Ta-Nehisi Coates “Between the world and me” is not a book on racial empowerment, it’s a book that challenges the lopsided American dream of perfect suburban houses with nice lawns, Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. A dream that rest on backs and beddings made from the braking of the black body.
The dream is a nightmare for black parents who tell their black boys and black girls to “be twice as good,” which is to say “accept half as much.”
Coates renounces accommodating what he perceives as racial blackmail. He rejects what he sees as a corrupting racial double standard. “No one,” he observes, “told those little white children … to be twice as good.”
Written as an open letter to his son Samori. The book is a grounded reflection of his own life growing up in Baltimore. He pens down a very deep and personal contemplation as he watches him growing up.
Unraveling the structural obstacles of raising & educating a black child and what it means to live within a black body in America. In reference to innocent killings of black boys by the police including his own friend Prince.
Coates’s portrayal of the African American past, present, and future is gloomy.
Asserting to his son “I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.”
The book challenges the smoke screen of the “black presidency” that “White” America sees as progress, when it is rather a consolidation of the status quo.
“Whiteness” he reemphasizes has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white.
Presenting American history as a chronicle of atrocities.
The consolidation of white America, he writes, “was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.”
In other words; where America sees progress, the black body sees the change of guards from slave masters to the police.
The police reflects the people in all of its will and fear.
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.
He tells his son that the United States is neither divinely blessed nor peculiarly noble. Far from it. “The entire narrative of this country,” he says to Samori, “argues against the truth of who you are.”
A mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below,” he observes. “You and I, my son, are that ‘below.’” True in 1776, “it is true today.”
If you are looking for a silver lining in the sky, move along.
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