Between the World and Me

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2015

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1, Pages 1-25

Chapter 1, Pages 26-50

Chapter 1, Pages 51-73

Chapter 2, Pages 74-97

Chapter 2, Pages 98-131

Chapter 3, Pages 132-148

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Quiz

Key Figures

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates uses his own life to emphasize the book’s core themes, most pointedly the precarity of the black body. He begins the book by illustrating the ignorance of those who live under the spell of the Dream, writing of an interview in which a news anchor implores him to speak of hope in the face of police brutality. This lack of awareness shows Coates the rampant unwillingness of white Americans to see or address the root of racial violence.

Coates references his own childhood in Baltimore to paint a picture of everyday racism. He describes the streets he grew up on, where young boys used fashion and the threat of violence to protect themselves from their own fragility. Coates recalls an early instance in which he was almost shot for a trivial matter. He references his school experiences and how his teachers sanitized black history and stunted his curiosity, opting for compliance instead. By referring to his own childhood, Coates doubles down on his argument that state institutions, and America’s social and legal systems in general, harm more than they help black children.

As the book directly addresses Coates’s son Samori, Coates often returns to the transformative experience of fatherhood. He describes his own father’s corporal punishment as a response to state violence against black men. He writes of his renewed commitment to surviving when Samori is born, knowing that Samori’s life is now dependent upon his own. He conveys his fear after Prince Jones is murdered, knowing that no social order will protect even the most successful black men. Here, he thinks of his own son. It is this understanding that drives the intention of the book—to protect his son. Coates’s aim is to convey the realities of racial violence so that his son can best protect his body while maintaining a sense of pride in his blackness. Coates depicts this pride and sense of community through his experience at the historically black Howard University, which Coates calls The Mecca for its wide representation of the black diaspora.

Samori

Fatherhood is the filter through which Coates sees the world. Coates’s son Samori is named after West African revolutionary Samori Touré, and so his name symbolizes struggle. Throughout the book Coates instructs Samori on how to keep his eyes open to the realities of racism and racial violence in America, and how to protect his body without forgetting his history. Coates compares his son’s struggle with the realities of racism and racial violence to those of his own. In many ways they are similar: Both Coates and Samori face the vulnerability of their bodies as black men and the responsibility of curbing any possible errors lest they be used as justification for violence. However, as Coates writes, he carries with him many of the “old codes” from learning to survive the streets of Baltimore. Samori has lived in a comparably more tolerant and safe environment in New York City.

The chief breach and conergence of their experiences as black males is symbolized by Samori’s response to the Michael Brown verdict, in which Brown’s killers were acquitted. Unlike Coates, Samori is shocked by this blatant disregard for black life. But like Coates, Samori understands that as a black boy, his life can be taken away from him without accountability at any moment. It is this understanding—the vulnerability of the black body—that Coates aims to convey to his son. Yet as Coates writes to his son about racial violence, he also emphasizes the importance of understanding America’s fraught history with blackness. Addressing Samori is the narrative structure through which Coates explains the intertwined exploitation, surveillance, and survival of black people in America.

Malcolm X

The figure of black activist Malcolm X served as a guiding light for the young Coates. Coates writes that Malcolm X was “the first honest man I’d ever heard” (38), a man who addressed the black experience without hyperbole and who was unwilling to cater to white narratives. Coates admires that Malcolm X “spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the laws that proscribed our imagination” (38). Malcolm X’s honest and pragmatic approach leads Coates out of the confines of the watered-down black history he received in school and toward the study of African and black history and empowerment movements. It is partly this pursuit of black pride and all its contradictions that propels Coates to Howard University, which Coates describes as “a port in the American storm” (40).

Prince Carmen Jones

Coates uses the death of Prince Jones to symbolize the reach of racism in America. Jones’s death comes as a shock. He was a fellow Howard University student whom Coates became friendly with through one of the girls that Coates loved. Coates remembers Jones as handsome, charismatic, and warm. Jones was a well-loved, successful Howard student on the verge of being married. Police killed Prince while he was driving to visit his fiancée. After Jones’s murder, Coates realizes that neither money nor social status can protect black men from the violence of the state.

Coates became obsessed with Jones’s death. He reported on Jones’s killing and eventually went to New Jersey to visit his mother, Dr. Mable Jones. Coates notes the composure that masks her pain. During their visit, Dr. Mable Jones told Coates that Prince’s death rendered all her battles against racism null, saying, “I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It’s all it takes” (142).