The denial of that fact is part of the “Dream” by which, in a phrase borrowed from Baldwin, those “who believe themselves to be white” maintain power and righteousness. It is Coates’s contention in the book that despite civil rights, despite the symbolism of Obama, violence towards, and subjugation of, black men and women remains ingrained in American culture from slavery. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings and humiliations. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding… Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. And you know now, if you did not know before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old child they were oath-bound to protect. “I am writing to you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store.

“I write to you in your 15th year,” Coates explains by way of introduction.

The book is a response to the sense of powerlessness, and fear, that evokes in him. Coates has heard Samori weeping in his bedroom after watching the night-time news. It is also an intimate confession of the fears of a black American father, fears that whatever positive values he gives his son, however hard he encourages him to work in school and do the right thing, out on the streets his body, the colour of his skin, will make him vulnerable to state-sanctioned attack. (The New York Times said it was “essential, like water or air.”) Coates, 39, a staff writer at the Atlantic magazine, conceived of his book as a letter to his teenage son Samori, just as 50 years ago, James Baldwin, the great poet-prophet of the civil rights movement, wrote his seminal work, The Fire Next Time, as a missive to his young nephew.Ĭoates’s book is a profound and angry address to a nation that refuses to prosecute police officers who kill innocent black men and women that pursues a policy of mass incarceration hugely weighted towards its black population and that routinely seems to think nothing of it. I n the US, where it has topped the New York Times bestseller list over the summer, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me has been hailed as the unmissable document of the current #ICan’tBreathe state of race relations.

Tanasi coates between the world and me