NIKKI BYRD — writer, thinker, lover

Note: This content was written entirely by me and was not generated, edited, or researched using AI.

SYNOPSIS

Between the World and Me is a 2015 nonfiction book written by American author Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It was written by Coates as a letter to his then-teenage son about his perception of what the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States are.

REVIEW

In this autobiography, Coates puts the darkness of black history and the endangerment of black bodies into perspective for all who have forgotten that slavery has existed longer than not, for the ones who have been smokescreened by inches of progress within the last century. Because Coates is an atheist, the lens in which he perceives and the way in which he addresses his son are hard, naked truths, devoid of shame, of softness – no relentlessness in describing the horrific reality of being born into a black body. Of all that Coates consumes, investigates, and regards, he concludes this country has washed its hands twice over with black history, although the plundering of our race will always and forever be consistent; this he stresses to his son.

“You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance – not matter how improved – as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.”

“You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.”

Cause and effect. Coates recalls the fear this country has embedded in black bodies weaved by the beating, raping, lynching, killing, and caging of the black race by design in the past and present, weaved through the disregard and ignorance of their bloodied history, horrors forgotten and shunned; how this juggernaut of oppression has modernized enslavers gradually and deceptively into government uniforms and badges, with the disguise to protect and serve, to pay for their [‘the people who believed they were white’] summer homes and shiny cars with the payment of black bodies time and time again and how that fear manifests within households, on the streets, and in schools.

He observes the fear in the black bodies that loiter in his neighborhood brandishing their guns, the whippings he’d endure for being too soft or being too hard, how his education at school felt more like compliance than a nourishment of his curiosities and fascinations, leading him nowhere, securing no one. In these places, he did not find a world in which he fit and felt everdistant from the “Dream”.

“Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies. I knew this because there was a large television resting in my living room. In the evenings I would sit before this television bearing witness to the dispatches from this other world. There were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak. That other world was suburban and endless, organized around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sundaes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and glens. Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of ‘Mr. Belvedere.’ I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.”

In this autobiography addressed to his son, Samori, Coates continues to enrich his audience with experiences at Howard, The Mecca, of rich black lives of students ranging from Q dogs and gangsters to mathematical geniuses and Muslims with bindis and hijabs from Bangalore; with the death of a brother and the birth of his son, how the tragedy of that death and the creation of a black life he so desperately wanted to protect – that of his own blood – shaped his reality all at his age of 40. A hard truth: no matter how affluent, reserved, controlled, no matter the accolades earned or doctorates hanging on the wall, there was nothing that would stop this country from trying to destroy black bodies.

Just how Jay-Z raps in The Story of O.J.:

Light nigga, dark nigga, faux nigga, real nigga
Rich nigga, poor nigga, house nigga, field nigga
Still nigga

And still with Coates’ stories of travel, he tells of how he ventured outside of the country, yet not and never outside of his black body, never being able to escape to the ‘Dream’.

What he addresses within this book is that there is no consciousness in the ‘Dream’. There is only greed fueled by the payment and transaction of black bodies — dead or alive; in releasing police officers back into the streets who murdered black bodies in cold blood, deeming us worthless to a great country, the land of the free. But he urges his son to remember his beauty and his value, urges his son to seek his community, as much as he urges his son to struggle and continue on, forever and for whatever reason, and not forget, never forget, the horrors endured of his people and this country.

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is— the right to break the black body as a meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.

You and I, my son, are that “below.” That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream.”

Coates, at the stake of societal frailty, with no desire of absolution, unbandages and reveals the truth — that is cruel, bloody, and visceral, naturally, in the wake of its history.

★★★★