BY TA-NEHISI COATES
Between the World and Me
The Beautiful Struggle
Between
the World
and Me
Between
the World
and Me
‘ I,
Ta-N ehisi Coates
SPIEGEL & GRAU
NEW YORK
— ———– ——- ———·
.
~–.,;•.·”
!
Between tlze World and Me is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying
details have been changed.
Copyright© 2015 byTa-Nehisi Coates
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spi~gel & Grau, an imprint of Random
House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
SPIEGEL & GRAU and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks
of Penguin Random House LLC.
The title of this work is drawn from the poem “Between the World and Me”
by Richard Wright, from Wliite Man Listen! copyright© 1957 by Richard
Wright. Used by permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate
ofRichardWright.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint
previously published material:
Chris Calhoun Agency: Excerpt from “Ka’ Ba” by Amiri Baraka, copyright©
Estate of Amiri Baraka. Reprinted by permission of the Chris Calhoun Agency.
John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate ofRichardWright: Excerpt
from “Between the World and Me” from Mite Man Listen! by Richard Wright,
copyright© 1957 by Richard Wright. Reprinted by permission of John
Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate of Richard Wright.
Sonia Sanchez: Excerpt from “Malcolm” from Shake Loose My Skin by Sonia
Sanchez (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), copyright © 1999 by Sonia Sanchez.
Reprinted by permission of Sonia Sanchez.
ISBN 978-0-8129-9354-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64598-6
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Book design by Caroline Cunningham
For David and Kenyatta,
who believed
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And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly
upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks
and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves
between the world and me . …
-RICHARD WRIGHT
Between
the World
and Me
I.
Do not speak to me of martyrdom,
of men who die to be remembered
on some parish day.
I don’t believe in dying
though, I too shall die.
And violets like castanets
will echo me.
SONIA SANCHEZ
Son,
Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me
what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting
from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote stu
dio on the far west side of Manhattan. A satellite closed
the miles between us, but no machinery could close the
gap between her world and the world for which I had
been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about
my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced
by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week.
The host read these words for the audience, and when
she finished she turned to the subject of my body, al
though she did not mention it specifically. But by now I
am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the
condition of my body without realizing the nature of their
request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt
6
7
TA-NEHISJ COATES
that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of
those Americans who believe that they are white, was built
on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and
indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this ques
tion is the record of the believers themselves. The answer
is American history.
There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans
deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness
that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of
their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and Amer
ica’s heresies-torture, theft, enslavement-are so common
among individuals and nations that none can declare them
selves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have
never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln de
clared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure
“that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely
being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United
States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage
in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly
meant “government of the people” but what our country
has, throughout its history, taken the political term “peo
ple” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother
or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me.
Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of “government
of the people,” but the means by which “the people” ac
quired their names.
This leads us to another equally important ideal, one
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME
that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make
no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of
“race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural
world. Racism-the need to ascribe bone-deep features to
people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them
inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this
way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother
Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or
the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a
tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as be
yond the handiwork of men.
But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the
process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of
genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.
Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the pre
eminence 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 these new people who have been brought up hope
lessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.
These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But
unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced
from the m;chinery of criminal power. The new people
were something else before they were white-Catholic,
Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish-and if all our na
tional hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be
something else again. Perhaps they will truly become
American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I can-
8 9 TA-NEHISI COATES
not call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of
washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the
belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tast
ings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging
oflife, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs;
the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the de
struction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of chil
dren; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to
deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own
bodies.
The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there
has been, at some point in history, some great power whose
elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of
other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to dis
cover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse
America, because America makes no claim to the banal.
America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and no
blest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing be
tween the white city of democracy and the terrorists,
despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One
cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead
mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of
American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I pro
pose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral stan
dard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an
apparatus urging us to accept American innoc~nce at face
value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to
look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ig-
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME
nore the great evil ·done in all of our names. But you and I
have never truly had that luxury. I think you know.
I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you be
cause 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. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and
murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they
were oath-b,;und to protect. And you have seen men in
the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s
grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if
you did not before, that the police departments of your
country have been endowed with the authority to destroy
your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result
of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it
originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the
destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes
without the proper authority and your body can be de
stroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and
it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your
body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held
accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And de
struction is merely the superlative form of a dominion
whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings,
and humiliations. All of this is common to black people.
And all of this is old for black people. No one is held re
sponsible.
