Between the World and Me

Written as a personal letter to his adolescent son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers an emotionally charged and blunt account of the reality of Black men (and to a lesser degree Black women) in the US based on his own experiences as well as his hopes and fears for his teenage son. "My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk on your own". From his childhood home in Baltimore to the Mecca of Howard University to trips to Paris with his family, Coates' conveys to the reader what it is like to walk in his shoes, to feel no autonomy over one's body or future, and no possibility to keep his son safe from harm in a society that profits from the destruction and disenfranchisement of Black bodies. "I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it". It is raw and intimate and powerful: every paragraph felt like a gut punch.