The social sciences
BY TA-NEHISI COATES
Between the World and Me
The Beautiful Struggle
Between the World and Me
Between the World and Me
' I, Ta-N ehisi Coates
SPIEGEL & GRAU
NEW YORK
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. ~--.,;•.·''
!
Between tlze World and Me is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying
details have been changed.
Copyright© 2015 byTa-Nehisi Coates
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spi~gel & Grau, an imprint of Random
House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
SPIEGEL & GRAU and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks
of Penguin Random House LLC.
The title of this work is drawn from the poem "Between the World and Me"
by Richard Wright, from Wliite Man Listen! copyright© 1957 by Richard
Wright. Used by permission of John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate
ofRichardWright.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint
previously published material:
Chris Calhoun Agency: Excerpt from "Ka' Ba" by Amiri Baraka, copyright©
Estate of Amiri Baraka. Reprinted by permission of the Chris Calhoun Agency.
John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate ofRichardWright: Excerpt
from "Between the World and Me" from Mite Man Listen! by Richard Wright,
copyright© 1957 by Richard Wright. Reprinted by permission of John
Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate of Richard Wright.
Sonia Sanchez: Excerpt from "Malcolm" from Shake Loose My Skin by Sonia Sanchez (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), copyright © 1999 by Sonia Sanchez.
Reprinted by permission of Sonia Sanchez.
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For David and Kenyatta,
who believed
And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly
upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks
and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves
between the world and me . ...
-RICHARD WRIGHT
Between the World and Me
I.
Do not speak to me of martyrdom,
of men who die to be remembered
on some parish day.
I don't believe in dying
though, I too shall die.
And violets like castanets
will echo me.
SONIA SANCHEZ
Son,
Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me
what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting
from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote stu
dio on the far west side of Manhattan. A satellite closed
the miles between us, but no machinery could close the
gap between her world and the world for which I had
been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about
my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced
by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week.
The host read these words for the audience, and when
she finished she turned to the subject of my body, al
though she did not mention it specifically. But by now I
am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the
condition of my body without realizing the nature of their
request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt
6 7
TA-NEHISJ COATES
that white America's progress, or rather the progress of
those Americans who believe that they are white, was built
on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and
indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this ques
tion is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history.
There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans
deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness
that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of
their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and Amer
ica's heresies-torture, theft, enslavement-are so common
among individuals and nations that none can declare them
selves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have
never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln de
clared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure
"that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth," he was not merely
being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United
States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage
in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly
meant "government of the people" but what our country
has, throughout its history, taken the political term "peo
ple" to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother
or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me.
Thus America's problem is not its betrayal of "government
of the people," but the means by which "the people" ac quired their names.
This leads us to another equally important ideal, one
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME
that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make
no conscious claim. Americans believe in the reality of
"race" as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural
world. Racism-the need to ascribe bone-deep features to
people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them
inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this
way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother
Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or
the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a
tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as be
yond the handiwork of men.
But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the
process of naming "the people" has never been a matter of
genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.
Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the pre
eminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can
correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper
attributes, which are indelible-this is the new idea at the
heart of these new people who have been brought up hope
lessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.
These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But
unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced
from the m;chinery of criminal power. The new people
were something else before they were white-Catholic,
Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish-and if all our na
tional hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be
something else again. Perhaps they will truly become
American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I can-
8 9 TA-NEHISI COATES
not call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of
washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the
belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tast
ings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging
oflife, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs;
the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the de
struction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of chil
dren; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to
deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.
The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there
has been, at some point in history, some great power whose
elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of
other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to dis
cover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse
America, because America makes no claim to the banal.
America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and no
blest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing be
tween the white city of democracy and the terrorists,
despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One
cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead
mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of
American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I pro
pose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral stan
dard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an
apparatus urging us to accept American innoc~nce at face
value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to
look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ig-
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME
nore the great evil ·done in all of our names. But you and I
have never truly had that luxury. I think you know.
I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you be
cause this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that
Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John
Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department
store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and
murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they
were oath-b,;und to protect. And you have seen men in
the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone's
grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if
you did not before, that the police departments of your
country have been endowed with the authority to destroy
your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result
of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the
destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes
without the proper authority and your body can be de
stroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and
it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your
body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held
accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And de
struction is merely the superlative form of a dominion
whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings,
and humiliations. All of this is common to black people.
And all of this is old for black people. No one is held re
sponsible.
11 10 TA-NEHISI COATES
There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or
even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men en
forcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting
its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our
phrasing-race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial
profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy-serves
to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dis
lodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs,
cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from
this. You must always remember that the sociology, the
history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regres
sions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
That Sunday, with that host, on that news show, I tried
to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But
at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared
picture of an eleven-year-old black boy tearfully hugging
a white police officer. Then she asked me about "hope."
And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that
I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indis
tinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I
came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a
calm December day. Families, believing themselves white,
were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were
bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much
as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there
watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then
why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my
body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME
most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day
cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is
treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like
peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for
so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold
my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never
been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the
bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, know
ing that the Dream persists by warring with the known
world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families,
I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I
was sad for you. That was the week you learned that the killers of Mi
chael Brown would go free. The men who had left his
body in the street like some awesome declaration of their
inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my
expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you
were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 P.M.
that night, waiting for the announcement of an indict
ment, and when instead it was announced that there was
none you said, "I've got to go," and you went into your
room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after,
and I didn't hug you, and I didn't comfort you, because I
thought it would be wrong to comfort you. 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
12 TA-NEHISJ COATES
world, that this is your body, and you must find some way
to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question
of how one should live within a black body, within a
country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and
the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately an swers itself.
This must seem strange to you. We live in a "goal
oriented" era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes,
big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time
ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a
gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console
me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preor
dained American glory. In accepting both the chaos of his
tory and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly
consider how I wished to live-specifically, how do I live
free in this black body? It is a profound question because
America understands itself as God's handiwork, but the
black body is the clearest evidence that America is the
work of men. I have asked the question through my read
ing and writings, through the music of my youth, through
arguments with your grandfather, with your mother, your
aunt Janai, your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in
nationalist 1nyth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on
other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is
not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant inter
rogation, of confrontation with the brutality 9£ my coun try, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me
against the sheer terror of disembodiment.
.. • ifi.. : .. t ' L i I f
14 TA-NEHISI COATES
And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever
you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this
I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I
knew were black, and all of them were power:fully, ada
mantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young
life, though I had not always recognized it as such.
It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in
the extravagant boys of my neighborhood,.in their large
rings and medallions, their big puffy coats and full-length
fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their
world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak
and Liberty, or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside
Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell
sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear,
and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts
of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered
'round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black
body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on
in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big
T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a cata
log of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief
that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.
I saw it in their customs of war. I was no older than five,
sitting out on the front steps of my home on Woodbrook
Avenue, watching two shirtless boys circle each other close
and buck shoulders. From then on, I knew that there was
a ritual to a street fight, bylaws and codes that, in their very
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 15
need, attested to all the vulnerability of the black teenage
bodies. I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music
that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and
bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty
up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them,
against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of
their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I
saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded
bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over.
And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how
they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with
their words for the sin of playing too much. "Keep my
name out your mouth;' they would say. I would watch
them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vas
elined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each
other. I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana's home in Phila
delphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what
I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I
knew that my father's father was dead and that my uncle
Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and
that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in
my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who
slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very
afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which
he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who
beat me as if someo~e might steal me away, because that is
16 TA-NEHISI COATES
exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had
lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to
guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey
and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had
just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives
around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear.
Have they told you this story?When your grandmother
was sixteen years old a young man knocked on her door.
The young man was your Nana Jo's boyfriend. No one
else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait
until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother
got there first. She asked the young man to leave. Then
she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so
that she might remember how easily she could lose her
body. Ma never forgot. I remember her clutching my small
hand tightly as we crossed the street. She would tell me
that ifl ever let go and were killed by an onrushing car, she
would beat me back to life. When I was six, Ma and Dad
took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and
found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious
minutes looking for _me. When they found me, Dad did
what every parent I knew would have done--he reached
for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense.
Later, I would hear it in Dad's voice--"Either I can beat
him, or the police:' Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn't. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 17
from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even
administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked
us at the exit. What I know is that fathers who slammed
their teenage boys for sass would then release them to
streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the
same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls,
but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers
twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest
humor to cope. We stood in the alley where we shot bas
ketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the
boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front
of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five
bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose
mother was known to reach for anything--cable wires,
extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know
that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our par
ents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague
years resorted to the scourge.
To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be
naked before the elements of the world, before all the
guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness
is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the cor
rect and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot
of people forced for centuries to live under fear. The law
did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has be
come an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to
say, for furthering the assault on your body. But a society
that protects some people through a safety net of schools,
18 TA-NEHISI COATES
government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but
can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has
either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has suc
ceeded at something much darker. However you call it,
the result was our infirmity before the criminal forces of
the world. It does not matter if the agent of those forces is
white or black-what matters is our condition, what mat
ters is the system that makes your body breakable.
The revelation of these forces, a series of great changes,
has unfolded over the course of my life. The changes are
still unfolding and will likely continue until I die. I was
eleven years old, standing out in the parking lot in front of
the 7 -Eleven, watching a crew of older boys standing near
the street. They yelled and gestured at ... who? ... another
boy, young, like me, who stood there, almost smiling,
gamely throwing up his hands. He had already learned the
lesson he would teach me that day: that his body was in
constant jeopardy. Who knows what brought him to that
knowledge? The projects, a drunken stepfather, an older
brother concussed by police, a cousin pinned in the city
jail. That he was outnumbered did not matter because the
whole world had outnumbered him long ago, and what do
numbers matter? This was a war for the possession of his
body and that would be the war of his whole life.
I stood there for some seconds, marveling at the older
boys' beautiful sense of fashion. They all wore ski jackets,
the kind which, in my day, mothers put on layaway in Sep-
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 19
tember, then piled up overtime hours so as to have the
thing wrapped and ready for Christmas. I focused in on a
light-skinned boy with a long head and small eyes. He was
scowling at another boy, who was standing close to me. It
was just before three in the afternoon. I was in sixth grade.
School had just let out, and it was not yet the fighting
weather of early spring. What was the exact problem here?
Who could know?
The boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket
and ptilled out a gun. I recall it in the slowest motion, as
though in a dream. There the boy stood, with the gun
brandished, which he slowly untucked, tucked, then un
tucked once more, and in his small eyes I saw a surging
rage that could, in an instant, erase my body. That was
1986. That year I felt myself to be drowning in the news
reports of murder. I was aware that these murders very
often did not land upon the intended targets but fell upon
great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful
children-fell upon them random and relentless, like great
sheets of rain. I knew this in theory but could not under
stand it as fact until the boy with the small eyes stood
across from me holding my entire body in his small hands.
The boy did not shoot. His friends ptilled him back. He
did not need to shoot. He had affirmed my place in the
order of things. He had let it be known how easily I could
be selected. I took the subway home that day, processing
the episode all alone. I did not tell my parents. I did not tell
20 TA-NEHISI COATES
my teachers, and if! told my friends I would have done so
with all the excitement needed to obscure the fear that
came over me in that moment.
I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise
up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like
fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the
north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that
the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father
lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there be
yond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were
other worlds where children did not regularly fear for
their bodies. I knew this because there was a large televi
sion resting in my living room. In the evenings I would sit
before this television bearing witness to the dispatches
from this other world. There were little white boys with
complete collections of football cards, and their only want
was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison
oak. That other world was suburban and endless, organized
around pot roasts, blueberry pies, fireworks, ice cream sun
daes, immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks that
were loosed in wooded backyards with streams and glens.
Comparing these dispatches with the facts of my native
world, I came to understand that my country was a galaxy,
and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West
Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I
obsessed over the distance between that other sector of
space and my own. I knew that my portion of the Ameri
can galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 21
gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was
not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the
breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation be
tween that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic
injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, ir
repressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the
velocity of escape.
Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very
different from my own. The grandness of the world, the
real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you.
And you have no need of dispatches because you have
seen so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants
their homes, their hobbies-up close. I don't know what it
means to grow up with a black president, social networks,
omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their
natural hair. What I know is that when they loosed the
killer of Michael Brown, you said, "I've got to go." And
that cut me because, for all our differing worlds, at your
age my feeling was exactly the same. And I recall that even
then I had not yet begun to imagine the perils that tangle
us. You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You
have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives
and discovered the plunder everywhere around us.
Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to
survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets,
by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the
people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles
and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt it-
22 TA-NEHISI COATES
self. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series
of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives un
scathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant
danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrill
ing. This is what the rappers mean when they pronounce
themselves addicted to "the streets" or in love with "the game:• I imagine they feel something akin to parachutists,
rock climbers, BASE jumpers, and others who choose to
live on the edge. Of course we chose nothing. And I have
never believed the brothers who claim to "run," much less
"own," the city. We did not design the streets. We do not
fund them. We do not preserve them. But I was there,
nevertheless, charged like all the others with the protec
tion of my body.
The crews, the young men who'd transmuted their fear
into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the
blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it
was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel
any sense of security and power. They would break your
jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that
power, to revel in the might of their own bodies. And their
wild reveling, their astonishing acts made their names ring
out. Reps were made, atrocities recounted. And so in my
Baltimore it was known that when Cherry Hill rolled
through you rolled the other way, that North and Pulaski
was not an intersection but a hurricane, leaving only splin
ters and shards in its wake. In that fashion, the security of
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 23
these neighborhoods flowed downward and became the
security of the bodies living there. You steered clear ofJo
Jo, for instance, because he was cousin to Keon, the don of
Murphy Homes. In other cities, indeed in other Balti
mores, the neighborhoods had other handles and the boys
went by other names, but their mission did not change:
prove the inviolability of their block, of their bodies,
through their power to crack knees, ribs, and arms. This
practice was so common that today you can approach any
black person raised in the cities of that era and they can tell
you which crew ran which hood in their city; and they can
tell you the names of all the captains and all their cousins
and offer an anthology of all their exploits.
To survive the neighborhoods and shield my body, I
learned another language consisting of a basic comple
ment of head nods and handshakes. I memorized a list of
prohibited blocks. I learned the smell and feel of fighting
weather. And I learned that "Shorty, can I see your bike?"
was never a sincere question, and "Yo, you was messing
with my cousin" was neither an earnest accusation nor a
misunderstanding of the facts. These were the summonses
that you answered with your left foot forward, your right
foot back, your hands guarding your face, one slightly
lower than the other, cocked like a hammer. Or they were
answered by breaking out, ducking through alleys, cutting
through backyards, then bounding through the door past
your kid brother into your bedroom, pulling the tool out
of your lambskin or from under your mattress or out of
24 TA-NEHISI COATES
your Adidas shoebox, then calling up your own cousins
(who really aren't) and returning to that same block, on
that same day, and to that same crew, hollering out, "Yeah, nigger, what's up now?" I recall learning these laws clearer
than I recall learning my colors and shapes, because these
laws were essential to the security of my body.
I think ofthis as a great difference between us. You have
some acquaintance with the old rules, but they are not as
essential to you as they were to me. I am sure that you have
had to deal with the occasional roughneck on the subway
or in the park, but when I was about your age, each day,
fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was
walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of
our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I
smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not-all of
which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a
culture concerned chiefly with securing the body. I do not
long for those days. I have no desire to make you "tough"
or "street," perhaps because any "toughness" I garnered
came reluctantly. I think I was always, somehow; aware of
the price. I think I somehow knew that that third of my
brain should have been concerned with more beautiful
things. I think I felt that something out there, some force,
nameless and vast, had robbed me of ... what? Time? Ex
perience? I think you know something of what that third
could have done, and I think that is why you may feel the
need for escape even more than I did. You have seen all
the wonderful life up above the tree-line, yet you under-
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 25
stand that there is no real distance between you and Tray
van Martin, and thus Trayvon Martin must terrify you in a
way that he could never terrify me. You have seen so
much more of' all that is lost when they destroy your body.
The streets were· not my only problem. If the streets
shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to
comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now.
But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your
body later. I suffered at the hands of both, but I resent the
schools more. There was nothing sanctified about the laws
of the streets-the laws were amoral and practical. You
rolled with a posse to the party as sure as you wore boots
in the snow, or raised an umbrella in the rain. These were
rules aimed at something obvious-the great danger that
haunted every visit to Shake & Bake, every bus ride down
town. But the laws of the schools were aimed at something
distant and vague. What did it mean to, as our elders told
us, "grow up and be somebody"? And what precisely did
this have to do with an education rendered as rote dis
cipline? To be educated in my Baltimore mostly meant
always packing an extra number 2 pencil and working qui
etly. Educated children walked in single file on the right
side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory,
and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated
children never offered excuses-certainly not childhood
itself. The world had no time for the childhoods of black
boys and girls. How could the schools? Algebra, Biology,
and English were not subjects so much as opportunities to
. 26 TA-NEHISI COATES
better discipline the body, to practice writing between the
lines, copying the directions legibly, memorizing theorems
extracted from the world they were created to represent.
All of it felt so distant to me. I remember sitting in my
seventh-grade French class and not having any idea why
I was there. I did not know any French people, and noth
ing around me suggested I ever would. France was a rock
rotating in another galaxy, around another sun, in another sky that I would never cross. Why, precisely, was I sitting
in this classroom? The question was never answered. I was a curious boy,
but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They
were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my
teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them.
Some years after I'd left school, after I'd dropped out of
college, I heard a few lines from Nas that struck me:
Ecstasy, coke, you say it's love, it is poison
Schools where I learn they should be burned, it is poison
That was exactly how I felt back then. I sensed the
schools were hiding something, drugging us with false
morality so that we would not see, so that we did not ask:
Why-for us and only us-is the other side of free will
and free spirits an assault upon our bodies? This is not a
hyperbolic concern. When our elders presented school to
us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but
as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing.
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 27
Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of
high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the coun
try. But it does not, and while I couldn't crunch the num
bers or plumb the history back then, I sensed that the fear
that marked West Baltimore could not be explained by the
schools. Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed
them. Perhaps they must be burned away so that the heart
of this thing might be known.
Unfit for the schools, and in good measure wanting to
be unfit for them, and lacking the savvy I needed to master
the streets, I felt there could be no escape for me or, hon
estly, anyone else. The fearless boys and girls who would
knuckle up, call on cousins and crews, and, if it came to it, pull guns seemed to have mastered the streets. But their
knowledge peaked at seventeen, when they ventured out
of their parents' homes and discovered that America had
guns and cousins, too. I saw their futures in the tired faces
of mothers dragging themselves onto the 28 bus, swatting
and cursing a\ three-year-olds; I saw their futures in the
men out on the corner yelling obscenely at some young
girl because she would not srnile. Some of them stood
outside liquor stores waiting on a few dollars for a bottle.
We would hand them a twenty and tell them to keep the
change. They would dash inside and return with Red Bull,
Mad Dog, or Cisco. Then we would walk to the house of
someone whose mother worked nights, play "Fuck tha
Police;' and drink to our youth. We could not get out. The
ground we walked was trip-wired. The air we breathed
28 TA-NEHISI COATES
was toxic. The water stunted our growth. We could not get out.
A year after I watched the boy with the small eyes pull
out a gun, my father beat me for letting another boy steal
from me. Two years later, he beat me for threatening my
ninth-grade teacher. Not being violent enough could cost
me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body.
We could not get out. I was a capable boy, intelligent, well
liked, but powerfully afraid. And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly,
that for a child to be marked off for such a life, to be forced
to live in fear was a great injustice. And what was the
source of this fear? What was hiding behind the smoke
screen of streets and schools? And what did it mean that
number 2 pencils, conjugations without context, Pythago
rean theorems, handshakes, and head nods were the differ
ence between life and death, were the curtains drawing down between the world and me?
I could not retreat, as did so many, into the church and
its mysteries. My parents rejected all dogmas. We spurned
the holidays marketed by the people who wanted to be
white. We would not stand for their anthems. We would
not kneel before their God. And so I had no sense that any
just God was on my side. "The meek shall inherit the
earth" meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in
West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed
up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city
jail. My understanding of the universe was physical, and its
moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 29
That was the message of the small-eyed boy, untucking the
piece--a child bearing the power to body and banish
other children to memory. Fear ruled everything around
me, and I knew, as all black people do, that this fear was
connected to the Dream out there, to the unworried boys,
to pie and pot roast, to the white fences and green lawns
nightly beamed into our television sets.
But how? Religion could not tell me. The schools
could not tell me. The streets could not help me see be
yond the scramble of each day. And I was such a curious
boy. I was raised that way. Your grandmother taught me to
read when I was only four. She also taught me to write, by
which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into
a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of
investigation. When I was in trouble at school (which was
quite often) she woul,I make me write about it. The writ
ing had to answer a series of questions: Why did I feel the
need to talk at the same time as my teacher?Why did I not
believe that my teacher was entitled to respect? How
would I want someone to behave while I was talking?
What would I do the next time I felt the urge to talk to
my friends during a lesson? I have given you these same
assignments. I gave them to you not because I thought
they would curb your behavior-they certainly did not
curb mine-but because these were the earliest acts of in
terrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness. Your
grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class.
She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the
30 TA·NEHISI COATES
subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing
mysel£ Here was the lesson: I was not an innocent. My
impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And feeling
that I was as human as anyone, this must be true for other
humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not inno
cent. Could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? The cities they built? The country they claimed as given to them by God?
Now the questions began burning in me. The materials
for research were all around me, in the form of books as
sembled by your grandfather. He was then working at
Howard University as a research librarian in the Moorland
Spingarn Research Center, one of the largest collections
of Africana in the world. Your grandfather loved books
and loves them to this day, and they were all over the house,
books about black people, by black people, for black peo
ple spilling off shelves and out of the living room, boxed
up in the basement. Dad had been a local captain in the
Black Panther Party. I read through all of Dad's books
about the Panthers and his stash of old Party newspapers. I
was attracted to their guns, because the guns seemed hon
est. The guns seemed to address this country, which in
vented the streets that secured them with despotic police,
in its primary language--violence. And I compared the
Panthers to the heroes given to me by the schools, men
and women who struck me as ridiculous and contrary to everything I knew.
Every February my classmates and I were herded into
32 TA-NEHISI COATES
assemblies for a ritual review of the Civil Rights Move
ment. Our teachers urged us toward the example of free
dom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers,
and it seemed that the month could not pass without a
series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on
camera. The black people in these films seemed to love
the worst things in life--love the dogs that rent their chil
dren apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the fire
hoses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the
streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the
women who cursed them, love the children who spat on
them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they show
ing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I
speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense
that blacks are in especial need of this morality. Back then
all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I
knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children
pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents
wielding extension cords, and "Yeah, nigger, what's up
now?" I judged them against the country I knew, which
had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under
slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across
the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real
one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means.
How could the schools valorize men and women whose
values society actively scorned? How could they send us
out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they
were, and then speak of nonviolence?
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 33
I came to see the streets and the schools as arms of the
same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state
while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and
violence were the weaponry ofboth. Fail in the streets and
the crews would catch you slipping and take your body.
Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent
back to those same streets, where they would take your
body. And I began to see these two arms in relation
those who failed in the schools justified their destruction
in the streets. The society could say, "He should have
stayed in school," and then wash its hands of him.
It does not matter that the "intentions" of individual
educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any
institution, or its agents, "intend" for you is secondary. Our
world is physical. Learn to play defense--ignore the head
and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will
directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people
being left to the streets. But a very large number of Amer
icans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. No one
directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify
failure and destruction. But a great number of educators
spoke of "personal responsibility" in a country authored
and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of
this language of "intention" and "personal responsibility"
is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were
broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried
our best. "Good intention" is a hall pass through history, a
sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
34 TA·NEHISI COATES !"
An unceasing interrogation of the stories told to us by
the schools now felt essential. It felt wrong not to ask why,
and then to ask it again. I took these questions to my fa
ther, who very often refused to offer an answer, and instead
referred me to more books. My mother and father were
always pushing me away from secondhand answers-even
the answers they themselves believed. I don't know that I
have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But
every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best
of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being
"politically conscious"-as much a series of actions as a
state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual,
questioning as exploration rather than the search for cer
tainty. Some things were clear to me: The violence that
undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during
Black History Month, and the intimate violence of "Yeah,
nigger, what's up now?" were not unrelated. And this vio
lence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design.
But what exactly was the design? And why? I must
know. I must get out ... but into what? I devoured the
books because they were the rays of light peeking out
from the doorframe, and perhaps past that door there was
another world, one beyond the gripping fear that under girded the Dream.
In this blooming consciousness, in this period of intense
questioning, I was not alone. Seeds planted in the 1960s,
forgotten by so many, sprung up from the ground and bore
fruit. Malcolm X, who'd been dead for twenty-five years,
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 35
exploded out qf the small gatherings of his surviving apos
tles and returned to the world. Hip-hop artists quoted him
in lyrics, cut his speeches across the breaks, or flashed his
likeness in their videos. This was the early '90s. I was then
approaching the end of my time in my parents' home and
wondering about my life out there. If! could have chosen
a flag back then, it would have been embroidered with a
portrait of Malcolm X, dressed in a business suit, his tie
dangling, one hand parting a window shade, the other
holding a rifle. The portrait communicated everything
I wanted to be--controlled, intelligent, and beyond the
fear. I would buy tapes of Malcolm's speeches-"Message
to the Grassroots,'' "The Ballot or the Bullet"--down at
Everyone's Place, a black bookstore on North Avenue,
and play them on my Walkman. Here was all the angst I
felt before the heroes of February, distilled and quotable.
"Don't give up your life, preserve your life," he would say.
"And if you got to give it up, make it even-steven." This
was not boasting-it was a declaration of equality rooted
not in better angels or the intangible spirit but in the sanc
tity of the black body. You preserved your life because
your life, your body, was as good as anyone's, because your
blood was as precious as jewels, and it should never be sold
for magic, for spirituals inspired by the unknowable here
after. You do not give your precious body to the billy
clubs of Birmingham sheriffs nor to the insidious gravity
of the streets. Black is beautiful-which is to say that the
black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded
36 TA-NEHISI COATES
ag;rinst the torture of processing and lye, that black skin
must be guarded ag;nnst bleach, that our noses and mouths
must be protected ag;rinst modern surgery. We are all our
beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before bar
barians, must never submit our original self, our one· of one, to defiling and plunder.
I loved Malcolm because Malcolm never lied, unlike the
schools and their fa~ade of morality, unlike the streets and
their bravado, unlike the world of dreamers. I loved him
because he made it plain, never mystical or esoteric, be cause his science was not rooted in the actions of spooks
and mystery gods but in the work ·of the physical world.
Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first
honest man I'd ever heard. He was unconcerned with mak
ing the people who believed they were white comfortable
in their belief. If he was angry, he s;rid so. If he hated, he
hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the
enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would
not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better
man for you. He would not be your morality. Malcolm
spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the
laws that proscribed our imagination. I identified with him.
I knew that he had chafed ag;rinst the schools, that he had
almost been doomed by the streets. But even more I knew
that he had found himself while studying in prison, and
that when he emerged from the j;rils, he returned wielding
some old power that made him speak as though his body
were his own. "If you're black, you were born in jill;' Mal-
,
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 37
colm s;nd. And I felt the truth of this in the blocks I had to
avoid, in the times of day when I must not be caught walk
ing home from school, in my lack of control over my body.
Perhaps I too might live free. Perhaps I too might wield the
same old power that animated the ancestors, that lived in
Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Nanny, Cudjoe, Malcolm X,
and speak-no, act-as though my body were my own.
My reclamation would be accomplished, like Malcolm's,
through books, through my own study and exploration.
Perhaps I might write something of consequence someday.
I had been reading and writing beyond the purview of the
schools all my life. Already I was scribbling down bad rap
lyrics and bad poetry. The air of that time was charged
with the call for a return, to old things, to something es
sential, some part of us that had been left behind in the
mad dash out of the past and into America. This missing thing, this lost essence, expl;rined the boys
on the corner and "the babies having babies." It explained
everything, from our cracked-out fathers to HIV to the
bleached skin of Michael Jackson. The missing thing was
related to the plunder of our bodies, the fact that any c!;rim to ourselves, to the hands that secured us, the spine that
braced us, and the head that directed us, was contestable.
This was two years before the Million Man March. Al
most every day I played Ice Cube's album Death Cert_ijicate:
"Let me live my life, if we can no longer live our life, then
let us give our life for the liberation and salvation of the
black nation." I kept the Black Power episodes of Eyes on
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 39
the Prize in my weekly rotation. I was haunted by the
shadow of my father's generation, by Fred Hampton and
Mark Clark. I was haunted by the bodily sacrifice of Mal
colm, by Attica and Stokely. I was haunted because I be
lieved that we had left ourselves back there, undone by
COINTELPRO and black flight and drugs, and now in
the crack era all we had were our fears. Perhaps we should
go back. That was what I heard in the call to "keep it real."
Perhaps we should return to ourselves, to our own pri
mordial streets, to our own ruggedness, to our own rude
hair. Perhaps we should return to Mecca.
My only Mecca was, is, and shall always be Howard Uni
versity. I have tried to explain this to you many times. You
say that you hear me, that you understand, but I am not so
sure that the force of my Mecca-The Mecca-can be
translated into your new and eclectic tongue. I am not
even sure that it should be. My work is to give you what I
know of my own particular path while allowing you to
walk your own. You can no more be black like I am black
than I could b~ black like your grandfather was. And still,
I maintain that even for a cosmopolitan boy like you, there
is something to be found there--a base, even in these
modern times, a port in the American storm. Surely I am
biased by nostalgia and tradition. Your grandfather worked
at Howard. Your uncles Darnani and Menelik and your
aunts Kris and Kelly graduated from there. I met your
40 TA•NEHISI COATES
mother there, your uncle Ben, your aunt Kamilah and aunt Chana.
I was admitted to Howard University, but formed and
shaped by The Mecca. These institutions are related but
not the same. Howard University is an institution ofhigher
education, concerned with the LSAT, magna cum laude,
and Phi Beta Kappa. The Mecca is a machine, crafted to
capture and concentrate the dark energy of all African
peoples and inject it directly into the student body. The
Mecca derives its power from the heritage of Howard Uni
versity, which in Jim Crow days enjoyed a near-monopoly
on black talent. And whereas most other historically black
schools were scattered like forts in the great wilderness of
the old Confederacy, Howard was in Washington, D.C.
Chocolate City-and thus in proximity to both federal
power and black power. The result was an alumni and
professorate that spanned genre and generation-Charles
Drew, Amiri Baraka, Thurgood Marshall, Ossie Davis,
Doug Wilder, David Dinkins, Lucille Clifton, Toni Mor
rison, Kwame Ture. The history, the location, the alumni
combined to create The Mecca-the crossroads of the black diaspora.
I first witnessed this power out on the Yard, that com
munal green space in the center of the campus where the
students gathered and I saw everything I knew of my black
self multiplied out into seemingly endless variations. There
were the scions of Nigerian aristocrats in their business
suits giving dap to bald-headed Qs in purple windbreakers
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 41
and tan Timbs. There were the high-yellow progeny of
AME preachers debating the clerics of Ausar-Set. There
were California girls turned Muslim, born anew, in hijab
and long skirt. There were Ponzi schemers and Christian
cultists, Tabernacle fanatics and mathematical geniuses. It
was like listening to a hundred different renditions of
"Redemption Song;' each in a different color and key.
And overlaying all of this was the history of Howard itself.
I knew that I was literally walking in the footsteps of all
the Toni Morrisons and Zora Neale Hurstons, of all the
Sterling Browns and Kenneth Clarks, who'd come before.
The Mecca-the vastness of black people across space
time--could be experienced in a twenty-minute walk
across campus. I saw this vastness in the students chopping
it up in front of the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hall,
where Muhammad Ali had addressed their fathers and
mothers in defiance of the Vietnam War. I saw its epic
sweep in the students next to Ira Aldridge Theater, where
Donny Hathaway had once sung, where Donald Byrd had
once assembled his flock. The students came out with
their saxophones, trumpets, and drums, played "My Favor
ite Things" or "Someday My Prince Will Come." Some of
the other students were out on the grass in front of Alain
Locke Hall, in pink and green, chanting, singing, stomping,
clapping, stepping. Some of them came up from Tubman
Quadrangle with their roommates and rope for Double
Dutch. Some of them came down from Drew Hall, with
their caps cocked and their backpacks slung through one
' ' .,
42 TA•NEHISI COATES
arm, then fell into gorgeous ciphers ofbeatbox and rhyme.
Some of the girls sat by the flagpole with bell hooks and
Sonia Sanchez in their straw totes. Some of the boys, with
their new Yoruba names, beseeched these girls by citing
Frantz Farron. Some of them studied Russian. Some of
them worked in bone labs. They were Panamanian. They
were Bajan. And some of them were from places I had
never heard of. But all of them were hot and incredible,
exotic even, though we hailed from the same tribe.
The black world was expanding before me, and I could
see now that that world was more than a photonegative of
that of the people who believe they are white. "White
America" is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this
power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious
(redlining). But however it appears, the power of domina
tion and exclusion is central to the belief in being white,
and without it, "white people" would cease to exist for
want of reasons. There will surely always be people with
straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all his
tory. But some of these straight-haired people with blue
eyes have been "black;' and this points to the great differ
ence between their world and ours. We did not choose
our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters
obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible.
