His professors break down the idealized version of black legacy that he has constructed. When he arrives at Howard University, which Coates lovingly calls “the Mecca,” he sees the complexity of African American and African identity and history. He turns to figures such as Malcolm X to answer these questions of racism. Witnessing injustice on the streets and in his schools, Coates questions the version of blackness that he has been taught by white America. He describes the young men who used fashion and bravado as a shield against this fear of death and the corporal punishment that he and many of his friends received from their parents, which served as a warning shot for the real world. He recalls his own understanding of the fragility of his body as a black man while growing up in Baltimore. Coates recalls hearing his son cry in his room and choosing not to comfort him. After a five-month trial, the police officer who murdered Brown was charged with no crime. He recalls his son’s reaction to the verdict of Michael Brown’s case. Coates connects this history to contemporary life, in which black youth are faced with the realities of police brutality as emphasized by the murders of children and young adults like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Renisha McBride.Ĭoates weaves personal experience into his social commentary. Coates often references his body or his son’s body, emphasizing the corporal harm that results from America’s willful ignorance of its historical past, including slavery, genocide, and Jim Crow-era racism.

Within the first chapter, Coates explains the bodily harm that institutionalized racism, from law to discriminatory economic policies to ineffective public school systems, causes black lives.

The book focuses on the psychological and physical trauma of racial violence that haunts generations of black people, and takes its name from a poem by famed black author Richard Wright. Between the World and Me takes the form of a long letter to Coates’s son Samori at age 15.

The world between me