The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. “You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. Coates is asking that we remain present and involved in order to truly see what is happening in these changing times. As a white person, this book changed my perspective by allowing me to see how the “American dream” cannot be realized by Black individuals because of the violence against the Black community. We can be blind to what is occurring in our world today, especially if we are privileged enough to be able to remove ourselves from current events. Though addressed to his son, this statement is crucial in understanding what Coates demands of people. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world,” Coates wrote. “I would not have you descend into your own dream. In my opinion, Coates’s novel is a required reading for all, especially those in America. The wrestling with these big questions that Coates intentionally leaves unanswered is exactly what is needed for all people. Maybe this is the time for questioning, searching and struggling without really believing the struggle can be won,” Alexander wrote. “The second time around I could see that maybe, just maybe, this is what is most needed right now - a book that offers no answers but instead challenges us to wrestle with the questions on our own.

These freedoms - ranging from something as simple as walking down the street with a pack of Skittles to driving without fear of a traffic stop - are taken for granted by white people in America.Īccording to Alexander, Coates raises “big questions” that he leaves unanswered, but in a meaningful and purposeful way.

The boy is Coates’s 15-year-old son, who is trying to make sense of blatant racial injustice and come to grips with his place in a world that refuses to guarantee for him the freedoms that so many others take for granted,” Alexander wrote. “‘Between the World and Me’ carries a very different message, though it is also written in the form of a letter to a black teenage boy. Michelle Alexander, renowned scholar and author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” wrote about Coates’s book in 2015 for the New York Times. In his epistolary novel, Coates addresses the problem of Black people belonging overall. And Black individuals are not part of the group that decides where Black people belong.Ĭoates’s 15-year-old son realized this because of the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012 at the hands of George Zimmerman, who was acquitted of all charges in the murder. Published in 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” is a letter from Coates to his teenage son detailing what it is like to be Black in America.Ī select group of American people have always decided where Black people belong within this country.

Ta nehisi between the world and me