Between the World and Me

Publication

Coates was inspired to write Between the World and Me following a 2013 meeting with sitting United States President Barack Obama. Coates, a writer for The Atlantic, had been reading James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time and was determined to make his second meeting with the president less deferential. As he left for Washington, D.C., his wife encouraged him to think like Baldwin and Coates recalled an unofficial, fiery meeting between Baldwin, black activists, and Robert Kennedy in 1963. When it was his turn, Coates fought with Obama over how his policy addressed racial disparities in the universal health care rollout. After the event, Obama and Coates spoke privately about a blog post Coates had written in criticism of the president's call for more personal responsibility among African Americans. Obama thought the criticism was unjust and told Coates not to despair.

As Coates walked to the train station, he thought of how Baldwin did not share Obama's optimism, the same optimism of the civil rights movement that believed in the inevitability of justice. Instead, Coates saw Baldwin as "cold", without "sentiment and melodrama", as he acknowledged that the movement could fail and that requital was not guaranteed. Coates found this idea "freeing" and called Christopher Jackson to ask "why no one wrote like Baldwin anymore". Jackson, the book's editor, proposed that Coates try.

Between the World and Me is Coates's second book, following his 2008 memoir The Beautiful Struggle. Since then, and especially in the 18 months including the Ferguson unrest leading up to his new book's release, Coates somberly believed less in the soul and its aspirational sense of eventual justice. Coates felt that he had become more radicalized. The book's title comes from a poem by Richard Wright, which, although now published in numerous collections, was first published in the July/August 1935 issue of the journal Partisan Review. Wright's poem is about a Black man discovering the site of a lynching and becoming incapacitated with fear, creating a barrier between himself and the world. Despite many changes in Between the World and Me, Coates always planned to end the book with the story of Mabel Jones. The only endorsement Coates sought was that of novelist Toni Morrison, which he received. Between the World and Me was published by Spiegel & Grau in 2015.

Summary

Between the World and Me adopts the structure of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time. The latter is directed, in part, towards Baldwin's nephew, while the former addresses Coates's 15-year-old son. This letter contemplates the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being black in the United States. Coates recapitulates the American history of violence against black people and the incommensurate policing of black youth. The book's tone is bleak, which is guided by Coates's experiences growing up poor and always in the way of bodily harm. He prioritizes the physical security of African-American bodies over the black, Christian tradition of optimism, "uplift", and eventual justice (i.e., being on God's side). His background, which he describes as "physicality and chaos", puts more emphasis on the daily corporeal concerns of being an African-American. Coates's position is that absent the religious rhetoric of "hope and dreams and faith and progress", only systems of white supremacy remain along with no real evidence that those systems will change. In this way, he disagrees with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s optimism towards integration and Malcolm X's optimism towards nationalism. Coates does not believe there is reason to be optimistic, and does not expect the association between America and white supremacy to ever change. He feels that even the death of white supremacy would just lead to "a new peon class".

Coates gives an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth "always on guard" in Baltimore and the fear he felt towards both the police and the streets—both of which threatened physical harm. He also feared the rules of code-switching to meet the clashing social norms of the streets, the authorities, and the professional world. To this experience, he compares neat suburban life. Coates calls this life "the Dream" in that it is an exclusionary fantasy for white people enabled by and largely ignorant of their history of privilege and suppression. To become conscious of their gains from slavery, segregation, and voter suppression would shatter that Dream. The book ends with a story about Mabel Jones, the daughter of a sharecropper who worked and rose in social class to give her children comfortable lives with private schools and European trips. Her son, Coates' college friend Prince Carmen Jones Jr., was mistakenly tracked and killed by a policeman. Coates uses his story to argue that race-related tragedy affects black people of means as well.

Reception

After reading Between the World and Me, novelist Toni Morrison wrote that Coates fills "the intellectual void" left by James Baldwin's death 28 years prior. A. O. Scott of The New York Times said the book is "essential, like water or air". David Remnick of The New Yorker described it as "extraordinary".

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times wrote that Between the World and Me functioned as a sequel to Coates's 2008 memoir, which displayed Coates's talents as an emotional and lyrical writer. Coates's use of "the Dream" (in reference to paradisal suburban life) confused her, and she thought Coates stretched beyond what is safely generalizable. In particular, she felt that his comment on the 9/11 first responders was phrased so as to be easily misread. Kakutani felt that Coates did not consistently acknowledge the racial progress that has been made over the course of centuries. Some parts read like the author's internal debate. Benjamin Wallace-Wells of New York said that a sense of fear for one's children propels the book, and Coates's atheism gives the book a sense of urgency.

On November 18, 2015, it was announced that Coates had won the National Book Award for Between the World and Me. NPR's Colin Dwyer had considered it the favorite to win the prize, given the book's reception.

The book topped the New York Times Best Seller list for nonfiction on August 2, 2015, and remained #1 for three weeks. It again topped the New York Times Best Seller list the week of January 24, 2016.

The book was selected by Washington University in St. Louis as the book for all first year students must read and discuss in the fall 2016 semester.

Tom Eley and David Walsh, writing on the World Socialist Web Site, criticized Coates's book as narrow, parochial, nationalist, and dystopian. They said that the book was not a protest of the reality of the vast majority of Americans, as it left out discussion of key social conditions such as poverty.

Editions and translations