They are the ones who came up with a one-drop rule that
separated the "white" from the "black," even if it meant that their own blue-eyed sons would live under the lash.
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 43
The result is a people, black people, who embody all phys
ical varieties and whose life stories mirror this physical
range. Through The Mecca I saw that we were, in our
own segregated body politic, cosmopolitans. The black di
aspora was not just our own world but, in so many ways,
the Western world itself.
Now, the heirs of those Virginia planters could never
directly acknowledge this legacy or reckon with its power.
And so that beauty that Malcolm pledged us to protect,
black beauty, was never celebrated in movies, in television,
or in the textbooks I'd seen as a child. Everyone of any
import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This
was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone
Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They
were rebelling against the history books that spoke of
black people only as sentimental "firsts"-first black five
star general, first black congressman, first black mayor
always presented in the bemused manner of a category of
Trivial Pursuit. Serious history was the West, and the West
was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once
read from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can't remember where
I read it, or when-only that I was already at Howard.
"Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" Bellow quipped. Tol
stoy was "white," and so Tolstoy "mattered," like everything
else that was white "mattered;' And this view of things was
connected to the fear that passed through the generations,
to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the
visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was in-
f
t '
44 TA 0 NEHISI COATES
ferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies
were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly
be accorded the same respect as those that built the West.
Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized,
improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?
Contrary to this theory, I had Malcolm. I had my mother
and father. I had my readings of every issue of The Source
and Vibe. I read them not merely because I loved black
music-I did-but because of the writing itsel£ Writers
Greg Tate, Chairman Mao, dream hampton-barely older
than me-were out there creating a new language, one that
I intuitively understood, to analyze our art, our world. This
was, in and ofitself, an argument for the weight and beauty
of our culture and thus of our bodies. And now each day;
out on the Yard, I felt this weight and saw this beauty, not
just as a matter of theory but also as demonstrable fact. And
I wanted desperately to communicate this evidence to the
world, because I felt-even if I did not completely know
that the larger culture's erasure of black beauty was inti
mately connected to the destruction of black bodies.
What was required was a new story, a new history told
through the lens of o·ur struggle. I had always known this,
had heard the need for a new history in Malcolm, had seen
the need addressed in my father's books. It was in the
promise behind their grand titles-Children of the Sun, Wondeiful Ethiopians of the Andent Cushite Empire, The African Origin of Civilization. Here was not just our history but the history of the world, weaponized to our noble
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 45
ends. Here was the primordial stuff of our own Dream
the Dream of a "black race"-of our own Tolstoys who
lived deep in the African past, where we authored operas,
pioneered secret algebra, erected ornate walls, pyramids,
colossi, bridges, roads, and all the inventions that I then
thought must qualify one's lineage for the ranks of civiliza
tion. They had their champions, and somewhere we must
have ours. By then I'd read Chancellor Williams, J. A. Rogers, and John Jackson-writers central to the canon of
our new noble history. From them I knew that Mansa
Musa of Mali was black, and Shabaka of Egypt was black,
and Yaa Asantewaa of Ashanti was black-and "the black
race" was a thing I supposed existed from time immemo
rial, a thing that was real and mattered.
When I came to Howard, Chancellor Williams's De
struction of Black Civilization was my Bible. Williams him self had taught at Howard. I read him when I was sixteen,
and his work offered a grand theory of multi-millennial
European plunder. The theory relieved me of certain
troubling questions-this is the point of nationalism-and
it gave me my Tolstoy. I read about Queen Nzinga, who
ruled in Central Africa in the sixteenth century, resisting
the Portuguese. I read about her negotiating with the
Dutch. When the Dutch ambassador tried to humiliate
her by refusing her a seat, Nzinga had shown her power by
ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human
chair of her body. That was the kind of power I sought,
and the story of our own royalty became for me a weapon.
;
46 TA-NEHISI COATES
My working theory then held all black people as kings in
exile, a nation of original men severed from our original
names and our majestic Nubian culture. Surely this was
the message I took from gazing out on the Yard. Had any
people, anywhere, ever been as sprawling and beautiful as us?
I needed more books. At Howard University, one of the
greatest collections of books could be found in the
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, where your grand
father once worked. Moorland held archives, papers, col
lections, and virtually any book ever written by or about
black people. For the most significant portion of my time
at The Mecca, I followed a simple ritual. I would walk into
the Moorland reading room and fill out three call slips for
three different works. I would take a seat at one of these
long tables. I would draw out my pen and one of my
black-and-white composition books. I would open the
books and read, while filling my coI11position books with
notes on my reading, new vocabulary words, and sentences
of my own invention. I would arrive in the morning and request, three call slips at a time, the works of every writer
I had heard spoken ·of in classrooms or out on the Yard:
Larry Neal, Eric Williams, George Padmore, Sonia San
chez, Stanley Crouch, Harold Cruse, Manning Marable,
Addison Gayle, Carolyn Rodgers, Etheridge Knight, Ster
ling Brown. I remember believing that the key to all life
lay in articulating the precise difference between "the
Black Aesthetic" and "Negritude." How, specifically, did
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 47
Europe underdevelop Africa? I must know. And if the
Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs were alive today, would they
live in Harlem? I had to inhale all the pages.
I went into this investigation imagining history to be a
unified narrative, free of debate, which, once uncovered,
would simply verify everything I had always suspected.
The smokescreen would lift. And the villains who ma
nipulated the schools and the streets would be unmasked.
But there was so much to know-so much geography to
cover-Africa, the Caribbean, the Americas, the United
States. And all of these areas had histories, sprawling liter
ary canons, fieldwork, ethnographies. Where should I
begin?
The trouble came almost immediately. I did not find a
coherent tradition marching lockstep but instead factions,
and factions within factions. Hurston battled Hughes, Du
Bois warred with Garvey, Harold Cruse fought everyone. I
felt myself at the bridge of a great ship that I could not
control because C.L.R. James was a great wave and Basil
Davidson was a swirling eddy, tossing me about. Things I
believed merely a week earlier, ideas I had taken from one
book, could be smashed to splinters by another. Had we
retained any of our African inheritance? Frazier says it was
all destroyed, and this destruction evidences the terrible
ness of our capturers. Herskovitz says it lives on, and this evidences the resilience of our African spirit. By my sec
ond year, it was natural for me to spend a typical day me
diating between Frederick Douglass's integration into
48 TA-NEHISI COATES
America and Martin Delany's escape into nationalism.
Perhaps they were somehow both right. I had come look
ing for a parade, for a military review of champions march
ing in ranks. Instead I was left with a brawl of ancestors, a
herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as
often marching away from each other.
I would take breaks from my reading, walk out to the
vendors who lined the streets, eat lunch on the Yard. I
would imagine Malcolm, his body bound in a cell, study
ing the books, trading his human eyes for the power of
flight. And I too felt bound by my ignorance, by the ques
tions that I had not yet understood to be more than just
means, by my lack of understanding, and by Howard itself.
It was still a school, after all. I wanted to pursue things, to
know things, but I could not match the means of knowing
that came naturally to me with the expectations of profes
sors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right
to declare your own curiosities and follow them through
all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the
classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's inter
ests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was
discovering myself. The best parts of Malcolm pointed the
way. Malcolm, always changing, always evolving toward
some truth that was ultimately outside the boundaries of
his life, of his body. I felt myself in motion, still directed
toward the total possession of my body, but by some other
route which I could not before then have imagined.
I was not searching alone. I met your uncle Ben at The
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 49
Mecca. He was, like me, from one of those cities where
everyday life was so different than the Dream that it de
manded an explanation. He came, like me, to The Mecca
in search of the nature and origin of the breach. I shared
with him a healthy skepticism and a deep belief that we
could somehow read our way out. Ladies loved him, and
what a place to be loved-for it was said, and we certainly
believed it to be true, that nowhere on the Earth could
one find a more beautiful assembly of women than on
Howard University's Yard. And somehow even this was
part of the search-the physical beauty of the black body
was all our beauty, historical and cultural, incarnate. Your uncle Ben became a fellow traveler for life, and I discov
ered that there was something particular about journeying
out with black people who knew the length of the road
because they had traveled it too. I would walk out into the city and find other searchers
at lectures, book signings, and poetry readings. I was still
writing bad poetry. I read this bad poetry at open mies in
local cafes populated mostly by other poets who also felt
the insecurity of their bodies. All of these poets were older
and wiser than me, and many of them were well read, and
they brought this wisdom to bear on me and my work.
What did I mean, specijically, by the loss of my body? And
if every black body was precious, a one of one, if Malcolm
was correct and you must preserve your life, how could I
see these precious lives as simply a collective mass, as the
amorphous residue of plunder? How could I privilege the
50 TA-NEHISI COATES
spectrum of dark energy over each particular ray oflight?
These were notes on how to write, and thus notes on how
to think. The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting
the number of possible questions, on privileging immedi
ate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous
thinking, and honest writing. And it became clear that this
was not just for the dreams concocted by Anlericans to
justify themselves but also for the dreams that I had con
jured to replace them. I had thought that I must mirror the
outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to
civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself. I had forgotten my own self
interrogations pushed upon me by my mother, or rather I
had not yet apprehended their deeper, lifelong meaning. I
was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own hu
manity, of my own hurt and anger-I didn't yet realize that
the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delu
sional as it is to ennoble.
The art I was coming to love lived in this void, in the
not yet knowable, in the pain, in the question. The older
poets introduced. me to artists who pulled their energy
from the void-Bubber Miley, Otis Redding, Sam and
Dave, C. K. Williams, Carolyn Forche. The older poets
were Ethelbert Miller, Kenneth Carroll, Brian Gilmore. It
is important that I tell you their names, that you know that
I have never achieved anything alone. I remember sitting
with Joel Dias-Porter, who had not gone to Howard but
whom I found at The Mecca, reviewing every line of
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 51
Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage." And I was stunned by
how much Hayden managed to say without, seemingly,
saying anything at all-he could bring forth joy and agony
without literally writing the words, which formed as pic
tures and not slogans. Hayden imagined the enslaved, dur
ing the Middle Passage, from the perspective of the
enslavers-a mind-trip for me, in and of itself; why should
the enslaver be allowed to speak? But Hayden's poems did
not speak. They conjured:
You cannot stare that hatred down
or chain the fear that stalks the watches
I was not in any slave ship. Or perhaps I was, because so
much of what I'd felt in Baltimore, the sharp hatred, the
immortal wish, and the timeless will, I saw in Hayden's
work. And that was what I heard in Malcolm, but never
like this-quiet, pure, and unadorned. I was learning the
craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of
what my mother had taught me all those years ago-the
craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an
economy of truth-loose and useless words must be dis
carded, and I found that these loose and useless words were
not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was
not simply the transcription of notions-beautiful writing
rarely is. I wanted to learn to write, which was ultimately,
still, as my mother had taught me, a confrontation with my
own innocence, my own rationalizations. Poetry was the
52 TA-NEHISI COATES
processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell
away and I was left with the cold steel truths oflife.
These truths I heard in the works of other poets around
the city. They were made of small hard things-aunts and
uncles, smoke breaks after sex, girls on stoops drinking
from mason jars. These truths carried the black body be
yond slogans and gave it color and texture and thus re
flected the spectrum I saw out on the Yard more than all of
my alliterative talk of guns or revolutions or paeans to the
lost dynasties of African antiquity. After these readings, I
followed as the poets would stand out on U Street or re
pair to a care and argue about everything-books, politics,
boxing. And their arguments reinforced the discordant
tradition I'd found in Moorland, and I began to see dis
cord, argument, chaos, perhaps even fear, as a kind of
power. I was learning to live in the disquiet I felt in
Moorland-Spingarn, in the mess of my mind. The gnaw
ing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not
an alarm. It was a beacon. It began to strike me that the point of my education was
a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award
me my own especial Dream but would break all the
dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and
everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all
its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there,
even among us. You must understand this.
Back then, I knew, for instance, that just outside of
Washington, D.C., there was a great enclave of black peo-
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 53
pie who seemed, as much as anyone, to have seized control
of their bodies. This enclave was Prince George's County
"PG County" to the locals-and it was, to my eyes, very
rich. Its residents had the same homes, with the same
backyards, with the same bathrooms, I'd seen in those tele
vised dispatches. They were black people who elected
their own politicians, but these politicians, I learned, su
perintended a police force as vicious as any in America. I
had heard stories about PG County from the same poets
who opened my world. These poets assured me that the
PG County police were not police at all but privateers,
gangsters, gump.en, plunderers operating under the color
oflaw. They told me this because they wanted to protect
my body. But there was another lesson here: To be black
and beautiful was not a matter for gloating. Being black
did not immunize us from history's logic or the lure of the
Dream. The writer, and that was what I was becoming,
must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his
own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other,
precisely because it was his own.
I began to feel that something more than a national
trophy case was needed if I was to be truly free, and for
that I have the history department of Howard University
to thank. My history professors thought nothing of telling
me that my search for myth was doomed, that the stories I
wanted to tell myself could not be matched to truths. In
deed, they felt it their duty to disabuse me of my weapon
ized history. They had seen so many Malcolmites before
I
54 TA-NEHISI COATES
and were ready. Their method was rough and direct. Did
black skin really convey nobility? Always? Yes. What about
the blacks who'd practiced slavery for millennia and sold
slaves across the Sahara and then across the sea? Victims of a trick. Would those be the same black kings who birthed all
of civilization? Were they then both deposed masters of
the galaxy and gullible puppets all at once? And what did
I mean by "black"? You know, black. Did I think this a time
less category stretching into the deep past? Yes? Could it
be supposed that simply because color was important to
me, it had always been so?
I remember taking a survey class focusing on Central
Africa. My professor, Linda Heywood, was slight and be
spectacled, spoke with a high Trinidadian lilt that she em
ployed like a hammer against young students like me who
confused agitprop with hard study. There was nothing
romantic about her Africa, or rather, there was nothing
romantic in the sense that I conceived of it. And she took
it back to the legacy of Queen Nzinga-my Tolstoy-the
very same Nzinga whose life I wished to put in my trophy
case. But when she told the story of Nzinga conducting
negotiations upon the woman's back, she told it without
any fantastic gloss, and it hit me hard as a sucker punch:
Among the people in that room, all those centuries ago,
my body, breakable at will, endangered in the streets, fear
ful in the schools, was not closest to the queen's but to her
adviser's, who'd been broken down into a chair so that a
queen, heir to everything she'd ever seen, could sit.
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 55
I took a survey of Europe post-1800. I saw black people, rendered through "white" eyes, unlike any I'd seen
before-the black people looked regal and human. I re
member the soft face of Alessandro de' Medici, the royal
bearing of Bosch's black magi. These images, cast in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were contrasted with
those created after enslavement, the Samba caricatures I
had always known. What was the difference? In my survey •
course of America, I'd seen portraits of the Irish drawn in
the same ravenous, lustful, and simian way. Perhaps there
had been other bodies, mocked, terrorized, and insecure.
Perhaps the Irish too had once lost their bodies. Perhaps
being named "black" had nothing to do with any of this;
perhaps being named "black" was just someone's name for
being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object
turned to pariah.
This heap of realizations was a weight. I found them
physically painful and exhausting. True, I was coming to
enjoy the dizziness, the vertigo that must come with any
odyssey. But in those early moments, the unceasing con
tradictions sent me into a gloom. There was nothing holy
or particular-in my skin; I was black because of history and
heritage. There was no nobility in falling, in being bound,
in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning in
black blood. Black blood wasn't black; black skin wasn't
even black. And now I looked back on my need for a tro
phy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bel
low, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear
56 TA·NEHJSJ COATES
again-fear that "they;' the alleged authors and heirs of the
universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we ac
cepted their standards of civilization and humanity.
But not all of us. It must have been around that time
that I discovered an essay by Ralph Wiley in which he
responded to Bellow's quip. "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the
Zulus," wrote Wiley. "Unless you find a profit in fencing
off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal
ownership." And there it was. I had accepted Bellow's
premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was
to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I
chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My
great error was not that I had accepted someone else's
dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need
for escape, and the invention of racecraft.
And still and all I knew that we were something, that we
were a tribe-on one hand, invented, and on the .other, no
less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first
warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, bor
ough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora
had sent a delegate to the great world party. I remember
those days like an OutKast song,painted in lust and joy. A
baldhead in shades and a tank top stands across from Black
burn, the student center, with a long boa draping his mus
cular shoulders. A conscious woman, in stonewash with
her dreads pulled back, is giving him the side-eye and
laughing. I am standing outside the library debating the
Republican takeover of Congress or the place ofWu-Tang
'·
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 57
Clan in the canon. A dude in a Tribe Vibe T-shirt walks up,
gives a pound, and we talk about the black bacchanals of
the season-Freaknik, Daytona, Virginia Beach--,md we
wonder if this is the year we make the trip. It isn't. Because
we have all we need out on the Yard. We are dazed here
because we still remember the hot cities in which we were
born, where the first days of spring were laced with fear.
