Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

I am highly recommending Between The World and Me by Ta-Nehisi not so that you can agree or disagree with him, but for you to read and try to understand his perspective of growing up as a Black man in America. All of our stories are important....

I must confess that I totally admire Coates for being what I call a “self-educated man.” He grew up in a house where he was exposed to books and then he later made the journey to Howard University to use their extensive library and the culture that the students brought to the University to educate himself. I admire that he took the time to read and study things that may or may not have been taught in his classes and used the wide array of cultures within the African American community in order to learn to think critically and to leave Howard without a degree but with a great education.

Coates can write, and he strings words together in a way that made this short book read like poetry at times: “In this way racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.” Powerful right??

This book was painful to read at times such as when he talks about growing up in Baltimore, systematic racism, schools that are not liberating children, but on the other hand this book was also liberating when he states that “But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious. And you are here now, and you must live - and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else’s country, but in your own home. The warmth of dark energies that drew me to The Mecca, that drew out Prince Jones, the warmth of our particular world, is beautiful, no matter how brief and breakable.”

I read this book twice, and it gave me so many things to think about such as race as a social construct, the purpose of school, the importance of traveling abroad, how vulnerable our bodies can be, how awful it must feel to be a man who can not provide for his family, a father’s ability to show love to his son, the power of questioning and on and on and on...

Look for blog posts where I will write about the many topics that I read about in this short book; I could write for months about this particular book.

Right now, this country is having very courageous conversations on Between the World and Me, so please read this book so that you can at least follow the conversations...

Happy Monday!

Next, I’ll be reading The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs.