---
product_id: 16072317
title: "Between the World and Me"
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---

# Between the World and Me

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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME ’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” ( Rolling Stone ) NAMED ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES ’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY • NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE ’ S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE CENTURY • AN OPRAH DAILY BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE PAST TWO DECADES ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Washington Post, People, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, New York, Newsday, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Review: Just as Toni Morrison says, required reading. - I could not put it down. I thought it would probably take me weeks of bringing this book along with me for my solo meals out, which is how I do much of my reading. I'd get through a bit here, chew on it, bite off a bit more, etc. Instead, I read it from beginning to end in one sitting, staying up long past my bedtime because I prefered reading it to sleeping. I began the book as my accompaniment for a solo meal out, that meal ran into more than two hours, then I brought it home and continued to read it until I was surprised and saddened by the last page. This is at once a beautiful, touching, moving and profoundly insightful book. It answered, in one swiftly deft sweep of elegant prose, questions about racial identity in America that have puzzled me since I realized that I was "white" and there were other people, mostly distinguished by skin color and economic class, who were "colored." I would guess I was around four or five years old when I first wondered why white and colored people were so angry with each other. It was 1964. This book is written, earnestly and sincerely, as a letter to his son. There is no artifice in this. It is a letter from a black father frightened for his black son, who wants him to understand his situation and be able to discern lies from truth as he deals with it. He almost too-dryly lays out the dangerous situations over which his son will have no control other than over his own actions and mental repose, explaining each with simple equations of self-interest, power and brutality. He then details his own struggle and evolution with all this, honestly unearthing his own now-abandoned limited views of the world, some left on the streets of Paris and some left on the boulevards of a now-gentrifying Harlem, now strolled by white women with strollers, the very neighborhood in which I live today and read this remarkable book. He describes white people as "people who believe themselves to be 'white.'" This distinction is the central revelation of this book for me as a man of caucasian and European descent. I was primed and readied for this view because I've never felt my "white" identity was something real. I'm a little Northern European on my mother's side, a little Southern European on my father's. I've had my DNA sequenced, so I know that my father's ancestors emigrated from Northern Africa to Southern Europe fifty-thousand years ago, about twenty-thousand years before my mother's ancestors came out of the Caucus mountains and moved to Northern Europe. I have more in common genetically with people in the Basque region of Spain than any other currently identifiable region, but my father's family regards it's European roots as being in Alsace, we have record of a DeWald as a tax collector in the region in the eleventh century. However, the name DeWald has it's richest history in South Africa, at least for the last couple of centuries, and in German, it means "of the woods." So, WTF am I? A German/English/Basque/Alsatian/Afrikaner? I'm all those things, but according to the US culture, I'm "white" along with my friends whose ancestors followed an entirely different path. We share a skin color and assumedly "not one drop" of the adulterating "colored" blood. That's what makes us white, and it is the only thing that makes us white. We believe we are and so does everyone around us. This is the point that Mr Coates makes so eloquently. "White" isn't a race, as such, it's an identity, and the degree to which one possesses the identity (in their view and in the view of others) determines which side of the racial dividing (white vs. non-white) line one lives in the United States. The United States has, in Mr. Coates view, a heritage of enslavement, a history of violent oppression, and a continuing practice of violating non-white personhood. He points out, coldly and rationally, that non-white people, today, still lack boundaries and protections against institutional and state-sanctioned forms of systemic violence. White people, or as Mr. Coates reminds us, "people who believe themselves to be white" take inviolable boundaries and protections against these kinds of institutional and state-sanctioned manifestations of systemic violence for granted. This is what really makes them white. I live in Harlem. It would shock me to the very core of my being if a NYPD officer stopped and frisked me for drugs, weapons or contraband. It would be a turning point in my life, a story I would tell for years, something I would pursue remediation for to the full extent possible, with no fear of further persecution because I chose to do so. I walk by black men being stopped and frisked by NYPD on these same Harlem streets so routinely that I hardly take notice of it. There's nothing rhetorical about that. It's a fact of my own life. If I had a black son, I would require him to read this book. Today.
Review: An Essential Voice. Don't Just Read, Listen. - I’ve put off writing this review for a while. I find, as a straight, white, middle-class dude, conversations about race feel thorny. As I walk along this journey toward racial justice, however, I’m learning to embrace my feelings of discomfort and to not hesitate to speak up. I won’t let my sweaty palms stop me from pecking out notes about what I’m learning. Stumbling through a conversation about race is one of the best ways to learn sensitivity and empathy. Additionally, I was encouraged by the vulnerability of the author to describe his own failings and his progress as he learned about the role that race plays in this country. Sometimes I think reckoning with the complexities of race is a uniquely white problem for which I do not have any good answers. I’m encouraged to know that people of color walk this path of dawning understanding, horror, and aching for change. This insight may be remedial. In fact, I’m sure most of mine are. But I take pride in these tiny ignorances dispelled and in these small steps toward justice and equality. I know that I too can walk this bumpy path forward keeping an open heart and an eye toward my own missteps. Beyond the author’s honesty in his growing racial understanding, the book is poignant, insightful, and beautifully written. I particularly appreciated the author’s emphasis of what is really at stake when we talk about racial injustice: black lives (or, as Coates puts it in relating to the African American’s ongoing fight to escape from the historical chains of slavery woven into our society, the “black body”). He places preservation of the black body as the highest priority. This is no political point. It’s about ending pointless death based on nothing other than skin color. There is no abstraction here. The black body is what is at stake because the black body is what is most grievously endangered by racism and social injustice. Coates writes, “All our phrasing--race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy--serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body” (10). Coates’ focus on the real-world realities rather than intentions drives home the pervasive presence of racial oppression built into our modern world. Another important point is the power of forgetting. Denial and forgetting are key in upholding unequal power structures. We can advocate for equal treatment while forgetting that our ancestors (and even our younger selves) have already rigged the system in our favor. It’s a point I consider especially trenchant as I watch protests slowly waning across the country. Will we remember George Floyd in a year? Will we remember the gut-punch of black bodies destroyed needlessly on the streets? Or will we allow it to fade with time? We must, if we’re serious about our commitment to equality, remember. Remember every galling episode of racial injustice you can, keep it at the forefront of your mind, let your memory guide your actions toward change. I’m fumbling and bumbling to try to articulate points that Coates draws beautifully and with deep empathy. He often writes in the second person as a letter to his son to prepare him for the world: “You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold” (71). Coates’ story helped me to realize how very different my upbringing was because of my whiteness and social class. He expresses thoughts that I never had to consider because of the insulated childhood I enjoyed. For example, he writes, “When our elders present school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing” (26). Again, “My father beat me for letting another boy steal from me. Two years later, he beat me for threatening my ninth-grade teacher. Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out” (28). And, “All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to ‘be twice as good,’ which is to say ‘accept half as much” (91). Coates weaves history, personal experience, and informed insight beautifully. His story is honest and visceral and convicting and horrifying and encouraging. This is an important book that ought to be read with an open heart willing to listen and believe. A