And now, here at The Mecca, we are without fear, we are
the dark spectrum on parade.
These were my first days of adulthood, of living alone,
of cooking for myself, of going and corning as I pleased, of
my own room, of the chance of returning there, perhaps,
with one of those beautiful women who were now every
where around me. In my second year at Howard, I fell hard
for a lovely girl from California who was then in the habit
of floating over the campus in a long skirt and head wrap. I remember her large brown eyes, her broad mouth and
cool voice. I would see her out on the Yard on those spring
days, yell her name and then throw up my hands as though
signaling a touchdown-but wider-like the "W" in
"What up?"That was how we did it then. Her father was
from Bangalore, and where was that? And what were the
laws out there? I did not yet understand the import of my
own questions. What I remember is my ignorance. I re
member watching her eat with her hands and feeling
wholly uncivilized with my fork. I remember wondering
why she wore so many scarves. I remember her going to
India for spring break and returning with a bindi on her
58 TA-NEHISI COATES
head and photos of her smiling Indian cousins. I told her,
"Nigga, you black" because that's all I had back then. But
her beauty aud stillness broke the balance in me. In my
small apartment, she kissed me, aud the ground opened up,
swallowed me, buried me right there in that moment.
How many awful poems did I write thinking of her? I
know now what she was to me-the first glimpse of a
space-bridge, a wormhole, a galactic portal off this bound
and blind planet. She had seen other worlds, and she held
the lineage of other worlds, spectacularly, in the vessel of
her black body.
I fell again, a short time later and in similar fashion, for
another girl, tall with long flowing dreadlocks. She was
raised by a Jewish mother in a small, nearly all-white town
in Pennsylvania, and now, at Howard, ranged between
women and men, asserted this not just with pride but as
though it were normal, as though she were normal. I know it's nothing to you now, but I was from a place-America
where cruelty toward humans who loved as their deepest
instincts instructed was a kind oflaw. I was amazed. This
was something black people did? Yes. And they did so
much more. The girl with the long dreads lived in a house
with a man, a Howard professor, who was married to a
white woman. The Howard professor slept with men. His
wife slept with women. And the two of them slept with
each other. They had a little boy who must be off to col
lege by now. "Faggot" was a word I had employed all my
life. And now here they were, The Cabal, The Coven, The
60 TA-NEHISI COATES
Others, The Monsters, The Outsiders, The Faggots, The
Dykes, dressed in all their human clothes. I am black, and
have been plundered and have lost my body. But perhaps I
too had the capacity for plunder, maybe I would take an
other human's body to confirm myself in a community.
Perhaps I already had. Hate gives identity. The nigger, the
fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we
ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of
being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus
confirmed in the tribe. But my tribe was shattering and
reforming around me. I saw these people often, because
they were family to someone whom I loved. Their or
dinary moments---answering the door, cooking in the
kitchen, dancing to Adina Howard---assaulted me and ex
panded my notion of the human spectrum. I would sit in
the living room of that house, observing their private
jokes, one part of me judging them, the other reeling from
the changes.
She taught me to love in new ways. In my old house
your grandparents ruled with the fearsome rod. I have
tried to address you differently---an idea begun by seeing
all the other ways of!ove on display at The Mecca. Here is
how it started: I woke up one morning with a minor
headache. With each hour the headache grew. I was walk
ing to my job when I saw this girl on her way to class. I
looked awful, and she gave me some Advil and kept going.
By mid-afternoon I could barely stand. I called my super
visor. When he arrived I lay down in the stockroom, be-
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 61
cause I had no idea what else to do. I was afraid. I did not
understand what was happening. I did not know whom to
call. I was lying there simmering, half-awake, hoping to
recover. My supervisor knocked on the door. Someone
had come to see me. It was her. The girl with the long
dreads helped me out and onto the street. She flagged
down a cab. Halfway through the ride, I opened the door,
with the cab in motion, and vomited in the street. But I
remember her holding me there to make sure I didn't fall
out and then holding me close when I was done. She took
me to that house of humans, which was filled with all
manner oflove, put me in the bed, put Exodus on the CD
player, and turned the volume down to a whisper. She left
a bucket by the bed. She left a jug of water. She had to go
to class. I slept. When she returned I was back in form. We
ate. The girl with the long dreads who slept with whom
ever she chose, that being her own declaration of control
over her body, was there. I grew up in a house drawn be
tween love and fear. There was no room for softness. But
this girl with the long dreads revealed something else
that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or
hard, love was an act of heroism.
And I could no longer predict where I would find my
heroes. Sometimes I would walk with friends down to U
Street and hang out at the local clubs. This was the era of
Bad Boy and Biggie, "One More Chance" and "Hypno
tize." I almost never danced, as much as I wanted to. I was crippled by some childhood fear of my own body. But I
i
i ;
62 TA-NEHISI COATES
would watch how black people moved, how in these clubs
they danced as though their bodies could do anything, and
their bodies seemed as free as Malcolm's voice. On the
outside black people controlled nothing, least of all the
fate of their bodies, which could be commandeered by
the police; which could be erased by the guns, which were
so profligate; which could be raped, beaten, jailed. But in
the clubs, under the influence of two-for-one rum and
Cokes, under the spell of low lights, in thrall of hip-hop
music, I felt them to be in total control of every step, every nod, every pivot.
All I then wanted was to write as those black people
danced, with control, power,joy, warmth. I was in and out
of classes at Howard. I felt that it was time to go, to declare
myself a graduate of The Mecca, if not the university. I was
publishing music reviews, articles, and essays in the local
alternative newspaper, and this meant contact with more
human beings. I had editors-more teachers-and these
were the first white people I'd ever really known on any
personal level. They defied my presumptions-they were
afraid neither for me nor of me. Instead they saw in my
unruly curiosity and softness something that was to be
treasured and harnessed. And they gave me the art of jour
nalism, a powerful technology for seekers. I reported on
local D.C., and I found that people would tell me things,
that the same softness that once made me a target now
compelled people to trust me with their stories. This was
incredible. I was barely out of the fog of childhood, where
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 63
questions simply died in my head. Now I could call and
ask people why a popular store closed, why a show had
been canceled, why there were so many churches and so
few supermarkets. Journalism gave me another tool of ex
ploration, another way of unveiling the laws that bound
my body. It was beginning to come together-even if I
could not yet see what the "it" was.
In Moorland I could explore the histories and tradi
tions. Out on the Yard, I could see these traditions in ef
fect. And with journalism, I could directly ask people
about the two--or about anything else I might wonder. So
much of my life was defined by not knowing. Why did I
live in a world where teenage boys stood in the parking lot
of the 7-Eleven pulling out? Why was it normal for my
father, like all the parents I knew; to reach for his belt? And
why was life so different out there, in that other world past
the asteroids? What did the people whose images were
once beamed into my living room have that I did not?
The girl with the long dreads who changed me, whom
I so wanted to love, she loved a boy about whom I think
every day and about whom I expect to think every day for
the rest of my life. I think sometimes that he was an inven
tion, and in some ways he is, because when the young are
killed, they are haloed by all that was possible, all that was
plundered. But I know that I had love for this boy, Prince
Jones, which is to say that I would smile whenever I saw
him, for I felt the warmth when I was around him and was
slightly sad when the time came to trade dap and for one
64 TA-NEHISJ COATES
of us to go. The thing to understand about Prince Jones is
that he exhibited the whole of his given name. He was
handsome. He was tall and brown, built thin and powerful
like a wide receiver. He was the son of a prominent doctor.
He was born-again, a state I did not share but respected.
He was kind. Generosity radiated off of him, and he
seemed to have a facility with everyone and everything.
This can never be true, but there are people who pull the
illusion off without effort, and Prince was one of them. I
can only say what I saw, what I felt. There are people
whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm
place within us, and when they are plundered, when they
lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound.
I fell in love at The Mecca one last time, lost my balance
and all my boyhood confusion, under the spell of a girl
from Chicago. This was your mother. I see us standing
there with a group of friends in the living room of her
home. I stood with a blunt in one hand and a beer in an
other. I inhaled, passed it off to this Chicago girl, and when
I brushed her long elegant fingers, I shuddered a bit from
the blast. She brought the blunt to her plum-painted lips,
pulled, exhaled, then pulled the smoke back in. A week
earlier I had kissed her, and now, watching this display of
smoke and flame (and already feeling the effects), I was lost
and running and wondering what it must be to embrace
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME GS
her, to be exhaled by her, to return to her, and leave her
high.
She had never knowri her father, which put her in the
company of the greater number of everyone I'd known. I
felt then that these men-these "fathers"-were the great
est of cowards. But I also felt that the galaxy was playing with loaded dice, which ensured an excess of cowards in
our rariks. The girl from Chicago understood this too, and
she understood something more-that all are not equally
robbed of their bodies, that the bodies of women are set
out for pillage in ways I could never truly know. And she
was the kind of black girl who'd been told as a child that
she had better be smart because her looks wouldn't save
her, and then told as a young woman thanhe was really
pretty for a dark-skinned girl. And so there was, all about
her, a knowledge of cosmic injustices, the same knowledge
I'd glimpsed all those years ago watching my father reach
for his belt, watching the suburban dispatches in my living
room, watching the golden-haired boys with their toy
trucks and football cards, and dimly perceiving the great
barrier betwee;,_ the world and me.
Nothing between·us was ever planned-not even you.
We were both twenty-four years old when you were
born, the normal age for most Americans, but among the
class we soon found ourselves, we ranked as teenage par
ents. With a whiff of fear, we were very often asked if we
planned to marry. Marriage was presented to us as a shield
against other women, other men, or the corrosive monot-
66 TA-NEHISI COATES
ony of dirty socks and dishwashing. But your mother and
I knew too many people who'd married and abandoned
each other for less. The truth of us was always that you
were our ring. We'd summoned you out of ourselves, and
you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you de served all the protection we could muster. Everything else
was subordinate to this fact. If that sounds like a weight, it
shouldn't. The truth is that I owe you everything I have.
Before you, I had my questions but nothing beyond my
own skin in the game, and that was really nothing at all
because I was a young man, and not yet clear of my own
human vulnerabilities. But I was grounded and domesti
cated by the plain fact that should I now go down, I would
not go down alone.
This is what I told myself, at least. It was comforting to
believe that the fate of my body and the bodies of my fam
ily were under my powers. "You will have to man up," we tell our sons. "Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man
to be a father."This is what they had told me all my life. It
was the language of survival, a myth that helped us cope
with the human sacrifice that finds us no matter our man
hood. As though our hands were ever our own. & though
plunder of dark energy was not at the heart of our galaxy.
And the plunder was there, if I wished to see it.
One summer, I traveled out to Chicago to see your
mother. I rode down the Dan Ryan with friends and be
held, for the first time, the State Street Corridor--• four
mile stretch of dilapidated public housing. There were
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 67
projects all over Baltimore, but nothing so expansive as
this. The housing occurred to me as a moral disaster not
just for the people living there but for the entire region,
the metropolis of commuters who drove by, each day, and
with their quiet acquiescence tolerated such a thing. But
there was so much more there in those projects than I was,
even in all my curiosity, prepared to see. Your maternal grandmother once visited us during the
pregnancy. She must have been horrified. We were living
in Delaware. We had almost no furniture. I had left How
ard without a degree and was living on the impoverished
wages of a freelance writer. On the last day of her visit, I
drove your grandmother to the airport. Your mother was
her only child, as you are my only child. And having
watched you grow, I know that nothing could possibly be
more precious to her. She said to me, "You take care of my
daughter." When she got out of the car, my world had
shifted. I felt that I had crossed some threshold, out of the
foyer of my life and into the living room. Everything that
was the past seemed to be another life. There was before
you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were
the God I'd never had. I submitted before your needs, and
I knew then that I must survive for something more than
survival's sake. I must survive for you.
You were born that August. I thought of the great spec
trum of The . Mecca-black people from Belize, black
people with Jewish. mothers, black people with fathers
from Bangalore, bla~k people from Toronto and Kingston,
68 TA-NEHISI COATES
black people who spoke Russian, who spoke Spanish, who
played Mongo Santamaria, who understood mathematics
and sat up in bone labs, unearthing the mysteries of the
enslaved. There was more out there than I had ever hoped
for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that
the world in its entirety could never be found in the
schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy
case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is. I
wanted "Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus" to immedi
ately be obvious to you. And yet even in this cosmopolitan
wish I felt the old power of ancestry, because I had come
to knowledge at The Mecca that my ancestors made, and I
was compelle.d toward The Mecca by the struggle that my ancestors made.
The Struggle is in your name, Samori-you were
named for Samori Toure, who struggled against French
colonizers for the right to his own black body. He died in
captivity, but the profits of that struggle and others like it
are ours, even when the object of our struggle, as is so
often true, escapes our grasp. I learned this living among a
people whom I would never have chosen, because the
privileges of being black are not always self-evident. We
are, as Derrick Bell once wrote, the "faces at the bottom of
the well." But there really is wisdom down here, and that
wisdom accounts for much of the good in my life. And
my life down here accounts for you.
There was also wisdom in those streets. I think now of
the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 69
someone else's chancy hood, his friends must stand with
him, and they must all take their beating together. I now
know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None
of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists
raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies' num
ber, strength, nor weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a
bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it to
gether, because that is the part that was in our control.
What we must never do is willingly hand over our own
bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom:
We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street,
but despite that, we could-,md must-fashion the way of
our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name
that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.
That wisdom is not unique to our people, but I think it
has special meaning to those of us born out of mass rape,
whose ancestors were carried off and divided up into pol
icies and stocks. I have raised you to respect every human
being as singular, and you must extend that same respect
into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It
is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is ac
tive as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your
own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular
spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water
eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her
own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has
a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dress
making and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent
70 TA-NEHISI COATES
and capable as anyone. "Slavery" is this same woman born
in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and
inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which
these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her
mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and
when this woman peers back into the generations all she
sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imag
ine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies,
the world-which is really the only world she can ever
know-ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable.
It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the
length of that night is most of our history. Never forget
that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have
been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people
were born into chains-whole generations followed by
more generations who knew nothing but chains.
You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its
nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common
urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward
fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The en
slaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were
not chapters in ·your redemptive history. They were peo
ple turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement
was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our pres
ent circumstance-no matter how improved-as the re
demption for the lives of people who never asked for the
posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their chil
dren. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. Perhaps
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 71
our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all
we have because the god of history is an atheist, and noth
ing about his world is meant to be. So you must wake up
every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable,
least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not de
spair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs
over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.
The birth of a better world is not ultimately up to you,
though I know, each day, there are grown men and women
who tell you otherwise. The world needs saving precisely
because of the actions of these same men and women. I am
not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it
more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black
boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way
that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be respon
sible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which,
somehow, will always be assigt,ed to you. And you must be
responsible for the bodies of the powerful-the policeman
who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his ex
cuse in your furtive movements. And this is not reducible
to just you-the women around you must be responsible
for their bodies in a way that you never will know. You
have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot
lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and
how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco,
cotton, and gold.
II.
Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone~
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air
We are beautiful people
with african imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with african eyes, and noses, and arms,
though we sprawl in grey chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.
AMIRIBARAKA
Shortly before you were born, I was pulled over by the PG
County police, the same police that all the D.C. poets had
warned me of. They approached on both sides of the car,
shining their flashing lights through the windows. They
took my identification and returned to the squad car. I sat
there in terror. By then I had added to the warnings of my
teachers what I'd learned about PG County through re
porting and reading the papers. And so I knew that the PG
County police had killed Elmer Clay Newman, then
claimed he'd rammed his own head into the wall of a jail
cell. And I knew that they'd shot Gary Hopkins and said he'd gone for an officer's gun. And I knew they had beaten
Freddie McCollum half-blind and blamed it all on a col
lapsing floor. And I had read reports of these officers
choking mechanics, shooting construction workers, slam
ming suspects through the glass doors of shopping malls.
76 TA·NEHISI COATES
And I knew that they did this with great regularity, as
though moved by some uuseen cosmic clock. I knew that
they shot at moving cars, shot at the unarmed, shot through
the backs of men and claimed that it had been they who'd
been under fire. These shooters were investigated, exoner
ated, and promptly returned to the streets, where, so em
boldened, they shot again. At that point in American
history, no police department fired its guns more than that
of Prince George's County. The FBI opened multiple
investigations-sometimes in the same week. The police
chief was rewarded with a raise. I replayed all of this sitting
there in my car, in their clutches. Better to have been shot
in Baltimore, where there was the justice of the streets and
someone might call the killer to account. But these offi
cers had my body, could do with that body whatever they
pleased, and should I live to explain what they had done
with it, this complaint would mean nothing. The officer
returned. He handed back my license. He gave no expla nation for the stop.
