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The cover of Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me

Ta Nehisi Coates, 2015

A father's letter to his teenage son about fear, police killings, and the American Dream: how to live free in a black body in a country built on its plunder.

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12 parts, about 24 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Written as a letter from a father to his teenage son about living in a black body and the fear that shapes it
  • Argues that race is the child of racism and that the harm to black bodies is the result of policy, not accident
  • Weaves memoir of Baltimore, Howard University and Paris with the killing of a Howard student by police, and refuses easy hope

Who it is for

  • Readers trying to understand race in America through one person's experience
  • Parents who worry about raising children in a dangerous world
  • Readers of memoir and personal essays

What the summary covers

  1. The Question2 min
  2. Fear3 min
  3. Arms of the Same Beast1 min
  4. Malcolm and the Mecca2 min
  5. Your Mother and Your Name2 min
  6. Prince Jones2 min
  7. Twice as Good1 min
  8. The Mountain and the Below3 min
  9. You Exist. You Matter.1 min
  10. Paris2 min
  11. Dr. Mable Jones3 min
  12. Struggle, Not for the Dreamers2 min

Recommended by

  • Toni MorrisonNobel laureate in literature
    I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive.
  • Isabel WilkersonJournalist and author, Pulitzer Prize winner
    Ta-Nehisi Coates is the James Baldwin of our era, and this is his cri de coeur. A brilliant thinker at the top of his powers, he has distilled four hundred years of history and his own anguish and wisdom into a prayer for his beloved son and an invocation to the conscience of his country.
  • Michael ChabonNovelist and essayist, Pulitzer Prize winner
  • David RemnickEditor of The New Yorker

About the author

  • Ta Nehisi CoatesAmerican author, former Atlantic correspondent, MacArthur Fellow
    • Coates attended Howard University.
    • His articles have appeared in publications including the Village Voice, the Washington Post, the New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, and he was a national correspondent at The Atlantic.
    • He was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar at MIT in 2012 and a journalist in residence at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in 2014.
    • His 2008 memoir The Beautiful Struggle looks at race, class and masculinity through his boyhood in Baltimore as the son of a former Black Panther.
    • His 2014 essay "The Case for Reparations" prompted a national conversation.
    • Between the World and Me (2015) is a long essay addressed to his teenage son about the experience of being a Black man in America.
    • He has received a National Magazine Award and a MacArthur Fellowship.
    • His publisher lists him as holding the Sterling Brown endowed chair in the English department at Howard University.

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