## Features

- #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER | NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER | PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST | NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST | NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review O: The Oprah Magazine The Washington Post People Entertainment Weekly Vogue Los Angeles Times San Francisco Chronicle Chicago Tribune New York Newsday Library Journal Publishers Weekly

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #13,329 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #7 in Discrimination & Racism #14 in Black & African American Biographies #79 in Sociology Reference |
| Customer Reviews | 4.6 out of 5 stars 44,131 Reviews |

## Images

![Between the World and Me - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91sSklCppdL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Just as Toni Morrison says, required reading.
*by R***D on July 19, 2015*

I could not put it down. I thought it would probably take me weeks of bringing this book along with me for my solo meals out, which is how I do much of my reading. I'd get through a bit here, chew on it, bite off a bit more, etc. Instead, I read it from beginning to end in one sitting, staying up long past my bedtime because I prefered reading it to sleeping. I began the book as my accompaniment for a solo meal out, that meal ran into more than two hours, then I brought it home and continued to read it until I was surprised and saddened by the last page. This is at once a beautiful, touching, moving and profoundly insightful book. It answered, in one swiftly deft sweep of elegant prose, questions about racial identity in America that have puzzled me since I realized that I was "white" and there were other people, mostly distinguished by skin color and economic class, who were "colored." I would guess I was around four or five years old when I first wondered why white and colored people were so angry with each other. It was 1964. This book is written, earnestly and sincerely, as a letter to his son. There is no artifice in this. It is a letter from a black father frightened for his black son, who wants him to understand his situation and be able to discern lies from truth as he deals with it. He almost too-dryly lays out the dangerous situations over which his son will have no control other than over his own actions and mental repose, explaining each with simple equations of self-interest, power and brutality. He then details his own struggle and evolution with all this, honestly unearthing his own now-abandoned limited views of the world, some left on the streets of Paris and some left on the boulevards of a now-gentrifying Harlem, now strolled by white women with strollers, the very neighborhood in which I live today and read this remarkable book. He describes white people as "people who believe themselves to be 'white.'" This distinction is the central revelation of this book for me as a man of caucasian and European descent. I was primed and readied for this view because I've never felt my "white" identity was something real. I'm a little Northern European on my mother's side, a little Southern European on my father's. I've had my DNA sequenced, so I know that my father's ancestors emigrated from Northern Africa to Southern Europe fifty-thousand years ago, about twenty-thousand years before my mother's ancestors came out of the Caucus mountains and moved to Northern Europe. I have more in common genetically with people in the Basque region of Spain than any other currently identifiable region, but my father's family regards it's European roots as being in Alsace, we have record of a DeWald as a tax collector in the region in the eleventh century. However, the name DeWald has it's richest history in South Africa, at least for the last couple of centuries, and in German, it means "of the woods." So, WTF am I? A German/English/Basque/Alsatian/Afrikaner? I'm all those things, but according to the US culture, I'm "white" along with my friends whose ancestors followed an entirely different path. We share a skin color and assumedly "not one drop" of the adulterating "colored" blood. That's what makes us white, and it is the only thing that makes us white. We believe we are and so does everyone around us. This is the point that Mr Coates makes so eloquently. "White" isn't a race, as such, it's an identity, and the degree to which one possesses the identity (in their view and in the view of others) determines which side of the racial dividing (white vs. non-white) line one lives in the United States. The United States has, in Mr. Coates view, a heritage of enslavement, a history of violent oppression, and a continuing practice of violating non-white personhood. He points out, coldly and rationally, that non-white people, today, still lack boundaries and protections against institutional and state-sanctioned forms of systemic violence. White people, or as Mr. Coates reminds us, "people who believe themselves to be