Then that September I picked up The Washington Post
and saw that the PG County police had killed again. I
could not help but thiuk that this could have been me, and
holding you-a month old by then-I knew that such loss
would not be mine alone. I skimmed the headline-their
atrocities seemed so common back then. The story spread
into a second day, and reading slightly closer, I saw it was a
Howard student who had been killed. I thought perhaps I
knew him. But I paid it no further mind. Then on the
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 77
third day a photo appeared with the story, and I glimpsed
at and then focused on the portrait, and I saw him there.
He was dressed in his formal clothes, as though it were his
senior prom, and frozen in the amber of his youth. His face
was lean, brown, and beautiful, and across that face, I saw
the open, easy smile of Prince Carmen Jones.
I cannot remember what happened next. I think I
stumbled back. I think I told your mother what I'd read. I
thiuk I called the girl with the long dreads and asked her
if it could be true. I thiuk she screamed. What I remember
for sure is what I felt: rage and the old gravity of West
Baltimore, the gravity that condemned me to the schools,
the streets, the void. Prince Jones had made it through, and
still they had taken him. And even though I already knew
that I would never believe any account that justified this
taking, I sat down to read the story. There were very few
details. He had been shot by a PG County officer, not in
PG County, not even in D.C., but somewhere in Northern
Virginia. Prince had been driving to see his fiancee. He
was killed yards from her home. The only witness to the
killing of Prince Jones was the killer himself The officer
claimed that Prince had tried to run him over with his
jeep, and I knew that the prosecutors would believe him.
Days later, your mother and I packed you into the car,
drove down to Washington, left you with your aunt Kami
lah, and went to the service for Prince at Rankin Chapel
on Howard's campus, where I'd once sat amazed at the
parade of activists and intellectuals-Joseph Lowery, Cor-
78 TA-NEHISI COATES
nel West, Calvin Butts-who preached at that pulpit. I
must have seen a great number of old frieuds there, though
I cannot recall precisely who. What I remember is all the
people who spoke of Prince's religious zeal, his abiding
belief that Jesus was with him. I remember watching the
president of the university stand and weep. I remember Dr.
Mable Jones, Priuce's mother, speaking of her son's death
as a call to move from her comfortable suburban life into
activism. I heard several people ask for forgiveness for the
officer who'd shot Prince Jones down. I only vaguely re
call my impressions of all this. But I know that I have al
ways felt great distance from the grieving rituals of my
people, and I must have felt it powerfully then. The need
to forgive the officer would not have moved me, because
even then, in some inchoate form, I knew that Prince was
not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered
by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth.
At this moment the phrase "police reform" has come
into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed
guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedes
trian. You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity
training, and body cameras. These are all fine and appli
cable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of
this country to pretend that there is real distance between
their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to
protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America
in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 79
this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that
it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that
have followed from these policies-the sprawling carceral
state, the random detention of black people, the torture of
suspects-are the product of democratic will. And so to
challenge the police is to challenge the American people
who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self
generated fears that compelled the people who think they
are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The prob
lem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that
our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.
I knew some of this even then,sitting in Rankin Chapel,
even if I could not yet express it. So forgiving the killer of
Prince Jones would have seemed irrelevant to me. The
killer was the direct expression of all his country's beliefs.
And raised conscious, in rejection of a Christian God, I
could see no higher purpose in Prince's death. I believed,
and still do, that our bodies are our selves, that my soul is
the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and
that my spirit is my flesh. Prince Jones was a one of one,
and they had destroyed his body; scorched his shoulders
and arms, ripped open his back, mangled lung, kidney, and
liver. I sat there feeling myself a heretic, believing only in
this one-shot life and the body. For the crime of destroying
the body of Prince Jones, I did not believe in forgiveness.
When the assembled mourners bowed their heads in
prayer, I was divided from them because I believed that the
void would not answer back.
80 TA-NEHISI COATES
Weeks wore on. Nauseating details slowly dribbled out.
The officer was a known liar. A year earlier he had arrested
a man on false evidence. Prosecutors had been forced to
drop every case in which the officer was involved. The
officer was demoted, restored, then put out on the street to
continue his work. Now, through additional reports, a nar
rative began to take shape. The officer had been dressed
like an undercover drug dealer. He'd been sent out to track
a man whose build was five foot four and 250 pounds. We
know from the coroner that Prince's body was six foot
three and 211 pounds. We know that the other man was
apprehended later. The charges against him were dropped.
None of this mattered. We know that his superiors sent
this officer to follow Prince from Maryland, through
Washington, D. C., and into Virginia, where the officer shot
Prince several times. We know that the officer confronted
Prince with his gun drawn, and no badge. We know that
the officer claims he shot because Prince tried to run him
over with his jeep. We know that the authorities charged
with investigating this shooting did very little to inves
tigate the officer and did everything in their power to in
vestigate Prince Jones. This investigation produced no
information that would explain why Prince Jones would
suddenly shift his ambitions from college to cop killing.
This officer, given maximum power, bore minimum re
sponsibility. He was charged with nothing. He was pun
ished by no one. He was returned to his work.
There were times when I imagined myself, like Prince,
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 81
tracked through many jurisdictions by a man in a crimi
nal's costume. And I was horrified, because I knew what I
would have done with such a man confronting me, gun
drawn, mere feet from my own family's home. Take care ef my baby, your grandmother had said, which was to say Take
care ef your new family. But I now knew the limits of my caring, the reach of its powers, etched by an enemy old as
Virginia. I thought of all the beautiful black people I'd
seen at The Mecca, all their variation, all their hair, all their
language, all their stories and geography, all their stunning
humanity, and none of it could save them from the mark
of plunder and the gravity of our particular world. And it
occurred to me then that you would not escape, that there
were awful men who'd laid plans for you, and I could not
stop them. Prince Jones was the superlative of all my fears.
And if he, good Christian, scion of a striving class, patron
saint of the twice as good, could be forever bound, who
then could not? And the plunder was not just of Prince
alone. Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the
tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the
gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football
games, basketball tournaments, and Little League. Think
of the time spent regulating sleepovers. Think of the sur
prise birthday parties, the daycare, and the reference checks
on babysitters. Think of World Book and Childcraft. Think
of checks written for family photos. Think of credit cards
charged for vacations. Think of soccer balls, science kits,
chemistry sets, racetracks, and model trains. Think of all
82 TA-NEHISJ COATES
the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a
black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone.
And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the
concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into
him, sent flowing back to the earth. Think of your mother,
who had no father. And your grandmother, who was
abandoned by her father. And your grandfather, who was
left behind by his father. And think of how Prince's
daughter was now drafted into those solemn ranks and
deprived of her birthright-that vessel which was her fa
ther, which brimmed with twenty-five years of love and
was the investment of her grandparents and was to be her legacy.
Now at night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our
American generations, took me. Now I personally under
stood my father and the old mantra-"Either I can beat
him or the police." I understood it all-the cable wires, the
extension cords, the ritual switch. Black people love their
children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and
you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill
you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that
America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied,
of a people who control nothing, who can protect noth
ing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among
them but the police who lord over them with all the moral
authority of a protection racket. It was only after you that
I understood this love, that I understood the grip of my
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 83
mother's hand. She knew that the galaxy itself could kill
me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy
spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one would
be brought to account for this destruction, because my
death would 0
not be the fault of any human but the fault of
some unfortunate··but innnutable fact of"race," imposed
upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of
invisible gods. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed.
The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent
the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was
not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless
agent of our world's physical Jaws.
This entire episode took me from fear to a rage that
burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave
me on fire for the rest of my days. I still had my journalism.
My response was, in this moment, to write. I was lucky I
had even that. Most of us are forced to drink our travesties
straight and smile about it. I wrote about the history of the
Prince George's County police. Nothing had ever felt so
essential to me. Here is what I knew at the outset:The of
ficer who killed Prince Jones was black. The politicians
who empowered this officer to kill were black. Many of
the black politicians, many of them twice as good, seemed
unconcerned. How could this be? It was like I was back at
Moorland again, called by great mysteries. But by then I
didn't need any call slips; the Internet had bloomed into an
instrument of research. That must strike you as novel. For
all of your life, whenever you've had a question you have
84 TA-NEHISI COATES BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 85
been able to type that question out on a keyboard, watch
it appear in a rectangular space bordered by a corporate
logo, and within seconds revel in the flood of potential
answers. But I still remember when typewriters were use
ful, the dawn of the Commodore 64, and days when a
song you loved would have its moment on the radio and
then disappear into the nothing. I must have gone five
years without hearing the Mary Jane Girls sing "All Night
Long." For a young man like me, the invention of the In
ternet was the invention of space travel.
My curiosity, in the case of Prince Jones, opened a
world of newspaper clippings, histories, and sociologies. I
called politicians and questioned them. I was told that the
citizens were more likely to ask for police support than to
complain about brutality. I was told that the black citizens
of PG County were comfortable and had "a certain impa
tience" with crime. I had seen these theories before, back
when I was researching in Moorland, leafing through the
various fights within and without the black community. I
knew that these were theories, even in the mouths ofblack
people, that justified the jails springing up around me, that
argued for ghettos and projects, that viewed the destruc
tion of the black body as incidental to the preservation of
order. According to this theory "safety" was a higher value
thanjustice,perhaps the highest value. I understood. What
I would not have given, back in Baltimore, for a line of
officers, agents of my country and my community; patrol
ling my route to school! There were no such officers, and
whenever I saw the police it meant that something had
already gone wrong. All along I knew that there were
some, those who lived in the Dream, for whom the con
versation was different. Their "safety" was in schools, port
folios, and skyscrapers. Ours was in men with guns who
could only view us with the same contempt as the society
that sent them. And the lack of safety cannot help but constrain your
sense of the galaxy. It never occurred to me, for instance,
that I could, or should even want to, live in New York. I
did love Baltimore. I loved Charlie Rudo's and the side
walk sales at Mondawmin. I loved sitting out on the porch
with your uncle Damani waiting for Frank Ski to play
"Fresh Is the.Word." I always thought I was destined to go
back home after college-but not simply because I loved
home but because I could not imagine much else for my
self And that stunted imagination is something I owe to
my chains. And yet some of us really do see more.
I met many of them at The Mecca-like your uncle
Ben, who was raised in New York, which forced him to
understand himself as an African American navigating
among Haitians,Jarnaicans, Hasidic Jews, and Italians. And
there were others like him, others who, having gotten a
boost from a teacher, an aunt, an older brother, had peered
over the wall as children, and as adults became set on see
ing the full view. These black people felt, as did I, that
their bodies could be snatched back at a whim, but this set
in them a different kind of fear that propelled them out
,,
86 TA-NEHISI COATES
into the cosmos. They spent semesters abroad. I never
knew what they did or why. But perhaps I always sensed I
was going down too easy. Perhaps that explains every girl
I've ever loved, because every girl I've ever loved was a
bridge to somewhere else. Your mother, who knew so
much more of the world than me, fell in love with New
York through culture, through Crossing Delancey, Breakfast
at Tiffany's, l¼rking Girl, Nas, and Wu-Tang. Your mother
secured a job, and I followed, stowed away almost, because
no one in New York, at that time, was paying for me to
write much of anything. What little I did make, reviewing
an album or a book, covered approximately two electric bills every year.
We arrived two months before September 11, 2001. I
suppose everyone who was in New York that day has a
story. Here is mine: That evening, I stood on the roof of an
apartment building with your mother, your aunt Chana,
and her boyfriend, Jamal. So we were there on the roof,
talking and taking in the sight-great plumes of smoke
covered Manhattan Island. Everyone knew someone who
knew someoz:ie who was missing. But looking out upon
the ruins of America, my heart was cold. I had disasters all my own. The officer who killed Prince Jones, like all the officers who regard us so warily, was the sword of the
American citizenry. I would never consider any American citizen pure. I was out of sync with the city. I kept thinking
about how southern Manhattan had always been Ground
Zero for us. They auctioned our bodies down there, in
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 87
that same devastated, aud rightly named, finaucial district.
And there was once a burial ground for the auctioned
there. They built a department store over part of it and
then tried to erect a government building over auother
part. Only a community of right-thinking black people
stopped them. I had not formed auy of this into a coherent
theory. But I did know that Bin Laden was not the first
man to bring terror to that section of the city. I never for
got that. Neither should you. In the days after, I watched
the ridiculous pageantry of flags, the machismo of firemen,
the overwrought slogans. Damn it all. Prince Jones was
dead. And h~ll upon those who tell us to be twice as good
and shoot us no matter. Hell for ancestral fear that put
black parents under terror. And hell upon those who shat
ter the holy vessel.
I could see no difference between the officer who killed
Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefight
ers who died. They were not human to me. Black, white,
or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were
the fire, the comet, the storm, which could-with no
justification--shatter my body.
I saw Prince Jones, one last time, alive aud whole. He
was standing in front of me. We were in a museum. I felt
in that moment that his death had just been an awful
dream. No, a premonition. But I had a chauce. I would
warn him. I walked over, gave him a pound, and felt that
heat of the spectrum, the warmth of The Mecca. I wauted
to tell him something. I wanted to say-Beware the plun-
88 TA-NEHISI COATES
derer. But when I opened my mouth, he just shook his
head and walked away.
We lived in a basement apartment in Brooklyn, which I
doubt you remember, down the street from Uncle Ben
and his wife, your aunt Janai. These were not great times.
I remember borrowing two hundred dollars from Ben, and
it feeling like a million. I remember your grandfather
coming to New York, taking me out for Ethiopian, after
which I walked him to the West Fourth Street subway sta
tion. We said our goodbyes and walked away. He called me
back. He had forgotten something. He handed me a check
for $120. I tell you this because you must understand, no
matter the point of our talk, that I didn't always have
things, but I had people-I always had people. I had a
mother and father who I would match against any other. I
had a brother who looked out for me all through college.
I had The Mecca that directed me. I had friends who
would leap in front of a bus for me. You need to know
that I was loved, that whatever my lack of religious feeling,
I have always loved my people and that broad love is di
rectly related to the specific love I feel for you. I remember
sitting out on Ben's stoop on Friday nights, drinking Jack
Daniel's, debating the mayor's race or the rush to war. My
weeks felt aimless. I pitched to various magazines with no
success. Your aunt Chana lent me another two hundred
dollars; I burned it all on a scam bartending school. I de-
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 89
livered food for a small deli in Park Slope. In New York,
everyone wanted to know your occupation. I told people
that I was "trying to be a writer."
Some days I would take the train into Manhattan. There
was so much money everywhere, money flowing out of
bistros and cares, money pushing the people, at incredible
speeds, up the wide avenues, money drawing intergalactic
traffic through Times Square, money in the limestones and
brownstones, money out on West Broadway where white
people spilled out of wine bars with sloshing glasses and
without police. I would see these people at the club,
drunken, laughing, challenging breakdancers to battles.
They would be destroyed and humiliated in these battles.
But afterward they would give dap, laugh, order more
beers. They were utterly fearless. I did not understand it
until I looked out on the street. That was where I saw
white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentri
fying Harlem boulevards in T-shirts and jogging shorts. Or
I saw them lost in conversation with each other, mother
and father, while their sons commanded entire sidewalks
with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as
terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery
communicated to theirs.
And so when I remember pushing you in your stroller
to other parts of the city, the West Village for instance, al
most instinctively believing that you should see more, I
remember feeling ill at ease, like I had borrowed someone
else's heirloom, like I was traveling under an assumed
90 TA•NEHISI COATES
name. All this time you were growing into words and feel
ings; my beautiful brown boy, who would soon come into
the knowledge, who would soon comprehend the edicts
of his galaxy, and all the extinction-level events that re
garded you with a singular and discriminating interest.
You would be a man one day, and I could not save you
from the unbridgeable distance between you and your fu
ture peers and colleagues, who might try to convince you
that everything I know, all the things I'm sharing with you
here, are an illusion, or a fact of a distant past that need not
be discussed. And I could not save you from the police,
from their flashlights, their hands, their nightsticks, their
guns. Prince Jones, murdered by the men who should have
been his security guards, is always with me, and I knew
that soon he would be with you.
In those days I would come out of the house, turn onto
Flatbush Avenue, and my face would tighten like a Mexi
can wrestler's mask, my eyes would dart from corner to
corner, my arms loose, limber, and ready. This need to be
always on guard was an umneasured expenditure of energy,
the slow siphoning of the essence. It contributed to the fast
breakdown of our bodies. So I feared not just the violence
of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to ad
dress the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by
colleagues, and contort again so as not to give the police a
reason. All my life I'd heard people tell their black boys
and black girls to "be twice as good;' which is to say "ac-
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 91
cept half as much:' These words would be spoken with a
veneer of religious nobility, as though they evidenced
some unspoken quality, some undetected courage, when
in fact all they evidenced was the gun to our head and the
hand in our pocket. This is how we lose our softness. This
is how they steal our right to smile. No one told those
little white children, with their tricycles, to be twice as
good. I imagined their parents telling them to take twice
as much. It seemed to me that our own rules redoubled
plunder. It struck me that perhaps the defining feature of
being drafted into the black race was the inescapable rob
bery of time, because the moments we spent readying the
mask, or readying ourselves to accept half as much, could
not be recovered. The robbery of time is not measured in
lifespans but in moments. It is the last bottle of wine that
you have just uncorked but do not have time to drink. It is
the kiss that you do not have time to share, before she
walks out of your life. It is the raft of second chances for
them, and twenty-three-hour days for us.
