Early experiences in Coates’s life made him realize the inescapable truths about being black.Here are the 3 biggest lessons I’ve learned from this book: The message he has is simple, “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.” He reveals a life of fear that is part of black people’s everyday life because the system that should protect them falls woefully short. We see how policies and culture have given them an unfair horizontal trajectory.Ĭoates wrote this book as a letter to his teenage son. In Between the World and Me, author and award-winning journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates pulls back the curtain and allows us to see the black condition in America today. But you can still see racism in every aspect of public life in America. Slavery and discrimination may be illegal. Nobody can really know what it’s like to live life as an African American in the US unless they’ve experienced it.

Publisher: Text Publishing ISBN: 9781925240702 Number of pages: 166 Weight: 212 g Dimensions: 234 x 153 x 19 mm Edition: UK ed.Listen to the audio of this summary with a free reading.fm account*: In his trademark style - a mix of lyrical personal narrative, reimagined history, essayistic argument, and reportage - Coates provides readers a thrillingly illuminating new framework for understanding race: its history, our contemporary dilemma, and where we go from here. Here, Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings - moments when he discovered some new truth about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield, a journey to Chicago's South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America's 'long war on black people,' or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him - most urgently, the mystery of race, an abstract concept that put the safety of him and the people he loved the most, including his son, in constant jeopardy. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant 'government of the people' but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term 'people' to actually mean.įor Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal.

Between the world and me book