Between the World and Me

"A powerful exploration of race and history that Dorsey has identified as influential."

"A bold and personal literary exploration of America's racial history."

"Conceived as a letter from author Ta-Nehisi Coates to his son, this book punches way above its weight as provocation and analysis. Coates aims to unsettle complacency with research and bracing rhetoric. His book’s central question — “How do I live free in this black body?” — is far less haunting, Coates argues, than the ever fresh episodes of violence against the black bodies that made this nation possible. In beautiful prose, Coates bequeaths to his child the clear-eyed approach of his parents, “who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained American glory.” Those gifts, he maintains, make it possible for him to pose unanswerable questions without fearing the consequences. Some readers may regard his conclusions as grim; others are likely to find them liberating."

"I think he’s an astounding African-American public intellectual. He writes for the Atlantic . In this book he says many things: some of them related to the police, some of them related to institutional racism in the United States. He constantly refers to his body. He had a very close friend who was in college with him — an average college person, he wasn’t involved in street crime or anything like that — and this guy was killed just 20 feet from his house by a police officer. So when Coates keeps talking about his body I think he’s literally talking about the fact that his body could be dead any time he meets a police officer. I think it’s metaphorically about how he and other African Americans feel endangered in this society. I don’t believe necessarily in reparations in terms of giving every black person $50,000, but what I do believe is that we have to have the recognition of how badly wounded African Americans are by the psychic brutality they have gone through and the physical brutality that they’ve gone through. After the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 African Americans were theoretically equal, there was no more lawful segregation. During that period Lyndon Johnson was president, there was a lot of good in Lyndon Johnson — except that he got 50,000 guys killed in Vietnam , not to mention millions of Vietnamese — and he recognised in some visceral way the need to promote programmes that would advantage African Americans. But that was killed by the conservatives in this country. So maybe 3/4ths or 2/3rds of African Americans managed to make it into the solid working class or middle class. But then there was a huge number left behind, and they’ve been there for four or five generations in ghettos in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter We have not begun to address what needs to be addressed in every social sphere to eliminate the kinds of violence that we see in African-American ghettos. We’re not even thinking about it, we’re not even talking about it. Now, in America, black intellectuals and African-American psychologists are understanding that this issue of the police is part of a much larger problem. It’s going to take a couple of generations of African Americans in ghettos being really advantaged, not oppressed any more, before we can start to see the the kind of change that we need. We first need to have a recognition of what’s been done to African-American people before we start to talk about the programmes that over a generation or two can change the situation. Until then, I’m pessimistic. This interview was published on August 27th, 2015"