Between the World and Me

About Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (2015) is a letter to his teenage son about what it means to possess a Black body in the United States — its history of vulnerability to violence and exploitation from chattel slavery to contemporary police killings, and the question of how to live meaningfully in spite of that knowledge. Written in the tradition of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and one of the defining works of American political writing in the twenty-first century.