Between the World and Me
I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nahisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.
-Toni Morrison
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
In 2015 Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote Between the World and Me which is a letter to his teenage son. He refers to white people as “people who thing they’re white.”
Toni Morrison calls him the new James Baldwin. His writing is dense with ideas and thoughts that are gleaned from his daily experience of being a Black man in this society.
This is a good message for us as we begin our journey together- how we think we are white and what those thoughts can do to people who are not white.