Between the world and me (by Ta-Nehisi Coates)

(Amazon UK link)

I had never heard of the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. He’s an American journalist and activist, apparently. This book was allocated for this month’s local book group, and I acquired it second-hand when I was in the UK last summer. So by the time I embarked on ‘Between the world and me’ I had entirely forgotten anything I had read about it.

Since most of our book club books are fiction, it took a few moments for me to realise that this is a non-fiction account, unusually written in the form of a long letter to the author’s son Samori, who was fifteen at the time of writing (the book was published in 2015). It’s a book that has been highly rated and praised, and which was a bestseller. 

The book opens by describing a video interview which the author did, answering questions about what he meant by ‘losing his body’. It’s an odd phrase, and I’m not sure I ever fully understood why he expressed it that way. What he is referring to is the fact that, in his understanding, because he’s black he’s essentially an under class in American society. His body is not his own, even though slavery and segregation are things of the past. 

The whole book then builds on this, with a mixture of anecdotes and reflection. The writing is extremely high quality, poetic in places. And while it gives some horrific examples of white dominance, and almost more shocking examples of black brutality, the narrative manages to avoid complaining or evoking pity. The author apparently accepts history, including his own rather violent childhood. He was regularly beaten with belts; his parents would probably be imprisoned nowadays for such abuse. But they were supposedly doing this as a way to ensure he wouldn’t be treated even more badly by the rest of the world. I don’t understand that logic at all, but it apparently seemed to make sense at the time.

Coats acknowledges that his son is in a different world; yet he wants to give him advice, or at least information that may help him in the future. He explains that ‘race’ as such isn’t a straightforward issue, and goes on to explore different kinds of bigotry, separation and culture. The author is a well-educated, literate and articulate person yet he acknowledges his background in the slums of Baltimore. He doesn’t want a world where everyone is equal, but where everyone is equally respected, able to pursue their dreams and develop their talents irrelevant of their income, skin colour, size, gender or any other potentially discriminating feature.

So there’s a lot of good content in this book, much of which was quite eye-opening to me as a non-American white person. It’s worth reading, in my view, and it’s a message that needs to be said, and read, and taken to heart by those responsible for training and educating people in authority, such as the police.

However, I found it quite heavy going in the first fifty pages or so, and almost gave up before I finished the first (longest) section of the book. The author digresses in a somewhat rambling way - deliberately, I assume - as he starts to explain things. He's partly writing at a meta-level, asking himself why racism happens, wondering what it is, deep down, and what it means to consider oneself 'white', when nobody's skin is truly white. 

There are many names mentioned, too. They are real people, who suffered or were killed without any wrong doing; but I hadn’t heard of most of them. So I didn’t have any feeling for them, or knowledge of the circumstances. And that made it hard to relate. 

And, in my opinion, the elegant language actually detracts, somewhat, from the horrors that are being described. There’s nothing explicit, which is good; but the writing feels too poetic when used for scenes of insults, violence, and so on. I sometimes got caught up in the style of the writing without actually taking in what was being said.

But I kept reading. The second section has more anecdotes, with plenty of detail and no expectation that the reader might know anything about the people concerned.  And it’s written in a more straightforward, story-telling style which I found painted the picture of what was happening very effectively. It was interesting to read about the different experience the author had in France, where he was ‘different’ because of the language constraints, rather than his skin colour. 

Then the last section, which is the shortest of all, is about a meeting the author had with the mother of one of his friends who was murdered by someone in authority, due to mistaken identity. The mother is a well-respected doctor, and her son was brought up in affluence. It makes the point that it’s not just the impoverished who are targeted; it’s also relevant that the police officer who shot her son was himself black. It’s still a tragedy, one that should be averted.

I didn’t think I was going to like this book at first. Perhaps ‘like’ is the wrong word anyway. It’s a very well-written account of events that need to be told from the point of view of someone who relates to the victims. And if the rather rambling, poetic style is a bit off-putting, perhaps it’s deliberate, to show another difference - to help the reader, no matter how idealistic, to see how culture and education don’t actually make some people feel valued or of equal worth to those with white skin.

I very much doubt if I’ll read this again, but I’m glad I finished it.  Worth persevering if you have any interest in this topic. 

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