One afternoon your mother and I took you to visit a pre
school. Our host took us down to a large gym filled with
a bubbling ethnic stew of New York children. The chil
dren were running,jumping, and tumbling. You took one
look at them, tore away from us, and ran right into the
scrum. You have never been afraid of people, of rejection,
and I have always admired you for this and always been
92 TA-NEHISI COATES
afraid for you because of this. I watched you leap and laugh
with these children you barely knew, and the wall rose in
me and I felt I should grab you by the arm, pull you back
and say, "We don't know these folks! Be cool!" I did not do
this. I was growing, aod if I could not name my anguish
precisely I still knew that there was nothing noble in it.
But now I understand the gravity of what I was proposing
that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and
shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you submit to a
loss of time. And now when I measure this fear against the
boldness that the masters of the galaxy imparted to their
own children, I am ashamed.
New York was another spectrum unto itself, aod the great
diversity I'd seen at Howard, solely among black peo
ple, now spread across a metropolis. Something different
awaited around every corner. Here there were African
drummers assembling in Union Square. Here there were
dead office towers, brought to life at night by restaurants
buried within that served small kegs of beer aod Korean
fried chicken. Here there were black girls with white boys,
and black boys with Chinese-Americao girls, aod Chinese
American girls with Dominicao boys, and Dominican boys
with Jamaican boys and every other imaginable combina
tion. I would walk through the West Village, marveling at
restaurants the size of living rooms, and I could see that
the very smallness of these restaurants awarded the patrons
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 93
a kind of erudite cool, as though they were laughing at a
joke, and it would take the rest of the world a decade to
catch on. Summer was unreal-whole swaths of the city
became fashion shows, and the avenues were nothing but
runways for the youth. There was a heat unlike anything
I'd ever felt, a heat from the great buildings, compounded
by the millions of people jamming themselves into subway
cars, into bars, into those same tiny eateries aod cares. I had
never seen so much life. And I had never imagined that
such life could exist in so much variety. It was everyone's
particular Mecca, packed into one singular city.
But when I got off the train and came back to my hood,
to my Flatbush Avenue, or my Harlem, the fear still held. It
was the same boys, with the same bop, the same ice grill,
and the same code I'd known all my life. If there was one
difference in New York it was that we had more high
yellow cousins here in the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans.
But their rituals were so similar, the way they walked and
gave dap, it was all familiar to me. And so I found myself,
on aoy given day, traveling through several New Yorks at
once-dynamic, brutal, moneyed, sometimes all of those at
once. Perhaps you remember that time we went to see Howl's
Moving Castle on the Upper West Side. You were almost
five years old. The theater was crowded, and when we
came out we rode a set of escalators down to the ground
floor. As we came off, you were moving at the dawdling
speed of a small child. A white woman pushed you aod
94 TA-NEHISI COATES
said, "Come on!" Many things now happened at once.
There was the reaction of any parent when a stranger lays
a hand on the body of his or her child. And there was my
own .insecurity in my ability to protect your black body.
And more: There was my sense that this woman was pull
ing rank. I knew, for instance, that she would not have
pushed a black child out on my part of Flatbush, because
she would be afraid there and would sense, if not know,
that there would be a penalty for such an action. But I was
not out on my part of Flatbush. And I was not in West
Baltimore. And I was far from The Mecca. I forgot all of that. I was only aware that someone had invoked their
right over the body of my son. I turned and spoke to this
woman, and my words were hot with all of the moment and. all of my history. She shrunk back, shocked. A white man standing nearby spoke up in her defense. I experi
enced this as his attempt to rescue the damsel from the
beast. He had made no such attempt on behalf of my son.
And he was now supported by other white people in the
assembling crowd. The man came closer. He grew louder.
I pushed him away. He said, "I could have you arrested!" I
did not care; I told him this, and the desire to do much
more was hot in my throat. This desire was only control
lable because I remembered someone standing off to the
side there, bearing witness to more fury than he had ever seen from me-you.
I came home shook. It was a mix of shame for having
gone back to the law of the streets mixed with rage--"!
- . --··-------------~--··----·---
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 95
could have you arrested!" Which is to say: "I could take
your body."
I have told this story many times, not out of bravado, but
out of a need for absolution. I have never been a violent
person. Even when I was young and adopted the rules of
the stteet, anyone who knew me knew it was a bad fit. I've
never felt the pride that is supposed to come with righ
teous self-defense and justified violence. Whenever it was
me on top of someone, whatever my rage in the moment,
afterward I always felt sick at having been lowered to the
crudest form of communication. Malcolm made sense to
me not out of a love of violence but because nothing in
my life prepared me to understand tear gas as deliverance,
as those Black History Month martyrs of the Civil Rights
Movement did. But more than any shame I feel about my
own actual violence, my greatest regret was that in seeking
to defend you I was, in fact, endangering you.
"I could have you arrested," he said. Which is to say,
"One of y6ur son's earliest memories will be watching the
men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony
Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you." I had forgotten the
rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan as on the Westside of Baltimore. One must be
without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly.
Pack an extra number 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.
But you are human and you will make mistakes. You
will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much.
You will hang out with people you shouldn't. Not all of
96 TA-NEHISI COATES
us can always be Jackie Robinson-not even Jackie Rob
inson was always Jackie Robinson. But the price of error
is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so
that America might justify itself, the story of a black body's
destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or
imagined-with Eric Garner's anger, with Trayvon Mar
tin's mythical words ("You are gonna die tonight"), with
Sean Bell's mistake of running with the wrong crowd,
with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.
A society, almost necessarily, begins every success story
with the chapter that most advantages itself, and in Amer
ica, these precipitating chapters are almost always rendered
as the singular action of exceptional individuals. "It only
takes one person to make a change," you are often told.
This is also a myth. Perhaps one person can make a change,
but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen.
The fact of history is that black people have not
probably no people have ever--liberated themselves strictly
through their own efforts. In every great change in the
lives of African Americans we see the hand of events that
were beyond our individual control, events that were not
unalloyed goods. You cannot disconnect our emancipa
tion in the Northern colonies from the blood spilled in
the Revolutionary War, any more than you can disconnect
our emancipation from slavery in the South from the
charnel houses of the Civil War, any more than you can
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 97
disconnect our emancipation from Jim Crow from the genocides of the Second World War. History is not solely
in our hands. And still you are called to struggle, not be
cause it assures you victory but because it assures you an
honorable and sane life. I am ashamed of how I acted that
day, ashamed of endangering your body. But I am not
ashamed because I am a bad father, a bad individual or ill
mannered. I am ashamed that I made an error, knowing
that our errors always cost us more.
This is the import of the history all around us, though
very few people like to think about it. Had I informed this
woman that when she pushed my son, she was acting ac
cording to a tradition that held black bodies as lesser, her
response would likely have been, "I am not a racist." Or
maybe not. But my experience in this world has been that
the people who believe themselves to be white are ob
sessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the
word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf,
then something just as fantastic-an ore, troll, or gorgon.
"I'm not a racist," an entertainer once insisted after being
filmed repeatedly yelling at a heckler: "He's a nigger! He's
a nigger!" Considering segregationist senator Strom Thur
mond, Richard Nixon concluded, "Strom is no racist."
There are no racists in America, or at least none that the
people who need to be white know personally. In the era
of mass lynching, it was so difficult to find who, specifi
cally, served as executioner that such deaths were often
reported by,the press as having happened "at the hands of
98 TA•NEHISI COATES
persons unknown." In 1957, the white residents of Levit
town, Pennsylvania, argued for their right to keep their
town segregated. "As moral, religious and law-abiding cit
izens," the group wrote, "we feel that we are unprejudiced
and undiscriminating in our wish to keep our community
a closed community." This was the attempt to commit a
shameful act while escaping all sanction, and I raise it to
show you that there was no golden era when evildoers did
their business and loudly proclaimed it as such.
"We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist,
that there aren't any;' writes Solzhenitsyn. "To do evil a
human being must first of all believe that what he's doing
is good, or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity
with natural law:' This is the foundation of the Dream
its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it
is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the
natural result of grit, honor, and good works. There is
some passing acknowledgment of the bad old days, which,
by the way, were not so bad as to have any ongoing effect
on our present. The mettle that it takes to look away from
the horror of our prison system, from police forces trans
formed into armies, from the long war against the black
body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of
jabbing out one's eyes and forgetting the work of one's
hands. To acknowledge these horrors means turning away
from the brightly rendered version of your country as it
has always declared itself and turning toward something
murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 99
Americans to do this. But that is your work. It must be, if
only to preserve the sanctity of your mind.
The entire narrative of this country argues against the
truth of who you are. I think of that summer that you may
well remember when I loaded you and your cousin Chris
topher into the back seat of a rented car and pushed out to
see what remained of Petersburg, Shirley Plantation, and
the Wilderness. I was obsessed with the Civil War because
six hundred thousand people had died in it. And yet it had
been glossed over in my education, and in popular culture,
representations of the war and its reasons seemed obscured.
And yet I knew that in 1859 we were enslaved and in 1865
we were not, and what happened to us in those years
struck me as having some amount of import. But when
ever I visited any of the battlefields, I felt like I was greeted
as if I were a nosy accountant conducting an audit and someone was trying to hide the books.
I don't know if you remember how the film we saw at
the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the
Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I
doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the
gray wool of the Confederacy; or how every visitor seemed
most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smooth
bore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one
was interested in what all of this engineering, invention,
and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 101
ten years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble
you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people
would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to
enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning
and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this
is, what it always was.
At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were
worth four billion dollars, more than all of American in
dustry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories
combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen
bodies-cotton-was America's primary export. The rich
est men in America lived in the Mississippi River Valley,
and they made their riches off our stolen bodies. Our bod
ies were held in bondage by the early presidents. Our bod
ies were traded from the White House by James K. Polk.
Our bodies built the Capitol and the National Mall. The
first shot of the Civil War was fired in South Carolina,
where our bodies constituted the majority of human bod
ies in the state. Here is the motive for the great war. It's not
a secret. But we can do better and find the bandit confess
ing his crime. "Our position is thoroughly identified with
the institution of slavery;' declared Mississippi as it left the
Union, "the greatest material interest of the world."
Do you remember standing with me and your mother,
during one of our visits to Gettysburg, outside the home
of Abraham Brian? We were with a young man who'd
educated himself on the history of black people in Get
tysburg. He explained that Brian Farm was the far end of
102 TA-NEHISI COATES
the line that was charged by George Pickett on the final
day of Gettysburg. He told us that Brian was a black man,
that Gettysburg was home to a free black community, that
Brian and his family fled their home for fear oflosing their
bodies to the advancing army of enslavement, led by the
honored and holy Confederate general Robert E. Lee,
whose army was then stealing black people from them
selves and selling them south. George Pickett and his
troops were repulsed by the Union Army. Standing there,
a century and a half later, I thought of one of Faulkner's
characters famously recalling how this failure tantalized
the minds of all "Southern" boys-"lt's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun .... " All of
Faulkner's Southern boys were white. But I, standing on
the farm of a black man who fled with his family to stay
free of the South, saw Pickett's soldiers charging through
history; in wild pursuit of their strange birthright-the
right to beat, rape, rob, and pillage the black body. That is
all of what was "in the balance," the nostalgic moment's corrupt and unspeakable core.
But American reunion was built on a comfortable nar
rative that ·made enslavement into benevolence, white
knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the
war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that
both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and
elan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the
Dream. Historians conjured the Dream. Hollywood forti
fied the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and ad-
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 103
venture stories. John Carter flees the broken Confederacy
for Mars. We are not supposed to ask what, precisely, he
was running from. I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General
Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as "just some good ole
boys, never meanin' no harm"-a mantra for the Dream
ers if there ever was one. But what one "means" is neither
important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe
that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day
to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the
officer carries with him the power of the American state
and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate
that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and
disproportionate number of them will be black.
Here is what I would like for you to know: In America,
it is traditional to destroy the black body-it is heritage.
Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of
labor-it is not so easy to get a human being to commit
their body against its own elemental interest. And so en
slavement must be casual wrath and random manglings,
the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as
the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to
be industrial. There is no uplifi:ing way to say this. I have
no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and
soul are the body and brain, which are destructible-that
is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not
escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings. The
104 TA-NEHISI COATES
soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was
the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the
first fruits of the American garden. And the fruits were
secured through the bashing of children with stovewood,
through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn.
It had to be blood. It had to be nails driven through
tongue and ears pruned away. "Some disobedience;• wrote
a Southern mistress. "Much idleness, sullenness, slovenli
ness .... Used the rod:' It had to be the thrashing ofkitchen
hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It
had to some woman "chear'd ... with thirty lashes a Satur
day last and as many more a Tuesday again:' It could only
be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers,
handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be
handy to break the black body, the black family, the black
community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized
into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies
were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a
beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For
the men who needed to believe themselves white, the
bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break
the bodies was the mark of civilization. "The two great
divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white
and black," said the great South Carolina senator John C.
Calhoun. "And all the former, the poor as well as the rich,
belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as
equals." And there it is-the right to break the black body
as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 105
always given them meaning, has always meant that there
was someone down in the valley because a mountain is
not a mountain if there is nothing below: You and I, my son, are that "below." That was true in
1776. It is ttue today. There is no them without you, and
without the right to break you they must necessarily fall
from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of
the Dream. And then they would have to determine how
to build their suburbs on something other than human
bones, how to angle their jails toward something other
than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy inde
pendent of cannibalism. But because they believe them
selves to be white, they would rather countenance a man
choked to death on film under their laws. And they would
rather subscribe to the myth of Trayvon Martin, slight
teenager, hands full of candy and soft drinks, transforming
into a murderous juggernaut. And they would rather see
Prince Jones followed by a bad cop through three jurisdic
tions and shot down for acting like a human. And they
would rather reach out, in all their sanity, and push my
four-year-old son as though he were merely an obstacle in
the path of their too-important day.
I was there, Samori. No. I was back in Baltimore sur
rounded by them boys. I was on my parents' living room
floor, staring out at that distant world, impenetrable to me.
I was in all the anger of my years. I was where Eric Garner
.. Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage.
106 TA-NEHISI COATES
must have been in his last moments-"This stops today,"
he said and was killed. I felt the cosmic injustice, even
though I did not fully understand it. I had not yet been to
Gettysburg. I had not read Thavolia Glymph. All I had was
the feeling, the weight. I did not yet know, and I do not
fully know now. But part of what I know is that there is
the burden of living among Dreamers, and there is the
extra burden of your country telling you the Dream is just,
noble, and real, and you are crazy for seeing the corruption
and smelling the sulfur. For their innocence, they nullify
your anger, your fear, until you are coming and going, and
you find yourself inveighing against yourself-"Black
people are the only people who ... "-really inveighing
against your own humanity and raging against the crime
in your ghetto, because you are powerless before the great
crime of history that brought the ghettos to be.
It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential
below of your country. It breaks too much of what we
would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world
we move through and the people who surround us. The
struggle to understand is our only advantage over this
madness. By· the time I visited those battlefields, I knew
that they had been retrofitted as the staging ground for a
great deception, and this was my only security, because
they could no longer insult me by lying to me. I knew
and the most important thing I knew was that, somewhere
deep with them, they knew too. I like to think that know
ing might have kept me from endangering you, that hav-
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 107
mg understood and acknowledged the anger, I could
control it. I like to think that it could have allowed me to
speak the needed words to the woman and then walk away.
I like to think this, but I can't promise it. The struggle is
really all I have for you because it is the only portion of
this world under your control.
I am sorry that I cannot make it okay. I am sorry that I
cannot save you-but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that
your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning
oflife,just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white
divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams,
their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulner
ability becomes real-when the police decide that tactics
intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when
their armed society shoots down their children, when na
ture sends hurricanes against their cities-they are shocked
in a way that those of us who were born and bred to un
derstand cause and effect can never be. And I would not
have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in
which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are
always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of
all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege
of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
I am speaking to you as I always have-as the sober and
serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not
apologize for his human feelings, who does not make ex
cuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You
are growi~g into consciousness, and my wish for you is
108 TA-NEHISI COATES
that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other
people comfortable. None of that can change the math
anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good as them,
so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day
of your brief bright life in struggle. The people who must
believe they are white can never be your measuring stick.
