‘Between The World And Me’ (2015) by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Counter Arts Book Club 2023
“In America it is traditional to destroy the black body”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between The World And Me
Coates was motivated to write his book after a meeting with President Obama in 2013 which seems to have been a little too deferential and bothered Coates so much that he needed to express what he really felt and wanted to say — but hadn’t — about the status of the black body in American society even though a black man had now become President.
Coates had been reading James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) and was encouraged by his wife to channel that experience — both the book, its power, and his disappointing meeting with Obama — into his own fire this time, expressed within his recapitulation of American history through a 40-year-old black man’s eyes, experiences and deeply grounded education both academically and on the “streets”. And so Between The World And Me was born.
Ostensibly the book is written as — a very long — letter to his 15-year-old son as Baldwin wrote his epistolary book to his even younger nephew. Coate’s work takes structural and thematic inspiration from James Baldwin. Yet one of the main attractions of the book for me is the autobiographical nature of it as he details his own experiences growing up in Baltimore and then looks at them with an objective eye, to show his son, how dangerous every move you make or choice you make can be to the black body. This is all then linked to slavery and the historic and contemporaneous atrocities committed against the black body, both male and female.
Coate’s detailed timelines for himself and his own family and friends show how this physical threat and danger is institutionalised and has become structural to the American Dream. This America is controlled and run by what he calls the ‘Dreamers’. He is referring of course to the American Dream and the followers who need the black body as fuel to run the system that created the Dream and to continue its insidious existence. The Dreamers are still violently exploiting and violently subjugating the black body. Just take a look at the carceral system in America.
He prioritizes the physical security of African-American bodies over the tradition in Black Christianity of optimism and faith in eventual justice (i.e., being on God’s side). As Coates discussed in a 2015 interview at the Chicago Humanities Festival, he was inspired by his college professor Eileen Boris who developed an extended metaphor of the physical body for exploitation by objectification in her course, “History of Women in America” at Howard University.
Coates is critical of those who in the Civil Rights Movement believed that non-violence would overcome and triumph and he seems more in tune with Malcolm X and James Baldwin. But he is not advocating a violent overthrow to his son, he is advocating the continuation of the struggle with an awareness of the dangers inherent to the black body. But the struggle begins at birth and he quotes in the book directly from Malcolm X,
“If you’re black you were born in jail.”
There in a nutshell of experience and wisdom is the true immensity and scale of the black struggle.
How that struggle can be successful when the Dreamers still control the structures of power and the police as Coates details in describing the continuing murders of black people by police for just being black — which included a friend of his Prince Jones— Coates does not say.
His book was written in 2015 just as Ferguson was exploding, but years before the George Floyd murder and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests. And America still has the Dreamers pulling the strings and the racist police shooting black people dead just because they can and will never face justice.
His book is not an angry book but it still imparts a cool rage against the abuse, physical transgression of bodily integrity and dignity, and the murder of black people and forewarns of fiery retribution.
“Revenge is a dish best served cold,”
wrote Shakespeare and Coates knows this well from the historical folly of heated black responses even to massive injustices. But if you have nothing to lose then the fires will inevitably arise even if you are burning down your own neighbourhood. I know how uncontainable anger can be especially if you feel it to be righteous anger.
But his letter to his son is as it should be responsible. And because of that it is a poetic, powerful, and eloquent testimony to the dignity of mothers, daughters, brothers, sisters, and children suffering from the murders of their loved ones, time and time again.
Their loss is almost unbearable but they do keep going. It is compounded by the fact that the loved one now dead was completely innocent. Just driving along the road in a nice jeep and maybe looking very happy as the world — America — was for a moment a great place to be alive in and then they are stopped by a cop. And they never enjoy their life again. Shot dead.
A black body that has been so dehumanised by the Dreamers that it has no mind in that body. And without a mind, it is not human. Therefore, it is an animal. A dog to be given orders. And if it disobeys or even speaks up for itself? That is the vicious dehumanising racist circle. This is my interpretation of what I have seen and heard in countless news reports and written articles over the decades. These are not the words of Coates.
Coates is a journalist. And his book, although outwardly very personal, does not lose sight of its purpose which is to describe and show how the black body has been treated by the Dreamers since slavery. It is not a historical work in the formal sense but it is a brilliant historical debunking of those freedom-loving American Dreamers and their white supremacist foundation in slavery and continuing structural defence of Dreamland by the police forces of America.
The book was written for his son but I have to say there are times when it felt to me that Coates was writing to himself as if he were the young Coates at 15 years old. But, what he has seen and learnt, is, what makes this book so important both politically and historically.
It is ironic and deeply saddening that like Baldwin before him he can only truly find acceptance and freedom as a black man, in Paris. Baldwin had the extra weight to carry as he was a gay black man. But this would surely make any decent American — or Englishman like me — very sad to hear that only in Paris a black man can feel no threat of violence to his body which is the complete opposite from the country he was born into.
Yet in his 2015 book Coates mentions the Algerian taxi driver and his despair at the racism in France. And 8 years after the book is written we have the riots in France over the shooting by police of a young French lad of Algerian extraction in Paris. Another black body violated and then destroyed.
The riots/uprising against not just the murder of a young man in Paris but against the daily violation of human rights and the constant threat of violence against the black body — of whatever heritage — brought France to the brink of social revolution.
Coates was 40 when he wrote the book and he is now nearly 50 and there is a new generation out there now. I in my writings have quoted from Malcolm X and even Martin Luther King was starting to link the civil rights movement with the exploitation of workers and thereby create a more dangerous political movement. The times they are a-changing again. The young have had enough and they are prepared to challenge the highest level of Dreamers and their racist protectors in uniform.
And Coates himself prophetically tells his son that the days of the Dreamers are numbered because of their love of the oil and the automobile. It is not the fire of revolt that is coming but the very fire from the Earth itself that will inevitably and inexorably overwhelm the Dreamers.
Coates is of course referring to climate change. We have seen such fires this past week. As I watched and read the book his words echoed loudly and clearly he was absolutely right.
His book did not make me feel angry. I have been angry about injustice both in my country and outside of my country for 40 bloody years. Little has changed in my lifetime, in fact, it has got worse. Fascism and Authoritarianism has returned with a vengeance. And of course, as Coates referenced back in 2015 the world is now on fire.
I do look forward to the Dreamers getting their well-deserved deserts and justice for the longest drawn-out atrocity in human history. It has been an unrelenting 250 years of rape, lynching, torture, abuse, and murder of African-American people.
I am sorry but I can only see tragedy ahead. Because those Dreamers will not go quietly into that possible Brave New World because they will not relinquish their Dream.
