Between the World and Me: by Ta-Nehisi Coates | Summary & Analysis

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates | Summary & Analysis

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States” (The New York Observer)

Between the World and Me is a 2015 book written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It is written as a letter to the author's teenaged son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being black in the United States. Coates recapitulates the American history of violence against black people and the incommensurate policing of black youth. A common theme is his fear of bodily harm. Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore. The work takes inspiration from James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time. Like Baldwin, Coates does not share in traditional black Christian rhetoric of uplift, and more bleakly believes that no major change in racial justice is likely to come.

Novelist Toni Morrison wrote that Coates filled an intellectual lacuna in succession to James Baldwin. Editors of the The New York Times and The New Yorker described the book as exceptional. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times felt that Coates overgeneralized at times and did not consistently acknowledge racial progress over the course of centuries.

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