Though the initial reception of Between the World and Me became overly burdened by unproductive comparisons between Coates and James Baldwin, there are productive comparisons to be made between the two writers.

For Coates, blackness is more than simply something whiteness created blackness represents “the beautiful things, all the language and mannerisms, all the food and music, all the literature and philosophy, all the common language that they fashioned like diamonds under the weight of the Dream.” Moreover, he writes, “black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors.” Coates describes his experience at Howard as a journey to Mecca greater exposure to the black diaspora there precipitated a more expansive notion of blackness.

The way in which he ties whiteness to belief brings to mind the book Redeeming Mulatto, in which theologian Brian Bantum describes whiteness as a modality of faith, an assertion of belief grounded in false purity.Īlthough Coates writes that he outgrew his black nationalism as he transitioned from Baltimore to Howard University, he upholds what may be described as a nonontological blackness: although race is socially constructed and blackness is not biological, blackness should not be abandoned in some postracial quest. With subtle language, Coates tackles whiteness as an evolving social performance in U.S. The Dream, he explains, is tied to whiteness and to “those who believe themselves to be white.” Read our latest issue or browse back issues.Ī recurring theme throughout the book is what Coates calls the Dream: a useful myth about innocence, upward mobility, and safety that warps how people depict this country’s history and present realities.

He wants you to feel it in the gut while you stare at the flesh behind the statistics-at the human loves severed and the fears provoked. He does not want you to merely think about slavery, West Baltimore, or police violence in Washington, D.C. Coates tells his son: “You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regression all land, with great violence, upon the body.” Violence upon the body is a concept that Coates presses on the reader at every turn. It displays a thoroughgoing physicality in its language. history, but also about the place of faith within that nexus.Īddressed to his adolescent son, Coates’s book is a powerful and highly nuanced take on a black male’s life in the United States. And yet as a religious person reading Between the World and Me, I find his words to be deeply insightful and helpful for thinking not only about race, society, and U.S. Two, his alleged pessimism regarding America’s ability to progress beyond white supremacy appears to run directly against the root meaning of gospel-good news. To talk about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s social gospel may seem absurd.

Ta nehisi between the world and me