I would not have you descend into your own dream. I
would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
One day, I was in Chicago, reporting a story about the his
tory of segregation in the urban North and how it was
engineered by govermnent policy. I was trailing some of
ficers of the county sheriff as they made their rounds. That
day I saw a black man losing his home. I followed the
sheriff's officers inside the house, where a group of them
were talking to the man's wife, who was also trying to tend
to her two children. She had clearly not been warned that
the sheriff would be coming, though something in her
husband's demeanor told me he must have known. His
wife's eyes registered, all at once, shock at the circumstance,
anger at the officers, and anger at her husband. The offi
cers stood in the man's living room, giving him orders as
to what would now happen. Outside there were men
who'd been hired to remove the family's possessions. The
man was humiliated, and I imagined that he had probably
for some time carried, in his head, alone, all that was
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 109
threatening his family but could not bring himself to admit
it to himself or his wife. So he now changed all that energy into anger, directed at the officers. He cursed. He yelled.
He pointed wildly. This particular sheriff's department
was more progressive than most. They were concerned
about mass incarceration. They would often bring a social
worker to an eviction. But this had nothing to do with the
underlying and relentless logic of the world this man in
habited, a logic built on laws built on history built on con
tempt for this man and his family and their fate.
The man ranted on. When the officers turned away, he
ranted more to the group of black men assembled who'd
been hired to sit his family out on the street. His manner
was like all the powerless black people I'd ever known, exaggerating their bodies to conceal a fundamental plun
der that they could not prevent.
I had spent the week exploring this city, walking through
its vacant lots, watching the aimless boys, sitting in the
pews of the striving churches, reeling before the street mu
rals to the dead. And I would, from time to time, sit in the
humble homes of black people in that city who were en
tering their tenth decade of life. These people were pro
found. Their homes were filled with the emblems of
honorable life-citizenship awards, portraits of husbands
and wives passed away, several generations of children in
cap and gown. And they had drawn these accolades by
cleaning big houses and living in one-room Alabama
shacks before moving to the city. And they had done this
110 TA-NEHISI COATES
despite the city, which was supposed to be a respite, reveal
ing itself to simply be a more intricate specimen of plun
der. They had worked two and three jobs, put children
through high school and college, and become pillars of
their community. I admired them, but I knew the whole
time that I was merely encountering the survivors, the
ones who'd endured the banks and their stone-faced con
tempt, the realtors and their fake sympathy-'Tm sorry,
that house just sold yesterday"-the realtors who steered
them back toward ghetto blocks, or blocks earmarked to
be ghettos soon, the lenders who found this captive class
and tried to strip them of everything they had. In those
homes I saw the best of us, but behind each of them I
knew that there were so many millions gone.
And I knew that there were children born into these
same caged neighborhoods on the Westside, these ghettos,
each of which was as planned as any subdivision. They are
an elegant act of racism, killing fields authored by federal
policies, where we are, all again, plundered of our dignity,
of our families, of our wealth, and of our lives. And there
is no difference between the killing of Prince Jones and
the murders attending these killing fields because both are
rooted in the assumed inhumanity of black people. A leg
acy of plunder, a network oflaws and traditions, a heritage,
a Dream, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black
people in North Lawndale with frightening regularity.
"Black-on-black crime" is jargon, violence to language,
which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants,
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 111
who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built
the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should
not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into
this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history,
so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a
sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of
our days, we must invariably return.
The killing fields of Chicago, of Baltimore, of Detroit,
were created by the policy of Dreamers, but their weight,
their shame, rests solely upon those who are dying in
them. There is a great deception in this. To yell "black
on-black crime" is to shoot a man and then shame him for
bleeding. And the premise that allows for these killing
fields-the reduction of the black body-is no different
than the premise that allowed for the murder of Prince
Jones. The Dream of acting white, of talking white, of
being white, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders
black people in Chicago with frightening regularity. Do
not accept the lie. Do not drink from poison. The same
hands that drew red lines around the life of Prince Jones
drew red lines around the ghetto.
I did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did
not want you forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes.
What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness. I
resolved to hide nothing from you.
Do you remember when I first took you to work, when
112 TA-NEHISI COATES
you were thirteen? I was going to see the mother of a dead
black boy. The boy had exchanged hard words with a
white man and been killed, because he refused to turn
down his music. The killer, having emptied his gun, drove
his girlfriend to a hotel. They had drinks. They ordered a
pizza. And then the next day, at his leisure, the man turned
himself in. The man claimed to have seen a shotgun. He
claimed to have been in fear for his life and to only have
triumphed through righteous violence. "I was the victim
and the victor," he asserted, much as generations of Amer
ican plunderers had asserted before. No shotgun was ever
found. The claim still influenced the jury, and the killer
was convicted not of the boy's murder but of firing repeat
edly as the boy's friends tried to retreat. Destroying the
black body was permissible---but it would be better to do
it efficiently.
The mother of this murdered black boy was then taking
her case before journalists and writers. We met her in the
lobby of her Times Square hotel. She was medium height
with brown skin and hair down to her shoulders. It had
not even been a week since the verdict. But she was com
posed and wholly self-possessed. She did not rage at the
killer but wondered aloud if the rules she'd imparted had
been enough. She had wanted her son to stand for what he
believed and to be respectful. And he had died for believ
ing his friends had a right to play their music loud, to be
American teenagers. Still, she was left wondering. "In my
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 113
mind I keep saying, 'Had he not spoke back, spoke up,
would he still be here?'"
She would not forget the uniqueness of her son, his
singular life. She would not forget that he had a father who
loved him, who took him in while she battled cancer. She
would not forget that he was the life of the party, that he
always had new friends for her to shuttle around in her
minivan. And she would have him live on in her work. I
told her the verdict angered me. I told her that the idea
that someone on that jury thought it plausible there was a
gun in the car baftled the mind. She said that she was
baffled too, and that I should not mistake her calm probing
for the absence of anger. But God had focused her anger
away from revenge and toward redemption, she said. God
had spoken to her and committed her to a new activism.
Then the mother of the murdered boy rose, turned to you,
and said, "You exist. You matter. You have value. You have
every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as
loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no
one should deter you from being you. You have to be you.
And you can never be afraid to be you."
I was glad she said this. I have tried to say the same to
you, and if I have not said it with the same direction and
clarity, I confess that is because I am afraid.And I have no
God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter
the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of
us-Christians, Muslims, atheists-lived in this fear of tills
114 TA-NEHISI COATES
truth. Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat
of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this
distortion is intentional. Disembodiment. The dragon that
compelled the boys I knew, way back, into extravagant
theater of ownership. Disembodiment. The demon that
pushed the middle-class black survivors into aggressive
passivity, our conversation restrained in public quarters,
our best manners on display, our hands never out of pock
ets, our whole manner ordered as if to say, "I make no sud den moves." Disembodiment. The serpent of school years,
demanding I be twice as good, though I was but a boy.
Murder was all around us and we knew, deep in ourselves,
in some silent space, that the author of these murders was
beyond us, that it suited some other person's ends. We were right.
Here is how I take the measure of my progress in life: I
imagine myself as I was, back there in West Baltimore,
dodging North and Pulaski, ducking Murphy Homes,
fearful of the schools and the streets, and I imagine show
ing that lost boy a portrait of my present life and asking
him what he would make of it. Only once-in the two
years after your birth, in the first two rounds of the fight of
my life-have I believed he would have been disappointed.
I write you at the precipice of my fortieth year, having
come to a point in my life-not of great prominence
but far beyond anything that boy could have even imag-
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 115
ined. I did .not master the streets, because I could not read
the body language quick enough. I did not master the
schools, because I could not see where any of it could pos
sibly lead. But I did not fall. I have my family. I have my
work. I no longer feel it necessary to hang my head at par
ties and tell people that I am "trying to be a writer." And
godless though I am, the fact of being human, the fact of
possessing the gift of study, and thus being remarkable
among all the matter floating through the cosmos, still
awes me.
I have spent much of my studies searching for the right
question by which I might fully understand the breach
between the world and me. I have not spent my time
studying the problem of"race"-"race" itself is just a re
statement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this
from time to time when some dullard-usually believing
himself white-proposes that the way forward is a grand
orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all
beige and thus the same "race." But a great number of
"black" people already are beige. And the history of civi
lization is littered with dead "races" (Frankish, Italian, Ger
man, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve
their purpose-the organization of people beneath, and
beyond, the umbrella of rights.
If my life ended today, I would tell you it was a happy
life-that I drew great joy from the study, from the strug
gle toward which I now urge you. You have seen in this
conversation that the struggle has ruptured and remade me
116 TA-NEHISI COATES
several times over-in Baltimore, at The Mecca, in father
hood, in New York. The changes have awarded me a rap
ture that comes only when you can no longer be lied to,
when you have rejected the Dream. But even more, the
changes have taught me how to best exploit that singular
gift of study, to question what I see, then to question what
I see after that, because the questions matter as much, per haps more than, the answers.
But oh, my eyes. When I was a boy, no portion of my
body suffered more than my eyes. If I have done well by
the measures of childhood, it must be added that those
measures themselves are hampered by how little a boy of
my captive class had seen. The Dream seemed to be the
pinnacle, then-to grow rich and live in one of those dis
connected houses out in the country, in one of those small
communities, one of those cul-de-sacs with its gently
curving ways, where they staged teen movies and children
built treehouses, and in that last lost year before college,
teenagers made love in cars parked at the lake. The Dream
seemed to be the end of the world for me, the height of
American ambition. What more could possibly exist be
yond the dispatches, beyond the suburbs?
Your mother knew. Perhaps it was because she was
raised within the physical borders of such a place, because
she lived in proximity with the Dreamers. Perhaps it was
because the people who thought they were white told her
she was smart and followed this up by telling her she was
not really black, meaning it as a compliment. Perhaps it
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 117
was the boys out there, who were in fact black, telling her
she was "pretty for a dark-skin girl." Your mother never
felt quite at home, and this made the possibility of some
other place essential to her, propelling her to The Mecca,
propelling her to New York and then beyond. On her thir
tieth birthday she took a trip to Paris. I am not sure you
remember. You were only six. We spent that week eating
fried fish for breakfast and cake for dinner, leaving under
wear on the counter, and blasting Ghostface Killah. It had
never occurred to me to leave America-not even tempo
rarily. My eyes. My ftiendJelani, who came up the same as
me, once said that he used to think of traveling as a point
less luxury, like blowing the rent check on a pink suit. And
I felt much the same, then. I was bemused at your mother's
dreams of Paris. I could not understand them-and I did
not think I needed to. Some part of me was still back in
that seventh-grade French class, thinking only of the im
mediate security of my body, regarding France as one
might regard Jupiter.
But now your mother had gone and done it, and when
she returned her eyes were dancing with all the possibili
ties out there, not just for her but for you and for me. It is
quite ridiculous how the feeling spread. It was like falling
in love-the things that get you are so small, the things
that keep you up at night are so particular to you that
when you try to explain, the only reward anyone can give
you is a dumb polite nod. Your mother had taken many
pictures, all through Paris, of doors, giant doors-deep
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 119
blue, ebony, orange, turquoise, and burning red doors. I
examined the pictures of these giant doors in our small
Harlem apartment. I had never seen anything like them. It
had never even occurred to me that such giant doors could
exist, could be so common in one part of the world and
totally absent in another. And it occurred to me, listening
to your mother, that France was not a thought experiment
but an actual place filled with actual people whose tra
ditions were different, whose lives really were different,
whose sense of beauty was different.
When I look back, I know that I was then getting the
message from all over. By that time my friends included
a great number of people with ties to different worlds.
"Make the race proud," the elders used to say. But by then
I knew that I wasn't so much bound to a biological "race"
as to a group of people, and these people were not black
because of any uniform color or any uniform physical fea
ture. They were bound because they suffered under the
weight of the Dream, and they were bound by all the beau
tiful things, all the language and mannerisms, all the food
and music, all the literature and philosophy, all the com
mon language that they fashioned like diamonds under
the weight of the Dream. Not long ago I was standing in
an airport retrieving a bag from a conveyor belt. I bumped
into a young black man and said, "My bad."Without even
looking up he said, "You straight." And in that exchange
there was so much of the private rapport that can only
120 TA-NEHISI COATES
exist between two particular strangers of tbis tribe that
we call black. In other words, I was part of a world. And
looking out, I had friends who too were part of other
worlds-tbe world of Jews or New Yorkers, the world of
Southerners or gay men, of immigrants, of Californians,
of Native Americans, or a combination of any of these,
worlds stitched into worlds like tapestry. And though I
could never, myself, be a native of any of these worlds, I
knew that nothing so essentialist as race stood between us.
I had read too much by then. And my eyes-my beauti
ful, precious eyes-were growing stronger each day. And
I saw that what divided me from the world was not any
thing intrinsic to us but the actual i,zjury done by people
intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they
have named us matters more tban anything we could ever
actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born
witb darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but
in everything that happens after. In tbat single exchange
with tbat young man, I was speaking the personal language
of my people. It was the briefest intimacy, but it captured
much of the beauty of my black world-tbe ease between
your mother and me, the miracle at The Mecca, the way I
feel myself disappear on tbe streets of Harlem. To call tbat
feeling racial is to hand over all those diamonds, fashioned
by our ancestors, to tbe plunderer. We made tbat feeliug,
tbough it was forged in the shadow of the murdered, the
raped, the disembodied, we made it all the same. This is
tbe beautiful thing tbat I have seen with my own eyes, and
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 121
I think I needed this vantage point before I could journey
out. I think I needed to know that I was from somewhere,
that my home was as beautiful as any other.
Seven years after I saw the pictures of tbose doors, I re
ceived my first adult passport. I wish I had come to it sooner.
I wish, when I was back in that French class, that I had
connected the conjugations, verbs, and gendered nouns to
something grander. I wish someone had told me what that
class really was-a gate to some other blue world. I wanted
to see tbat world myself, to see the doors and everything
behind tbem. The day of my departure, I sat in a restaurant
with your mother, who'd shown me so much. I told her,
"I am afraid:' I didn't really speak the language. I did not
know the customs. I would be alone. She just listened and
held my hand. And tbat night, I boarded a starship. The
starship punched out into the dark, punched through the
sky, punched out past West Baltimore, punched out past
The Mecca, past New York, past any language and every
spectrum known to me.
My ticket took me to Geneva first. Everything hap
pened very fast. I had to change money. I needed to find a
trein from the eirport into the city and after that find an
other train to Paris. Some months earlier, I had begun a
halting study of the French language. Now I was in a storm
of French, drenched really, and only equipped to catch
drops of the language-"who," "euros," "you," "to the
right." I was still very afreid.
I surveyed the railway schedule and became aware that
122 TA-NEHISI COATES
I was one wrong ticket from Vienna, Milan, or some Al
pine village that no one I knew had ever heard of. It hap
pened right then. The realization of being far gone, the
fear, the unknowable possibilities, all of it-the horror, the
wonder, the joy-fused into an erotic thrill. The thrill was
not wholly alien. It was close to the wave that came over
me in Moorland. It was kin to the narcotic shot I'd gotten
watching the people with their wineglasses spill out onto
West Broadway. It was all that I'd felt looking at those Pa
risian doors. And at that moment I realized that those
changes, with all their agony, awkwardness, and confusion,
were the defining fact of my life, and for the first time I
knew not only that I really was alive, that I really was
studying and observing, but that I had long been alive
even back in Baltimore. I had always been alive. I was al
ways translating.
I arrived in Paris. I checked in to a hotel in the 6th ar
rondissement. I had no understanding of the local history
at all. I did not think much about Baldwin or Wright. I had
not read Sartre nor Camus, and if I walked past Cafe de
Flore or Les Deux Magots I did not, then, take any par
ticular note. None of that mattered. It was Friday, and what
mattered were the streets thronged with people in amaz
ing configurations. Teenagers together in cafi:s. School
children kicking a soccer ball on the street, backpacks to
the side. Older couples in long coats, billowing scarves, and
blazers. Twentysomethings leaning out of any number of
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 123
establishments looking beautiful and cool. It recalled New
York, but without the low-grade, ever-present fear. The
people wore no armor, or none that I recognized. Side
streets and alleys were bursting with bars, restaurants, and
cares. Everyone was walking. Those who were not walk
ing were embracing. I was feeling myselfbeyond any natu
ral right. My Caesar was geometric. My lineup was sharp
as a sword. I walked outside and melted into the city, like
butter in the stew. In my mind, I heard Big Bai sing:
I'm just a playa like that, my jeans was sharply creased.
I got a .fresh white T-shirt and my cap is slightly pointed east.
I had dinner with a friend. The restaurant was the size
of two large living rooms. The tables were jammed to
gether, and to be seated, the waitress employed a kind of
magic, pulling one table out and then wedging you in, like
a child in a high chair. You had to summon her to use the
toilet. When it was time to order, I flailed at her with my
catastrophic French. She nodded and did not laugh. She
gave no false manners. We had an incredible bottle of
wine. I had steak. I had a baguette with bone marrow. I had
liver. I had an espresso and a dessert that I can't even name.