white" take inviolable boundaries and protections against these kinds of institutional and state-sanctioned manifestations of systemic violence for granted. This is what really makes them white. I live in Harlem. It would shock me to the very core of my being if a NYPD officer stopped and frisked me for drugs, weapons or contraband. It would be a turning point in my life, a story I would tell for years, something I would pursue remediation for to the full extent possible, with no fear of further persecution because I chose to do so. I walk by black men being stopped and frisked by NYPD on these same Harlem streets so routinely that I hardly take notice of it. There's nothing rhetorical about that. It's a fact of my own life. If I had a black son, I would require him to read this book. Today.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ An Essential Voice. Don't Just Read, Listen.
*by P***F on October 12, 2020*

I’ve put off writing this review for a while. I find, as a straight, white, middle-class dude, conversations about race feel thorny. As I walk along this journey toward racial justice, however, I’m learning to embrace my feelings of discomfort and to not hesitate to speak up. I won’t let my sweaty palms stop me from pecking out notes about what I’m learning. Stumbling through a conversation about race is one of the best ways to learn sensitivity and empathy. Additionally, I was encouraged by the vulnerability of the author to describe his own failings and his progress as he learned about the role that race plays in this country. Sometimes I think reckoning with the complexities of race is a uniquely white problem for which I do not have any good answers. I’m encouraged to know that people of color walk this path of dawning understanding, horror, and aching for change. This insight may be remedial. In fact, I’m sure most of mine are. But I take pride in these tiny ignorances dispelled and in these small steps toward justice and equality. I know that I too can walk this bumpy path forward keeping an open heart and an eye toward my own missteps. Beyond the author’s honesty in his growing racial understanding, the book is poignant, insightful, and beautifully written. I particularly appreciated the author’s emphasis of what is really at stake when we talk about racial injustice: black lives (or, as Coates puts it in relating to the African American’s ongoing fight to escape from the historical chains of slavery woven into our society, the “black body”). He places preservation of the black body as the highest priority. This is no political point. It’s about ending pointless death based on nothing other than skin color. There is no abstraction here. The black body is what is at stake because the black body is what is most grievously endangered by racism and social injustice. Coates writes, “All our phrasing--race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy--serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body” (10). Coates’ focus on the real-world realities rather than intentions drives home the pervasive presence of racial oppression built into our modern world. Another important point is the power of forgetting. Denial and forgetting are key in upholding unequal power structures. We can advocate for equal treatment while forgetting that our ancestors (and even our younger selves) have already rigged the system in our favor. It’s a point I consider especially trenchant as I watch protests slowly waning across the country. Will we remember George Floyd in a year? Will we remember the gut-punch of black bodies destroyed needlessly on the streets? Or will we allow it to fade with time? We must, if we’re serious about our commitment to equality, remember. Remember every galling episode of racial injustice you can, keep it at the forefront of your mind, let your memory guide your actions toward change. I’m fumbling and bumbling to try to articulate points that Coates draws beautifully and with deep empathy. He often writes in the second person as a letter to his son to prepare him for the world: “You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold” (71). Coates’ story helped me to realize how very different my upbringing was because of my whiteness and social class. He expresses thoughts that I never had to consider because of the insulated childhood I enjoyed. For example, he writes, “When our elders present school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing” (26). Again, “My father beat me for letting another boy steal from me. Two years later, he beat me for threatening my ninth-grade teacher. Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out” (28). And, “All my life I’d heard people tell their black boys and black girls to ‘be twice as good,’ which is to say ‘accept half as much” (91). Coates weaves history, personal experience, and informed insight beautifully. His story is honest and visceral and convicting and horrifying and encouraging. This is an important book that ought to be read with an open heart willing to listen and believe. A

