By John Thompson.

The famed novelist, Toni Morrison, writes:

I’ve been wondering who might fill in the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.

Morrison is right. Coates is also correct in observing that it is still too difficult for most Americans to face up to the brutality he endured as a child in Baltimore during the 1980s. Coates grew up in a world that “no one survives unscathed.” Although it could be thrilling, it was also “a lifestyle of near-death experience.”  Those streets left the black child with the permanent reminder that “any claim to ourselves … was contestable.”

It will be a jolt for many white people when we reach many of the book’s passages with the words “they,” “them,” and “your,” but we all must heed Coates’s wisdom and turn away from “the brightly rendered version of your country” and toward “something murkier and unknown.”

It is outrageous that a child such as Coates, growing up in a democracy which takes pride in the promise that we all can share in “the American Dream,” would come of age with the belief that the universe has a “moral arc bent toward chaos and then concluded in a box.” It is tragic that Coates was so forced to inveigh against his own humanity, and thus be “powerless before the great crime of history that brought the ghettos to be.” But, it is inspiring that he ultimately became such an articulate and “conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”

Being a former inner city teacher who has seen how my students enthusiastically responded to challenging subject matter, especially Black History, Multiculturalism, and “History from the Bottom Up,” it would be tempting to draw upon Coates when challenging the way that school reform has made conditions even worse for the poorest children of color, and I will subsequently. But, Between the World and Me lets us into an ongoing conversation between Coates and his teenage son. Its best for us to first put our political concerns on hold for awhile and eavesdrop into how he takes the measure of his progress in life: “searching for the right question by which I might fully understand the breach between the world and me.”

At times, Coates might be too unsparingly critical of white and black “Dreamers,” over-emphasizing the intentionality of some policies that still alienate and damage poor children of color. For instance, the death of Mike Brown touched the unhealed wound of the police killing Coates’s fellow Howard University student, Prince Jones. His discussion of those racist killings starts with a quote from the 19^th century extremist, John C. Calhoun, in order to explain about white Americans, “There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream.”

Perhaps context is especially important at this point in the narrative. Only a paragraph later, Coates recalls Prince Jones and then “I was back in Baltimore surrounded by them boys.  … I was in all the anger of my years.” White readers are reminded at this point of the book that ghettos, such as Coates’s home neighborhood, were “as planned as any subdivision.” Their segregation was due to “an elegant act of racism, killing fields authored by federal policies.” He also reminds us, “The same hands that drew red lines around the life of Prince Jones drew red lines around the ghetto.”

Black readers are then challenged in the same way. Coates recalls the community’s common phrase, “‘Black people are the only people who ….’”  He counters by reminding blacks who speak that way that they are “really inveighing against your own humanity … because you are powerless before the great crime of history.” Speaking to black people in Prince Georges County and across America, Coates notes, “the Dream of acting white, of talking white, of being white, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in Chicago …” And, as in the case of Mike Brown, “Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all of the fears that marked it from birth.”

Coates also shares turning points in his life. After recalling the fear which accompanied his walk to school, Coates explains he was angrier about school and “if the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left.” He learned, “I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests.”

In college, Coates realizes that he previously believed “the key to all life lay in articulating the precise difference between ‘the Black Aesthetic’ and ‘Negritude.” But, he is empowered by the study of history and then “journalism gave me another tool of exploration, another way of unveiling the laws that bound my body.”

Coates is transformed by falling in love with his partner, and he crosses a threshold when hearing her mother insist, “You take care of my daughter.” He then knows that “the past was another life.” Coates grows even more when he becomes a father. He writes to his son that before his birth “I had my questions but nothing beyond my own skin in the game, and that was really nothing at all because I was a young man and not clear of my own human vulnerabilities.”

Towards the end of his narrative, a trip to Paris, France further helps Coates put his personal experiences into perspective, and we can anticipate another cycle of growth in his global consciousness and, perhaps, hopefulness. As the book’s climax approaches, Coates describes a Howard University homecoming. Watching older black strivers party, he celebrates “a moment, a joyous moment, beyond the Dream – a moment imbued by a power more gorgeous than any voting rights bill … this black power, originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark and essential planet.”   It comes from “the dungeon side-view of Monticello, which is to say, the view taken in struggle.” Coates’s stirring conclusion is, “They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.”

But, as we pull for Coates to enter a less conflicted period of accomplishment and joy, he has to come to grips with the killings of Mike Brown, Travon Martin, Renisha McBride, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Kajieme Powell, Sean Bell, and Jordan Davis. Wrestling with the injustice, brutality, and the racism of their killings, Coates relives the police shooting his friend Prince Jones. Despite all of his accomplishments, Coates continues to be reminded of the “low-grade, ever-present fear” of his youth.

In the climax of Between the World and Me, Coates visits Mabel Jones, the mother of Prince. After this encounter with the dignified woman who overcame so much, who did everything right, and who still lost her son to a cruel and racist system, Coates adds to his indictment of both the American Dream built on the backs of black Americans, and the continued “intentional” efforts of white and black “Dreamers” to forget the full horror of history.

In his closing words to his son, however, Coates’s feelings now seem less visceral. His warnings about the inherent tensions involved in being black in America sounds one notch more complicated, as if the next generation might really be different. He urges his son to “match intelligence with wisdom,” but remember that “the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body.” And, although Coates is not willing to forgive in the way that so many black Christians do, he observes “should Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them.”

After the conversation with Dr. Jones, Coates widens his indictment of the American Dream beyond race and fear to a more cosmopolitan and ecological critique.  He urges his son “do not struggle for the Dreamers.” But he invites him to “hope for them. Pray for them if you are so moved.” But, he must recognize the Dream as “the same habit that endangers the planet.”

Coates identifies the plunder unleashed by the American system as “a habit and addiction.” America is not just blinded by its “belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline.” That means, “Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all of our African ancestors is rising with the seas.”

Turning to the last page, readers will likely yearn for another shift of the gears. Even if our global challenges are as frightening as those the young Coates faced, perhaps we do not need to face them alone. Perhaps we can all pull together and build on Coates’s words. The last two sentences seem to say however, that we will have to wait for his next book to see where his journey is now directed. Driving away from Mabel Jones’s home, “I felt the old fear. Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets.”

What do you think? Will Between the World and Me have a transformative effect on discussions of racism and urban challenges? Can it contribute to school reform debates?