It is the America which falls upon 14-year-old Samori with awful clarity, when Ferguson prosecutor Bob McCulloch announced that Wilson would not be indicted for the killing of Michael Brown. The contrapositive to that dream is the America that Coates inhabits, rife with violence, theft and heartbreak. The passive acceptance of that violence is only made possible by the Dream: the idyllic, suburban universe of white America that "smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake." In Coates's view, this universe is not made for himself, his son, or any other black American, because "the dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies." Instead, it was bequeathed to future generations and left in the hands of police, vigilantes and white supremacists. Between the World and Me is both a meditation on life in a country that weaponizes black skin and a rigorous examination of what Coates calls the Dream – the pernicious American concept of whiteness, fuelled since the days of the Middle Passage by the destruction of black bodies.Īccording to Coates, the violence that plundered and shattered bodies for the purpose of producing cotton, tobacco and cane sugar was not eliminated by the abolition of slavery. – this interrogation couldn't have come at a more urgent time. Given the seemingly endless cycle of lethal violence against unarmed black Americans – Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and the church massacre in Charleston, S.C. In his new book Between the World and Me, Coates offers a blistering interrogation of that universe and its mythology through a series of letters to his teenaged son Samori. These are the necessary myths of our country, and without them we are subject to the awful specter of history, and that is just too much for us to bear." "The people who are telling us this hail from that universe where choke-holds are warm-fuzzies, where boys discard their skittles yelling, 'You're gonna die tonight,' and possess the power to summon and banish shotguns from the ether. "We are being told that Michael Brown attacked an armed man and tried to take his gun," Coates wrote. A few days after officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown and left his body to rot in the Missourian sun, Ta-Nehisi Coates posted a blog entry for The Atlantic, where he works as the magazine's national correspondent.
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