The worry is that if we follow along, we, too, shall be captured by its fatalistic assumptions.Ĭonsider two moments. The wound of racism is too fresh the sharpness of the pain captures his senses and arrests his imagination. This is a deeply troubling book-as well as one of great beauty and power. The lessons Coates shares with his son are meant for us. The appearance of privacy is, of course, deceptive. Combining historical analysis and social theory, and framed as a personal journey, Between the World and Me challenges our understanding of American life even as it captures our hearts. Similarly, Between The World and Me overflows with exquisite insights about the embodied existence of blackness and the warped logic of white supremacy. There Baldwin speaks to his nephew about the horrors of being black in the United States. This has invited comparison to the prefatory essay-“My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation”-in James Baldwin’s 1963 book, The Fire Next Time. Written in an epistolary form, the book is presented as a letter to Coates’s fifteen-year-old son, Samori. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me often seems like a conversation not meant for us the tone of the book implies privacy and intimacy. Ta-Nehisi Coates speaking in January (Gerald R. For all his channeling of James Baldwin, Coates seems to have forgotten that black people “can’t afford despair.” Melvin L.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |