He wants them to feel the strangulation of struggle, to rob them of breath for one heartbeat longer than is comfortable. (I’d like to try reading it backward to test this theory.) Coates goes for that audience’s throat. This is what gives me the sense of two different texts that were meant to be more cohesive than they end up being when read as ordered. That is when we first hear his son’s name and begin to get a sense of their relationship.
(To be fair, some said the same of Baldwin.) Even though the book begins with an address (“Son,”) Coates does not really introduce the reader to his son until page 69. Between The World and Me uses the device unevenly. Coates has shown that he, too, can do this. If you love the essay (I do), that move makes esoteric debates tangible in ways very few thinkers and writers can do. One of those essays was a letter addressed to his nephew “on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation.” In it, Baldwin snatches rhetoric from the sky and lands it in a kin relationship. James Baldwin-to whom Coates has been ceaselessly compared-is famous for this device in The Fire Next Time, a book featuring two essays on race and reckoning in America.
The most visible signpost is the literary device on which the whole book rests: It is a letter to his son. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible-this is the new idea at the heart of this new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, believe that they are white. The other text is an actual letter to his son that grapples with identity, anxiety, and what the moment means to those who cannot turn it off.ĭifference in hue and hair is old. One is a treatise on having “Baltimore eyes” in a moment when places like Baltimore are giving birth to social movements. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World and Me is two texts masquerading as one. Readers are invited to send their own responses to to follow along on Twitter at #BTWAM, or to read other responses to the book from Atlantic readers and contributors. Tressie McMillan Cottom, an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, will kick off each week’s discussion with a response of her own. It will shift to chapters three and four the week of Monday, July 27th, and conclude with chapters five and six on Monday, August 3rd.
This week, the discussion centers on the first two chapters of the book.
Over the next three weeks, The Atlantic will be hosting a Book Club discussion of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.
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