Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between The World And Me, Speigelll & Grau, NY, 2015.
Available as hardback, paperback,
audiobook (CD) and for Kindle, Audible and Nook.
Nonfiction
Recommended by Dorinda Kauzlarich-Rupe
This book is absolutely a must read,
especially for all white Americans! The author is a black man writing to his
adolescent son, explaining what it is like to live in a black body in today’s
American society. It is depressing, anger provoking, and terribly haunting,
while elucidating much empathy, and causing me to want so badly to see the
situation change NOW. Coates paints a picture of the USA in which the American
Dream has been built on the backs of slaves, followed by segregation, Jim Crow,
and, currently, a legal system that consistently jails blacks at a rate much
higher than whites for the same “crimes”, and in which persons of color are
always living on the brink, whose lives may be snuffed at any point in time,
for no reason other than the color of their skin and with the white
perpetrators often not suffering consequences of their actions.
Coates shares experiences attending the
black university, Howard; and visiting civil war battlefields, Chicago and
Paris; and how the experiences in these places has affected his life view and
understanding of tribalism. I didn’t find much sense of hope for the future,
just terrible hopelessness in a situation that is so unjust. I have to pray
that we, as a society and as individuals, can find ways to correct this and
bring our black fellow citizens into “the dream” or better yet allow them to
achieve their own dreams!
One of my church groups read this book
and discussed it in three sessions. Unfortunately, none of the African-Americans
who my attend church were able to join our discussions, each having job
responsibilities that made that impossible. I would like to hear their personal
responses to Coates and to find what their dreams are. Do they personally sense
more hope than Coates or might they write a similar letter to their children?
Coates talks a lot about Prince Jones
and his life which was snuffed out despite a life of meaning and contribution. “Prince
was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country
and all the fears that have marked it from birth” (p. 78). “The truth is that
the police reflect America in all of its will and fear….the product of
democratic will…” (p. 78).
Coates explains that black parents feel
the need to be really strict with their children and tend to beat them, feeling
“better me than the police,” knowing that the children they love so dearly,
“come to us endangered” (p. 82).
It is a really disturbing book and, I
think, full of truth. The big question, which we as individuals and society
need to figure out is how do we move beyond where we find ourselves now. Do we
have to let the past dictate our future or can we move forward so that all of
us are fully included in “we the people”?
Previously, I had read America’s Original Sin by Jim Wallis. That
also is an excellent book and one I also highly recommend, but it was
intellectual. This book was a personal, gut wrenching book.
