Between the World and Me
Between the World and Me is a 2015 nonfiction book written by American author Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It is written as a letter to the author's teenage son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States. Coates recapitulates American history and explains to his son the "racist violence that has been woven into American culture." Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore, detailing the ways in which institutions like the school, the police, and even "the streets" discipline, endanger, and threaten to disembody black men and women. The work takes structural and thematic inspiration from James Baldwin's 1963 epistolary book The Fire Next Time. Unlike Baldwin, Coates sees white supremacy as an indestructible force, one that Black Americans will never evade or erase, but will always struggle against. The novelist Toni Morrison wrote that Coates filled an intellectual gap in succession to James Baldwin. Editors of The New York Times and The New Yorker described the book as exceptional. The book won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
Stats for nerds
16recommend
35mentions
32people
2015–2026years
49% recommend49% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > Surely every police organization in the United States is just racist.
Well, there's personal racism, meaning personal prejudice against a race. But then there's also institutional racism, like policies that turn out to be racist. Racist policies can be blatantly racist, like redlining, or they may indirectly turn out to be racist.
But yes, I think institutional racism is fairly common and very well-documented in the US.
> You're literally just describing a chicken-and-egg problem.
If you want to understand this more deeply, I highly recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates' book "Between the World and Me".
Yes, it's a chicken and egg problem, but our police and judicial institutions are actively sustaining/aggravating the problem.
- How do you propose to lift up and support those in need if you can't even agree that the playing field is uneven and that when you're born black you face systemic injustices?
_That's_ racist.
Oh and I'm not going to read a book by a guy who defended Trump as being "not racist." While we're out here recommending books, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_World_and_Me exemplifies my point: a father telling his son the hard reality of our broken system.
- One of the great things about books is that it lets you see the world from a different set of eyes and experiences.
I highly recommend, "Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates." It's worth every minute of your time.
- I am reading "Between the world and me" from Ta-Neshi Coates and I thought that I would like to recommend it to HN community and would love to see a discussion about it.
I feel this community is perfect to recommend and discuss books (technical and non technical) and all of us could take advantage of it so I was wondering if there is or (could be created) a specific tag with this purpose.
- Between the World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Reading about the abject fear and death in which he grew up really helped me get a tiny insight into institutional racism's effects. I can't fully comprehend the entirety of the black American experience, but that book helped me gain a small glimpse.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Between_the_World_and_Me
"It is written as a letter to the author's teenage son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States."
I started reading it and couldn't put it down.
