Publisher Speigel and Grau bumped the release date up in response to the massacre of nine churchgoers in Charleston, as Between the World and Me “spoke to this moment.”īut the rush to get the book on shelves didn’t preclude Toni Morrison: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died,” Morrison had written. Coates writes about the physical and psychological toll of being black in America, in the form of six letters/chapters to his son. Originally conceived as a collection of essays on the Civil War, Between the World and Me arrived four months ahead of its scheduled publication with a more urgent focus. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within all of it.” The answer is American history.When a Missouri grand jury decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for killing 18-year-old Michael Brown, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates watched his 15-year-old son Samori slowly stand up and walk into his own Baltimore bedroom to cry.Īs Coates recounts this story in Between the World and Me, he writes that he followed his son, but did not hug or console him: “I did not tell you it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request.
The host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she turned to the subject of my body, although she did not mention it specifically. When the host asked me about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week. A satellite closed the miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which I had been summoned to speak. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote studio on the Far West Side of Manhattan.
Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body.
Ta-Nehisi Coates - Letter To My Son The Atlantic | September 2015 "And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white." - James Baldwin - Ta-Nehisi Coates
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