with his responsibility as the father of a black son. Only while abroad in France did Coates find a sense of relief from the burden of the United States’ history of racism. An atheist and feminist who believes that the concept of race derives from racism, rather than the other way around—and that the “Dreamers” who blind themselves to the realities of racism must wake up on their own—Coates wrote his book as a way of imparting what he has learned about being a black man in the United States to his son.
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