Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

genre: memoir, non-fiction

I am not a black man.  And I do not have a black son.  I am a white woman and that's why it was so incredibly important for me to read this book.

Ta-Nehisi grew up in Baltimore, the child of parents who loved him and who taught him, from the beginning, that the world was not a safe place for him.  And as he grew, he learned this for himself in ways both powerful and terrifying.  Now a father himself, Between the World and Me is a letter to his own teenage son, on the cusp of manhood in an America that still, STILL, treats a black body as less-than.  Ta-Nehisi helps his son, and those of us privileged to read this book, understand today's issues in the context of the past and how the nuances of American pride were built upon the backs of an enslaved people.

This book made me uncomfortable, as well it should.  Anything that pokes at me and reminds me of my privilege SHOULD make me uncomfortable.  I should be uncomfortable about the state of race discrepancies in our country every day - because even THAT is a privilege, isn't it?  That I don't have to think about my race if I don't want to?  Coates' writing is SO BEAUTIFUL.  A quarter of my book is highlighted with ideas and imagery that struck me, that make me dig and think, that made me want to do better, that shined a new light on something I have NEVER considered. He is vulnerable, here.  He is real and although I felt like an outsider reading it, he also invited me to try.  TRY to get it.  TRY to imagine the life of a black boy and, my own thoughts led to, what can I do to try and make it a safer world for him?

I want my boys to read it.  Honestly, probably everyone should read it, if just to give these thoughts and ideas a spot to percolate in your brain, even if you aren't ready to believe it all yet.  Because believing it is scary.  If you believe him, then the way you have to look at your country shifts in a way that doesn't feel good.  But that doesn't mean it's not right.