11 10 TA-NEHISI COATES
There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or
even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men en
forcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting
its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our
phrasing-race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial
profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy-serves
to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dis
lodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs,
cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from
this. You must always remember that the sociology, the
history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regres
sions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
That Sunday, with that host, on that news show, I tried
to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But
at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared
picture of an eleven-year-old black boy tearfully hugging
a white police officer. Then she asked me about “hope.”
And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that
I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indis
tinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I
came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a
calm December day. Families, believing themselves white,
were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were
bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much
as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there
watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then
why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my
body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME
most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It
is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day
cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is
treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like
peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for
so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold
my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never
been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the
bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, know
ing that the Dream persists by warring with the known
world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families,
I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I
was sad for you.
That was the week you learned that the killers of Mi
chael Brown would go free. The men who had left his
body in the street like some awesome declaration of their
inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my
expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you
were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 P.M.
that night, waiting for the announcement of an indict
ment, and when instead it was announced that there was
none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your
room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after,
and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I
thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell
you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it
would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents
tried to tell me: that this is your country; that this is your
12 TA-NEHISJ COATES
world, that this is your body, and you must find some way
to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question
of how one should live within a black body, within a
country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and
the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately an
swers itself.
This must seem strange to you. We live in a “goal
oriented” era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes,
big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time
ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a
gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console
me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preor
dained American glory. In accepting both the chaos of his
tory and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly
consider how I wished to live-specifically, how do I live
free in this black body? It is a profound question because
America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the
black body is the clearest evidence that America is the
work of men. I have asked the question through my read
ing and writings, through the music of my youth, through
arguments with your grandfather, with your mother, your
aunt Janai, your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in
nationalist 1nyth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on
other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is
not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant inter
rogation, of confrontation with the brutality 9£ my coun
try, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me
against the sheer terror of disembodiment.
.. • ifi.. : ..
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i
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14 TA-NEHISI COATES
And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever
you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this
I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I
knew were black, and all of them were power:fully, ada
mantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young
life, though I had not always recognized it as such.
It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in
the extravagant boys of my neighborhood,.in their large
rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length
fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their
world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak
and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside
Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell
sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear,
and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts
of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered
’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black
body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on
in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big
T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a cata
log of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief
that these boys were in firm possession of everything they
desired.
I saw it in their customs of war. I was no older than five,
sitting out on the front steps of my home on Woodbrook
Avenue, watching two shirtless boys circle each other close
and buck shoulders. From then on, I knew that there was
a ritual to a street fight, bylaws and codes that, in their very
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 15
need, attested to all the vulnerability of the black teenage
bodies.
I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music
that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and
bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty
up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them,
against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of
their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I
saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded
bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over.
And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how
they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with
their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my
name out your mouth;’ they would say. I would watch
them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vas
elined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each
other.
I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Phila
delphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what
I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I
knew that my father’s father was dead and that my uncle
Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and
that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in
my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who
slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very
afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which
he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who
beat me as if someo~e might steal me away, because that is
https://neighborhood,.in
16 TA-NEHISI COATES
exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had
lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to
guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey
and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had
just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives
around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a
great fear.
Have they told you this story?When your grandmother
was sixteen years old a young man knocked on her door.
The young man was your Nana Jo’s boyfriend. No one
else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait
until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother
got there first. She asked the young man to leave. Then
she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so
that she might remember how easily she could lose her
body. Ma never forgot. I remember her clutching my small
hand tightly as we crossed the street. She would tell me
that ifl ever let go and were killed by an onrushing car, she
would beat me back to life. When I was six, Ma and Dad
took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and
found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious
minutes looking for _me. When they found me, Dad did
what every parent I knew would have done–he reached
for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze,
awed at the distance between punishment and offense.
Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice–“Either I can beat
him, or the police:’ Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t.
All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 17
from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even
administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked
us at the exit. What I know is that fathers who slammed
their teenage boys for sass would then release them to
streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the
same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls,
but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers
twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest
humor to cope. We stood in the alley where we shot bas
ketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the
boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front
of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five
bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose
mother was known to reach for anything–cable wires,
extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know
that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our par
ents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague
years resorted to the scourge.
