This critically acclaimed book came out while Black Lives Matter protests were gripping the streets in 2015. Written as a memoir, it explains the effects of violence against black (particularly male) bodies on the black psyche. Although his observations are built around the artificial construct of the black and white races, he clearly sees that Dr. King’s Dream is as-yet unrealized in America. As a continual parade of unnecessary black deaths illustrated – deaths that never, ever lead to justice, we have more work to do.
After opening the book by introducing himself in high school and college, Ta-Nehisi Coates zeroes in on the event of the murder of Prince Jones in Maryland. Prince was a smart Howard student with special strengths in mathematics. A black police officer with a questionable history accused Prince of ramming his Jeep at him and shot him dead. The police officer was suspended but was eventually exonerated and returned to duty. The federal investigation focused not on the police officer but upon Prince in a search to find out if there was anything in his background showing a predilection towards violence. (No surprise: There wasn’t.)
Coates, then a journalist and a father, investigated this story with intimate passion. As an unbeliever in an afterlife, he was unable to justify to himself why so many lives were taken so needlessly and so soon. He found Dr. King’s Dream unrealized, and America’s beneath-the-surface race issues unresolved. In so doing, he illustrated to readers how black lives need increased consideration, particularly from the white community.
With a unique spin on a pressing, penetrating topic, it’s no wonder that this book won a National Book Award. Although it’s easy to deflect and deny the black community’s pain about the mass incarceration and mistreatment of black males, the statistics do not lie. It is no conspiracy theory. Books like these, if read among the white population, can help us come to terms with our own culpable part in this tragedy. Hopefully, blacks’ class disparity will disappear with time in America, much like the class disparity of the Irish and the Italians disappeared in decades past. Until then, books like these will give us language to grapple with our own shortcomings.
Between the World and Me
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Copyright (c) 2015
One World
ISBN13 9780812983814
Page Count: 152
Genre: Autobiography
www.amazon.com