Between the World and Me

The summary

The night it was announced that Michael Brown’s killers would go free, Coates’s fifteen-year-old son said “I’ve got to go,” went into his room, and cried. His father came in five minutes later and did not hug him, did not tell him it would be okay, because he has never believed it would be. He said what his own parents had told him: this is your country, this is your body, find some way to live within it. The book is the long version of that answer.

Race is the child of racism

Americans treat race as a fact of nature, which lets them deplore the Middle Passage the way you’d deplore an earthquake. Coates reverses it. Difference in hue and hair is old; the belief that hue and hair can correctly organize a society is new, invented to justify a hierarchy that came first. This is why he never writes “white people” but “people who believe that they are white.” They were Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Jewish before they were white, and the washing of those tribes white came through flayed backs and sold children, not wine tastings and ice cream socials.

The second insistence is physical. All the careful phrasing — race relations, racial profiling, white privilege — obscures that racism dislodges brains, blocks airways, cracks bones. “The sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

Fear was the weather of West Baltimore

Coates grew up among people who were dangerously afraid, though he didn’t recognize it as fear: it looked like big coats, medallions, a practiced bop, hard eyes. He was eleven, outside a 7-Eleven, when a boy with small eyes pulled a gun, tucked it, untucked it, and put it away. The boy didn’t need to shoot; he had made his point about how easily Coates could be selected.

His father beat him for letting another boy steal from him, and again for threatening a teacher. The logic fit in one sentence: “Either I can beat him, or the police.” A third of his brain went daily to who he walked to school with, how many times he smiled, who offered a pound. Streets and schools were two arms of the same beast: fail the streets and a crew takes your body now; fail the schools and you’re suspended back onto those streets, where the country can wash its hands — he should have stayed in school. Everyone told him to be twice as good, which he says only ever meant accept half as much.

The Mecca broke his myths too

Howard University — The Mecca — gave him the whole black diaspora inside a twenty-minute walk across the Yard, and the Moorland-Spingarn reading room, where he ordered books three call slips at a time. He arrived carrying a counter-myth: black kings in exile, Queen Nzinga as his answer to Saul Bellow’s sneer, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?”

His professors took it apart. Linda Heywood retold the Nzinga story without romance — the queen had an adviser get on all fours to serve as her chair — and it landed as a sucker punch: his breakable body was the adviser’s, not the queen’s. He’d come looking for a parade of champions and found a brawl of ancestors, Hurston battling Hughes, Du Bois warring with Garvey. Ralph Wiley had already answered Bellow — “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus” — and Coates saw that his error wasn’t adopting someone else’s dream but accepting the need for dreams at all.

Prince Jones, and what a body costs

Prince Jones was a Howard student, a doctor’s son, born-again, generous. A Prince George’s County officer in plain clothes followed him from Maryland through Washington into Virginia and shot him yards from his fiancée’s home, then said Prince had tried to run him over. The officer was a known liar whose earlier false arrest had forced prosecutors to drop every case he touched. He was hunting a man five foot four and 250 pounds; Prince was six three and 211. He was charged with nothing and put back on the street. At the funeral, mourners asked forgiveness for him. Coates, who believes the body is the whole of the self, could not: Prince was killed less by one officer than by his country.

Years later he visits Dr. Mable Jones, who integrated her Louisiana high school, went to med school at LSU, served in the Navy, became chief of radiology. Asked whether she regretted Prince choosing Howard over Harvard, she gasped: “No. I regret that he is dead.” She had bought him a jeep at twenty-three with a huge purple bow on it. “And that was the jeep he was killed in.”

Struggle instead of hope

The Dream is what he refuses to let his son enter: perfect houses, nice lawns, Memorial Day cookouts, treehouses, a country that “smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake.” It runs on forgetting. At the onset of the Civil War, enslaved bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all American industry and railroads combined. Later came redlining, ghettos planned as carefully as any subdivision, and the jargon of “black-on-black crime” — shooting a man, then shaming him for bleeding.

So he offers no rescue. What he hands his son is struggle — “verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope” — never pinned on the Dreamers converting, because the same appetite that stows bodies in prisons is now working on the planet.

The bottom line

American history isn’t background to racism, it’s the mechanism, and every abstraction about it eventually arrives as a hand on a body: his father’s belt, an officer’s gun, a jeep with a purple bow. Coates won’t console you, and he admits his own wisdom is partial. Read it if you want the case made without hedging, in prose specific enough to argue with.