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ This book matters.
*by E***E on August 17, 2015*

Several years ago, I read an interview with members of the Brooklyn-based band TV on the Radio. Its members, several of whom are black, lamented the lack of political activism in art, music and journalism in the Bush-era. TVOTR had just released an anti-war song ("Dry Drunk Emperor"), but their frustrations went beyond foreign military interventions. In regards to enduring questions of race and racism, one band member asked: who would be the James Baldwin of this generation? At the time, I did not even recognize the name of the author of "Go Tell it on the Mountain" and "The Fire Next Time." I of course knew who Martin Luther King, Jr., was (or so I thought) and other black intellectuals, like Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, and Richard Wright. But Baldwin, along with his significance to the present, was unknown to me, a white teenager reading about the hottest new indie band. If the jacket quote from Toni Morrison on the cover of Between the World and Me is to be believed, however, we now have an answer to who is to be Baldwin's heir. I've been a reader of Ta-Nehisi Coates for a few years now, ever since I discovered his writing on race, history, and current events in The Atlantic. I knew that he had published a memoir, but I looked forward to what seemed the next logical progression: a book fusing the aforementioned themes, presenting them through Coates's measured, precise slow-burn prose. Between the World and Me is not quite that book, but it is a book with an immediacy and urgency that has emerged over the past year, since the events of Ferguson, Missouri and the emerging unavoidability of the question of police violence, the value of black lives, and white supremacy in the U.S. Though this is not the book that I anticipated, that is besides the point. This book is important and deserves a wide readership. Between the World and Me is written as an open letter, perhaps an overused genre in this age of social media and blogs, but one that works beautifully here. Coates writes as a father for his son, Samori, contemplating the degrees of continuity and change present in growing up as a black man since he grew up in West Baltimore. In reality, this book is a stellar example of the essay, a tradition with a great legacy in African American intellectual life. Coates moves between the arcs of history to the intensely personal revelations of his own life. One of the unifying themes of this book is the death of his friend Prince Jones at the hands of an undercover cop from Prince George's County, who stalked Jones across several jurisdictions. The fact that the undercover cop was black and P.G. County is home of one of the most black communities in the country makes the case more confounding. Reflecting on this experience and others, Coates arrives at a serious of pithy, impactful insights for his young black son, including: "it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage." Observations like these move towards a critical and thoughtful perspective on U.S. history, one that does not simply call out racism but that asks how and why racism and white supremacy works (though the abstraction of racism is recognizable throughout the text, the word "racist" or "racism" is rarely if ever deployed.) Coates explores and probes other ideas that he has previously explored in his Atlantic articles: deconstructing, for example, Saul Bellow's quip about Tolstoy and the Zulus. Moving (and new for me) was Coates's retelling of his struggle with history while a student at Howard University, which he alternately refers to as The Mecca: moving beyond a teleological vision of "first" black achievers (implicitly culminating in the "first black president") or alternative heroes representative of an essential, unquestioned "black race", and instead towards a vision of history as debates, disagreements, and overall struggle against given assumptions. If all Americans (those who believe they are Americans?) took this vision to heart, perhaps we could confront the contradictions of our national history and its enduring inequalities based on white supremacy and a disregard for black bodies and black lives. The book's description promises that it "clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward"--I'm not sure if this essay delivers on the last, nor could we expect it to do as much. Samori and the present generation will elaborate this vision (or at least that is the hope) and will do so in spite of and in response to the challenges of the present. Some criticisms also have highlighted the fact that "the destruction of the black body" discussed here appears to refer to the male body--at the expense of the specific destruction experienced by women of color. Sandra Bland comes to mind as a recent example, but women are indeed present in this narrative in a specific way, often as secondary or as support figures rather than as protagonists. This is less of a failing of Coates and more of a decision not to overextend beyond the framework of a father talking to his son--the relationship that social and cultural critics often imagine is somehow naturally absent in the black community. Let this book serve as a rejoinder to that narrative. In spite of these criticisms, this essay is succinct, tight, and often engrossing--one that you will read quickly but one to which you will need to return for reflection. I still await Coates's book of historical synthesis, in effect previewed in his landmark piece "The Case for Reparations" but for now, this is the intervention that we need. Read and, most of all, discuss.

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