Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates's book-length letter to his son Samori, written after Samori learned that Michael Brown's killer would face no charges. Coates draws on his own coming of age in West Baltimore, where he says the streets and the schools acted as "arms of the same beast," each demanding control of Black children through fear or compliance. He studies at Howard University, which he calls "the Mecca," and loses a close friend, Prince Jones, who is shot by a police officer despite a life that, by every measure the country claims to reward, should have kept him safe.

Running through the book is Coates's argument about what he calls "the Dream": the comfortable, high-fenced life of people who believe themselves to be white, built on a history of plunder against Black bodies that the Dream depends on not seeing. A trip to Paris briefly shows him what it might feel like to move through the world without that constant fear, before the acquittal of Trayvon Martin's killer that same summer reminds him how far that feeling is from home. He closes by telling Samori to struggle, but for himself and his own, not for the Dreamers to wake up.

Published in 2015, Between the World and Me won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Kirkus Prize.