Between the World and Me is an epistolary essay about race by the African-American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. It arrived in Britain last autumn laurelled to the hilt. Written as a letter to his young son, it became a New York Times number one bestseller and won several awards, including the National Book Award for non-fiction and a lucrative MacArthur “genius grant” fellowship. A national correspondent for the Atlantic and the author of an earlier memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, Coates is currently one of the most high-profile commentators on race in the United States.
Coates writes about his country’s fear of the black male body, particularly among those he defines as the “American Dreamers”, who aspire to a life of picket fences and strawberry shortcake. He sees fear in the teenage gangs of his Baltimore childhood, whose swagger and “customs of war” attest to their vulnerability and whose social codes and laws he had to learn to survive. He sees it in his father, who meted out corporal punishment with the justification: “Either I can beat him, or the police.”
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