How Fresh and New is the Case Coates Makes?

So much has been said about Between the World and Me that I hesitated to join this discussion, fearing any critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates would be misconstrued as “hating on him.” The popularity of the book has surprised even Coates himself. I quite enjoy his essays in the Atlantic Monthly and I am especially fond of his first memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, where he labors to understand himself through the lens of his enigmatic father, publisher of Black Classic Press, Paul Coates. Considering Struggle in a limited capacity will be useful for my discussion of Between the World. My goal is to offer some analysis of his aims, his technique, and why that technique may resonate well with some aspects of the public and less so with some others. Along the way, I find it useful to examine the scarcity of black intellectual space that guides the broader discussion of Coates’s book by billing it as being “monumental” and a must-read for every American. It is our duty as scholars, however, to explore an appeal that transcends that of many similar volumes that have existed for decades. I want to know if the embrace is due to a deep emotional connection the author is making with readers, or merely because it arrives at a moment dominated by the Black Lives Matter movement. What is new here—is it the tone, or is it the voice? The structure, style, and aesthetic of the prose, or is it the information? What is Coates doing differently from the large body of literature that raises these very same questions?

Soon after Coates’s book was published, the vice-principal at my daughters’ high school approached my car during morning drop-off to ask if I had read Between the World. “You really need to read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book,” he exhorted. “The author has an amazing letter to his son that is just very powerful.” I explained to him that I was familiar with the book but that I had not yet read it. I had known this vice-principal for a few years and found him to be pretty conservative in matters of school and community. He had never before recommended a book to me, so I thought his enthusiasm warranted taking a look. I would also later learn that the reason the book resonated with him was because it offered far more questions than it answered, which fit his conservatism. But I am getting ahead of myself.

In a pithy 152 pages that includes several photographs, Coates meditates on the permanence of racial injustice in America while instructing his fifteen-year-old son Samori that it is foolhardy to believe that one person can make a change. The American Dream, he warns, is dangerous; black bodies are sport, and “[i]n America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage” (103; original emphasis). There is no harm in this. In fact, most black parents lament the day on which they must share these truths with their children. But Coates’s most impressive trick in Between the World is that he manages to place on full display the tradition of African American wisdom-teaching—the emotionally wrenching experience of telling our children about racism and injustice—but he manages to get away with generalizing what his son should do with this information. His goal seems to merely inform his son about “this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity” (70), and nothing else. But maybe there is more. If this book is in some ways an extension of Struggle, then perhaps Coates is forging his own genre. If his letter rejects the traditional Western epistolary form, then it should not be analyzed on those merits. It seems to be structured to mimic a writer’s inviting readers to embrace his personal musings. Such moves, however, are often absent a definitive solution, as was the case in Struggle; his second book treads close to his black nationalist roots even when he says he has separated himself from these. What Coates reveals of those...