Essays on Between The World and Me

July 14, 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates

Nonfiction text; Biography

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kenyatta Matthews, Samori Coates, Prince Jones, Dr. Mabel Jones, Paul Coates

Autobiography, American History, Race Relations

Violence, dreamers, fear, the yard, Paris

The book takes up such important topics as racism in America, the legacy of slavery, the black body, and family

"Good intention’ is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream."
"I believed, and still do, that our bodies are our selves, that my soul is the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and that my spirit is my flesh."
"Here is what I would like for you to know: in America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage."
"Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more."
"You must always remember," Coates writes to Samori, "that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body."

While speaking about his peers at Howard University, Coates foreshadows that Prince Jones will be killed at a young age.
The book won the 2015 National Book Award and the NAACP Image Award; She was also a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The book's title comes from Richard Wright's poem "Between the World and Me,"
Despite many changes in Between the World and Me, Coates always planned to end the book with the story of Mabel Jones.
The phrase "between the world and me" is literally in the text of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time.

1. Williams, D. A. (2016). Everybody's Protest Narrative: Between the World and Me and the Limits of Genre. African American Review, 49(3), 179-183. (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/631988)
2. Kirkland, D. E. (2017). " EJ" in Focus:" Beyond the Dream": Critical Perspectives on Black Textual Expressivities... Between the World and Me. The English Journal, 106(4), 14-18. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/26359456)
3. Coetzee, C. (2019). Between the world and Wakanda. Safundi, 20(1), 22-25. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15210960.2017.1267517?journalCode=hmcp20)
4. Gordon, J. (2017). Black Bodies Matter: A Reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, 38(1), 199-221. (https://www.pdcnet.org/gfpj/content/gfpj_2017_0038_0001_0199_0221)
5. Aaouinti-Haris, A. (2018). Re-Presenting Black Masculinities in Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me (Doctoral dissertation, Hood College). (https://www.proquest.com/openview/6820006dd0d871c77bafe3dcf8bb1d93/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750)
6. Clare, S. (2021). Experience and the Whiteness of the Anthropocene Narrative: A Reading of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. (https://academic.oup.com/isle/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/isle/isab032/6237191)
7. Thomas, L. E. (2020). Between the World and Me: Rituals for Crossing Over, in Memory of Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon. Interpretation, 74(1), 52-59. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0020964319876582)
8. LaMothe, R. (2019). Between the World and Me: A Psychology of Faith Perspective on Resisting Racism. Pastoral Psychology, 68, 575-589. (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11089-018-0850-0)