Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates’s debt to Baldwin is quite explicit. It joins Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped as recent, high-profile literary meditations on the tragedy of race in this country. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me is in the same mode of The Fire Next Time it is a book designed to wake you up. He woke me up, and gave me a way to keep moving through all of it. Meanwhile, my fellow students, the white ones, were incensed by OJ Simpson’s acquittal, even as they said nothing when a Bronx man named Anthony Baez was killed by a police officer in a chokehold.īaldwin came to me at the right time. Politicians who had just taken control of Congress were reading this book, and I could see already that it would lead to policies that would do harm. Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve – which argued that my intelligence would rate lower on the spectrum because of my race – had just been released. I had just finished a year at Columbia University as one of just a very few black students there. The months before I picked up that book had built in me a kind of dread I couldn’t name, spurred on by a constellation of events that were all designed to remind me of “my place”.

At the time I was living in Morningside Heights, a neighborhood to the south-west of Harlem.

The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.I first read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time 20 years ago, and it saved me.

And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The abuses that have followed from these policies-the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects-are the product of democratic will. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. “You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates