Between the World and Me

“There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy.” 

Coates clarifies that he does not believe the police officers who murder black people are evil; rather, they are merely carrying out the agenda of a legal and social system meant to disadvantage black people.

“But 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.” 

Coates returns to the central theme of the book, which is the precarity of the black body in America. His expresses his disinterest in intellectualizing and debating race, reducing its effects to the killing of black people, the extermination of black bodies.

“When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream.” 

Through the anecdote of a white female journalist pressing Coates to approach race relations with “hope,” Coates maintains that turning a blind eye to the realities of racism, namely that it kills black people, is to remain in a “gorgeous dream.” This willful ignorance perpetuates systems that oppress black people to the advantage of white people.

“And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.” 

Coates articulates his understanding of white peoples’ attraction to the Dream but emphasizes that, as a black person whom the illusion of the Dream of equity harms, he cannot partake in that Dream, as it falls in direct opposition to his lived experience.

“I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. 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 that you must find some way to live within the all of it.”

Like Coates’s parents before him, Coates does not shield his son from the pain and reality of racism in America because to do so would be to hinder his ability to survive.

“It does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black—what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable.” 

Here Coates addresses the argument around black police officers killing black citizens. In public discourse some argue that the identity of a black police officer killing a black citizen calls into question the idea that police brutality is racially motivated. Again, Coates emphasizes that the cause of police brutality is not the will or even the identity of individual police officers but a system that allows for the continued killing of black people. Therefore, it does not matter what race the officer is. What matters is that they work for and represent a system founded on the oppression of black people.

“I recall learning these laws clearer than I recall learning my colors and shapes, because these laws are essential to the security of my body.” 

Coates articulates his frustration with the rules of the school system in light of the profound violence happening on his streets. He questions why children should follow the rules of educational institutions when their bodies are being threatened every day in their neighborhoods.

“I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.”

Coates claims that his childhood curiosity was never met in school. Rather, his schools were more interested in teaching him how to follow the rules. Thus, schools stunted rather than stoked his questions about the world at large.

“‘Good intention’ is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”

Coates asserts that excusing the dangers of the Dream under the moniker of “good intentions” only perpetuates it further. Good intentions and hope are used as an excuse not to enact equitable change in the United States.

“Malcolm spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the laws that proscribed our imagination.” 

Contrary to the history of exceptional and nonviolent black people that Coates learns about in school, the writer, activist, and leader Malcolm X was plainspoken and honest. Malcolm X did not sugarcoat the realities of racial violence in America, nor did he pander to white people in power. He encouraged black people to take pride in themselves and create their own systems of power and self-governance.

“The Mecca—the vastness of black people across spacetime—could be experienced in a twenty-minute walk across campus.”

When Coates arrives at the historically black Howard University, he is struck by the vastness and beauty of black life on display on the school’s campus.

“They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental ‘firsts’—first black five-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West was white.” 

Coates describes his limited exposure to black history in public schools, where he only learned about black people who were the first in their field. In contrast, his father avidly consumed books about black empowerment written by black authors.

“Things I believed merely a week earlier, ideas I had taken from one book, could be smashed splinters by another.” 

Coates explains how his version of an idealized African past is deconstructed by the history courses he takes at Howard University.

“The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom.” 

Even at Howard University, Coates realizes that he does not respond well to organized, rote classroom thinking. He would rather investigate on his own, consulting resources as he sees fit.

“He was, like me, from one of those cities where everyday life was so different than the Dream that it demanded an explanation.” 

At Howard, Coates meets other young people who are equally disillusioned by the Dream due to their social and economic circumstances. They see how the Dream has not applied to them.

“Before you, I had my questions but nothing beyond my own skin in the game, and that was really nothing at all because I was a young man, and not yet clear on my own human vulnerabilities. But I was grounded and domesticated by the plain fact that should I now go down, I would not go down alone.” 

Remembering the birth of his son, Coates circles back to the notion of survival. He realizes that his son Samori’s survival is now contingent upon his own.

“I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in the schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the world, as it is.” 

Coates encourages his son to seek knowledge on his own terms, and outside of institutions, which Coates views as counterproductive to black empowerment.

“You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuances, error, and humanity.”

Coates emphasizes the importance of remembering America’s past, particularly the exploitation of enslaved black people, to fully understand the conditions that black people live in today.

“But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you.” 

Coates points to the double standard in the United States that holds all black people accountable for the actions of other black people, most notably in the prevalence of racial profiling. In the case of Prince Jones, the suspect that the officer was looking for was five foot four, while Prince Jones was six foot three.

“That was where I saw white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem boulevards in T-shirts and jogging shorts. Or I saw them lost in conversation with each other, mother and father, while their sons commanded entire sidewalks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.” 

Coates describes the spatial entitlement that he sees on the streets of New York City on the part of white parents and their children. He sees this gesture as symbolic of the power and privilege bestowed upon white people in general, which they teach to their children. While white children are taught that they deserve to take up space (in this case an entire sidewalk), black children are taught to contain and restrain themselves to survive living in America.

“‘I could have you arrested!’ Which is to say: ‘I could take your body.’” 

Coates describes an incident on the streets of New York City, when a white man threatens to have him arrested. Coates uses this scene to illustrate the everyday white supremacy and dominance that black people face.

“The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.” 

Coates alludes to the sanitization of American history that paints slavery as an act of benevolence and the Civil War as a question of heritage rather than a fight for “the right to beat, rape, rob, and pillage the black body” (102).

“In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.” 

Coates uses the Civil War to illustrate the history of social hierarchy in the United States and how the country used black bodies to further the American economic agenda, later instrumentalizing the law to justify it. Counter to the romanticized narratives of the Civil War conveyed on historical tours and in history books, Coates emphasizes that black sacrifice and pain are integral to American success.