To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be
naked before the elements of the world, before all the
guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness
is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the cor
rect and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot
of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law
did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has be
come an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to
say, for furthering the assault on your body. But a society
that protects some people through a safety net of schools,
18 TA-NEHISI COATES
government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but
can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has
either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has suc
ceeded at something much darker. However you call it,
the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of
the world. It does not matter if the agent of those forces is
white or black-what matters is our condition, what mat
ters is the system that makes your body breakable.
The revelation of these forces, a series of great changes,
has unfolded over the course of my life. The changes are
still unfolding and will likely continue until I die. I was
eleven years old, standing out in the parking lot in front of
the 7 -Eleven, watching a crew of older boys standing near
the street. They yelled and gestured at … who? … another
boy, young, like me, who stood there, almost smiling,
gamely throwing up his hands. He had already learned the
lesson he would teach me that day: that his body was in
constant jeopardy. Who knows what brought him to that
knowledge? The projects, a drunken stepfather, an older
brother concussed by police, a cousin pinned in the city
jail. That he was outnumbered did not matter because the
whole world had outnumbered him long ago, and what do
numbers matter? This was a war for the possession of his
body and that would be the war of his whole life.
I stood there for some seconds, marveling at the older
boys’ beautiful sense of fashion. They all wore ski jackets,
the kind which, in my day, mothers put on layaway in Sep-
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 19
tember, then piled up overtime hours so as to have the
thing wrapped and ready for Christmas. I focused in on a
light-skinned boy with a long head and small eyes. He was
scowling at another boy, who was standing close to me. It
was just before three in the afternoon. I was in sixth grade.
School had just let out, and it was not yet the fighting
weather of early spring. What was the exact problem here?
Who could know?
The boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket
and ptilled out a gun. I recall it in the slowest motion, as
though in a dream. There the boy stood, with the gun
brandished, which he slowly untucked, tucked, then un
tucked once more, and in his small eyes I saw a surging
rage that could, in an instant, erase my body. That was
1986. That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news
reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very
often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon
great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful
children-fell upon them random and relentless, like great
sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not under
stand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood
across from me holding my entire body in his small hands.
The boy did not shoot. His friends ptilled him back. He
did not need to shoot. He had affirmed my place in the
order of things. He had let it be known how easily I could
be selected. I took the subway home that day, processing
the episode all alone. I did not tell my parents. I did not tell
20 TA-NEHISI COATES
my teachers, and if! told my friends I would have done so
with all the excitement needed to obscure the fear that
came over me in that moment.
I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise
up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like
fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the
north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that
the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father
lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there be
yond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were
other worlds where children did not regularly fear for
their bodies. I knew this because there was a large televi
sion resting in my living room. In the evenings I would sit
before this television bearing witness to the dispatches
from this other world. There were little white boys with
complete collections of football cards, and their only want
was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison
oak. That other world was suburban and endless, organized
around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sun
daes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that
were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and glens.
Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native
world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy,
and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West
Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I
obsessed over the distance between that other sector of
space and my own. I knew that my portion of the Ameri
can galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 21
gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was
not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the
breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation be
tween that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic
injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, ir
repressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the
velocity of escape.
Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very
different from my own. The grandness of the world, the
real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you.
And you have no need of dispatches because you have
seen so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants
their homes, their hobbies-up close. I don’t know what it
means to grow up with a black president, social networks,
omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their
natural hair. What I know is that when they loosed the
killer of Michael Brown, you said, “I’ve got to go.” And
that cut me because, for all our differing worlds, at your
age my feeling was exactly the same. And I recall that even
then I had not yet begun to imagine the perils that tangle
us. You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You
have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives
and discovered the plunder everywhere around us.
Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to
survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets,
by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the
people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles
and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt it-
22 TA-NEHISI COATES
self. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series
of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat
down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives un
scathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant
danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrill
ing. This is what the rappers mean when they pronounce
themselves addicted to “the streets” or in love with “the
game:• I imagine they feel something akin to parachutists,
rock climbers, BASE jumpers, and others who choose to
live on the edge. Of course we chose nothing. And I have
never believed the brothers who claim to “run,” much less
“own,” the city. We did not design the streets. We do not
fund them. We do not preserve them. But I was there,
nevertheless, charged like all the others with the protec
tion of my body.
The crews, the young men who’d transmuted their fear
into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the
blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it
was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel
any sense of security and power. They would break your
jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that
power, to revel in the might of their own bodies. And their
wild reveling, their astonishing acts made their names ring
out. Reps were made, …
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