Using all the French I could muster, I tried to tell the wait
ress the meal was magnificent. She cut me off in English,
"The best you've ever had, right?" 1 rose to walk, and de
spite having inhaled half the menu I felt easy as a feather-
124 TA-NEHISI COATES
weight. The next day I got up early and walked through
the city. I visited the Musee Rodin. I stopped in a bistro,
and with all the fear of a boy approaching a beautiful girl
at a party, I ordered two beers and then a burger. I walked
to Le Jardin du Luxembourg. It was about four o'clock in
the afternoon. I took a seat. The garden was bursting with
people, again in all their alien ways. At that moment a
strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was that I had not
spoken a single word of English that entire day. Perhaps it
was that I had never sat in a public garden before, had not
even known it to be something that I'd want to do. And
all around me there were people who did this regularly.
It occurred to me that I really was in someone else's
country and yet, in some necessary way, I was outside of their country. In America I was part of an equation-even
ifit wasn't a part I relished. I was the one the police stopped
on Twenty-third Street in the middle of a workday. I was
the one driven to The Mecca. I was not just a father but
the father of a black boy. I was not just a spouse but the
husband of a black woman, a freighted symbol of black
love. But sitting in that garden, for the first time I was an
alien, I was a sailor-landless and disconnected. And I was
sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before
that I had never felt myself so far outside of someone else's
dream. Now I felt the deeper weight of my generational
chains-my body confined, by history and policy, to cer
tain zones. Some of us make it out. But the game is played
with loaded dice. I wished I had known more, and I wished
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 125
I had known it sooner. I remember, that night, watching
the teenagers gathering along the pathway near the Seine
to do all their teenage things. And I remember thinking
how much I would have loved for that to have been my
life, how much I would have loved to have a past apart
from the fear. I did not have that past in hand or memory.
But I had you.
We came back to Paris that summer, because your
mother loved the city and because I loved the language,
but above all because of you.
I wanted you to have your own life, apart from fear
even apart from me. I am wounded. I am marked by old
codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained
me in the next. I think of your grandmother calling me
and noting how you were growing tall and would one day
try to "test me." And I said to her that I would regard that
day, should it come, as the total failure of fatherhood be
cause if all I had over you were my hands, then I really had
nothing at all. But, forgive me, son, I knew what she meant
and when you were younger I thouglit the same. And I
am now ashamed of the thought, ashamed of my fear, of
the generational chains I tried to clasp onto your wrists.
We are entering our last years together, and I wish I had
been softer with you. Your mother had to teach me how
to love you-how to kiss you and tell you I love you every
night. Even now it does not feel a wholly natural act so
much as it feels like ritual. And that is because I am
wounded. That is because I am tied to old ways, which I
126 TA-NEHISI COATES
learned in a hard house. It was a loving house even as it
was besieged by its country, but it was hard. Even in Paris,
I could not shake the old ways, the instinct to watch my
back at every pass, and always be ready to go.
A few weeks into our stay, I made a friend who wanted
to improve his English as much as I wanted to improve my
French. We met one day out in the crowd in front of
Notre Dame. We walked to the Latin Quarter. We walked
to a wine shop. Outside the wine shop there was seating.
We sat and drank a bottle of red. We were served heaping
piles of meats, bread, and cheese. Was this dinner? Did
people do this? I had not even known how to imagine it.
And more, was this all some elaborate ritual to get an angle
on me? My friend paid. I thanked him. But when we left
I made sure he walked out first. He wanted to show me
one of those old buildings that seem to be around every
corner in that city. And the entire time he was leading me,
I was sure he was going to make a quick turn into an alley,
where some dudes would be waiting to strip me of ...
what, exactly? But my new friend simply showed me the
building, shook my hand, gave a fine bonne soiree, and
walked off into the wide open night. And watching him
walk away, I felt that I had missed part of the experience
because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in Balti
more, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.
What I wanted was to put as much distance between
you and that blinding fear as possible. I wanted you to see
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 127
different people living by different rules. I wanted you to
see the couples sitting next to each other in the cafes,
turned out to watch the street; the women pedaling their
old bikes up the streets, without helmets, in long white
dresses; the women whizzing past in Daisy Dukes and pink
roller skates. I wanted you to see the men in salmon
colored pants and white linen and bright sweaters tied
around their necks, the men who disappeared around cor
ners and circled back in luxury cars, with the top down,
loving their lives. All of them smoking. All of them know
ing that either grisly death or an orgy awaited them just
around the corner. Do you remember how your eyes lit up
like candles when we stood out on Saint-Germain-des
Pres? That look was all that I lived for.
And even then, I wanted you to be conscious, to under
stand that to be distanced, if only for a moment, from fear
is not a passport out of the struggle. We will always be
black, you and I, even if it means different things in differ
ent places. France is built on its own dream, on its collec
tion of bodies, and recall that your very name is drawn
from a man who opposed France and its national project
of theft by colonization. It is true that our color was not
our distinguishing feature there, so much as the American
ness represented in our poor handle on French. And it is
true that there is something particular about how the
Americans who think they are white regard us-something
sexual and obscene. We were not enslaved in France. We
128 TA-NEHISI COATES
are not their particular "problem," nor their national guilt.
We are not their niggers. If there is any comfort in this, it
is not the kind that I would encourage you to indulge.
Remember your name. Remember that you and I are
brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remem
ber the broader consciousness that comes with that. Re
member that this consciousness can never ultimately be
racial; it must be cosmic. Remember the Roma you saw
begging with their children in the street, and the venom
with which they were addressed. Remember the Algerian
cab driver, speaking openly of his hatred of Paris, then
looking at your mother and me and insisting that we were
all united under Africa. Remember the rumbling we all
felt under the beauty of Paris, as though the city had been
built in abeyance of Pompeii. Remember the feeling that
the great public gardens, the long lunches, might all be
undone by a physics, cousin to our rules and the reckoning
of our own country, that we do not fully comprehend.
It was good to have your uncle Ben and your aunt Janai
there-someone else who had to balance the awe of what
these people had built and the fact of whom they built so
much of it upon; someone else who'd learned to travel in adulthood; people who'd been black in America and were
mostly concerned with the safety of their bodies. And we
were all aware that the forces that held back our bodies
back at home were not unrelated to those that had given
France its wealth. We were aware that much of what they
had done was built on the plunder of Haitian bodies, on
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 129
the plunder of Wolof bodies, on the destruction of the
Toucouleur, on the taking ofBissandugu.
That was.the same summer that the killer ofTrayvon
Martin was acquitted, the summer I realized that I ac
cepted that there is no velocity of escape. Home would
find us in any language. Remember when we took the
train up to Place de la Nation to celebrate your birthday
with Janai and Ben and the kids? Remember the young
man standing outside the subway in protest? Do you re
member his sign? VIVE LE COMBAT DES JEUNES CONTRE LE
CRIMES RACISTES! USA: TRAYVON MARTIN, 17 ANS ASSASSINE
CAR NOIR ET LE RACISTE ACQUIT£.
I did not die in my aimless youth. I did not perish in the
agony of not knowing. I was not jailed. I had proven to
myself th~t there was another way beyond the schools and
the streets. I felt myself to be among the survivors of some
great natural disaster, some plague, some avalanche or
earthquake. And now, living in the wake of a decimation
and having arrived at a land that I once considered mythi
cal, everything seemed cast in a halo-the pastel Parisian
scarves burned brighter, the morning odor wafting out of
the boulangeries was hypnotic, and the language all around
me struck me not so much as language but as dance.
Your route will be different. It must be. You knew things
at eleven that I did not know when I was twenty-five.
When I was eleven my highest priority was the simple
130 TA-NEHISI COATES
security of my body. My life was the immediate negotia
tion of violence-within my house and without. But al
ready you have expectations, I see that in you. Survival and
safety are not enough. Your hopes-your dreams, if you
will-leave me with an array of warring emotions. I am so
very proud of you-your openness, your ambition, your
aggression, your intelligence. My job, in the little time we
have left together, is to match that intelligence with wis
dom. Part of that wisdom is understanding what you were
given---a city where gay bars are unremarkable, a soccer
team on which half the players speak some other language.
What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that
the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the
result of eajoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body.
Perhaps that is why, when you discovered that the killer
of Mike Brown would go unpunished, you told me you
had to go. Perhaps that is why you were crying, because in
that moment you understood that even your relatively
privileged security can never match a sustained assault
launched in the name of the Dream. Our current politics
tell you that should you fall victim to such an assault and
lose your body, it somehow must be your fault. Trayvon
Martin's hoodie got him killed. Jordan Davis's loud music
did the same. John Crawford should never have touched
the rifle on display. Kajieme Powell should have known
not to be crazy. And all of them should have had fathers-
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 131
even the ones who had fathers, even you. Without its own
justifications, the Dream would collapse upon itself. You
first learned this from Michael Brown. I first learned it
from Prince Jones.
Michael Brown did not die as so many of his defenders
supposed. And still the questions behind the questions are
never asked. Should assaulting an officer of the state be a
capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as
judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to
be? And all the time the Dreamers are pillaging Ferguson
for municipal governance. And they are torturing Mus
lims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by
accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther
King and e;ulting nonviolence for the weak and the big
gest guns for the strong. Each time a police officer engages
us, death, injury, maiming is possible. It is not enough to say that this is true of anyone or more true of criminals.
The moment the officers began their pursuit of Prince
Jones, his life was in danger. The Dreamers accept this as
the cost of doing business, accept our bodies as currency,
because it is their tradition. As slaves we were this coun
try's first windfall, the down payment on its freedom. After
the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came Redemption
for the unrepentant South and Reunion, and our bodies
became this country's second mortgage. In the New Deal
we were their guestroom, their finished basement. And
today, with a sprawling prison system, which has turned
132 TA-NEHISI COATES
the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for
Dreamers and a lucrative investment for Dreamers; today,
when 8 percent of the world's prisoners are black men, our
bodies have refinanced the Dream of being white. Black
life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural re
source of incomparable value.
III.
And have brought humanity to the edge of
oblivion: because they think they are white.
JAMES BALDWIN
In the years after Prince Jones died, I thought often of
those who were left to make their lives in the shadow of
his death. I thought of his fiancee and wondered what it
meant to see the future upended with no explanation. I
wondered what she would tell his daughter, and I won
dered how his daughter would imagine her father, when
she would miss him, how she would detail the loss. But
mostly I wondered about Prince's mother, and the ques
tion I mostly asked myself was always the same: How did
she live? I searched for her phone number online. I emailed
her. She responded. Then I called and made an appoint
ment to visit. And living she was,just outside of Philadel
phia in a small gated community of aflluent homes. It was
a rainy Tuesday when I arrived. I had taken the train in
from New York and then picked up a rental car. I was
thinking of Prince a lot in those months before. You, your
136 TA•NEHISI COATES
mother, and I had gone to Homecoming at The Mecca,
and so many of my friends were there, and Prince was not.
Dr. Jones greeted me at the door. She was lovely, polite,
brown. She appeared to be somewhere in that range be
tween forty and seventy years, when it becomes difficult to
precisely ascertain a black person's precise age. She was
well composed, given the subject of our conversation, and
for most of the visit I struggled to separate how she actu
ally felt from what I felt she must be feeling. What I felt,
right then, was that she was smiling through pained eyes,
that the reason for my visit had spread sadness like a dark
quilt over the whole house. I seem to recall music-jazz
or gospel-playing in the back, but conflicting with that
I also remember a deep quiet overcoming everything. I
thought that perhaps she had been crying. I could not tell
for sure. She led me into her large living room. There was
no one else in the house. It was early January. Her Christ
mas tree was still standing at the end of the room, and
there were stockings bearing the name of her daughter
and her lost son, and there was a framed picture of him_:__
Prince Jones-on a display table. She brought me water in
a heavy glass. She drank tea. She told me that she was born
and raised outside of Opelousas, Louisiana, that her ances
tors had been enslaved in that same region, and that as a
consequence of that enslavement, a fear echoed down
through the ages. "It first became clear when I was four," she told me.
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 137
My mother and I were going into the city. We got on
the Greyhound bus. I was behind my mother. She
wasn't holding my hand at the time and I plopped
down in the first seat I found. A few minutes later my
mother was looking for me and she took me to the
back of the bus and explained why I couldn't sit there.
We were very poor, and most of the black people
around us, who I knew were poor also, and the images
I had of white America were from going into the city
and seeing who was behind the counter in the stores
and seeing who my mother worked for. It became
clear there was a distance.
This chasm makes itself known to us in all kinds of
ways. A little girl wanders home, at age seven, after being
teased in school and asks her parents, "Are we niggers and
what does this mean?" Sometimes it is subtle-the simple
observation of who lives where and works what jobs and
who does not. Sometimes it's all of it at once. I have never
asked how you became personally aware of the distance.
Was it Mike Brown? I don't think I want to know. But I
know that it has happened to you already, that you have
deduced that you are privileged and yet still different from
other privileged children, because you are the bearer of a
body more fragile tl1an any other in this country. What I
want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is
ultimately your responsibility. It is your responsibility be-
138 TA-NEHISI COATES
cause you are surrounded by the Dreamers. It has nothing
to do with how you wear your pants or how you style
your hair. The breach is as intentional as policy, as inten
tional as the forgetting that follows. The breach allows for
the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers,
the enslaved from the enslavers, sharecroppers from land holders, cannibals from food.
Dr. Jones was reserved. She was what people once re
ferred to as "a lady," and in that sense reminded me of my
grandmother, who was a single mother in the projects but
always spoke as though she had nice things. And when Dr.
Jones described her motive for escaping the dearth that
marked the sharecropper life of her father and all the oth
ers around her, when she remembered herself saying, "I'm
not going to live like this," I saw the iron in her eyes, and
I remembered the iron in my grandmother's eyes. You
must barely remember her by now-you were six when
she died. I remember her, of course, but by the time I
knew her, her exploits-how, for instance, she scrubbed
white people's floors during the day and went to school at
night-were legend. But I still could feel the power and
rectitude that propelled her out of the projects and into homeownership.
It was the same power I felt in the presence of Dr.Jones.
When she was in second grade, she and another girl made
a pact that they would both become doctors, and she held
up her end of the bargain. But first she integrated the high
school in her town. At the beginning she fought the white
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 139
children who insulted her. At the end they voted her class
president. She ran track. It was "a great entree," she told
me, but it only brought her so far into their world. At
football games the other students would cheer the star
black running back, and then when a black player on the
other team got the ball, they'd yell, "Kill that nigger! Kill
that nigger!" They would yell this sitting right next to her,
as though she really were not there. She gave Bible recita
tions as a child and told me the story of her recruitment
into this business. Her mother took her to audition for the
junior choir. Afterward the choir director said, "Honey, I
think you should talk:' She was laughing lightly now, not
uproariously, still in control of her body. I felt that she was
warming up. As she talked of the church, I thought of
your grandfather, the one you know, and how his first in
tellectual adventures were found in the recitation of Bible
passages. I thought of your mother, who did the same. And I thought of my own distance from an institution that has,
so often, been the only support for our people. I often
wonder if in that distance I've missed something, some no tions of cosmic hope, some wisdom beyond my mean
physical perception of the world, something beyond the
body, that I might have transmitted to you. I wondered
this, at that particular moment, because something beyond
anything I have ever understood drove Mable Jones to an exceptional life.
She went to college on full scholarship. She went to
med school at Louisiana State University. She served in the
140 TA-NEHISI COATES
Navy. She took up radiology. She did not then know any
other black radiologists. I assumed that this would have
been hard on her, but she was insulted by the assumption.
She could not acknowledge any discomfort, and she did
not speak of herself as remarkable, because it conceded too
much, because it sanctified tribal expectations when the
only expectation that mattered should be rooted in an as
sessment of Mable Jones. And by those lights, there was
nothing surprising in her success, because Mable Jones was
always pedal to the floor, not over or around, but through,
and if she was going to do it, it must be done to death. Her
disposition toward life was that of an elite athlete who
knows the opponent is dirty and the refs are on the take,
but also knows the championship is one game away.
She called her son-Prince Jones-"Rocky" in honor
of her grandfather, who went by "Rock." I asked about his
childhood, because the fact is that I had not known Prince
all that well. He was among the people I would be happy
to see at a party, whom I would describe to a friend as "a
good brother," though I could not really account for his
comings and goings. So she sketched him for me so that I
might better understand. She said that he once hammered
a nail into an electrical socket and shorted out the entire
house. She said that he once dressed himself in a suit and
tie, got down on one knee, and sang "Three Tiines a Lady"
to her. She said that he'd gone to private schools his entire
life-schools filled with Dreamers-but he made friends
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 141
wherever he went, in Louisiana and later in Texas. I asked
her how his friends' parents treated her. "By then I was the
chief of radiology at the local hospital," she said. "And so
they treated me with respect." She said this with no love in
her eye, coldly, as though she were explaining a mathemat
ical function.
Like his mother, Prince was smart. In high school he
was admitted to a Texas magnet school for math and sci
ence, where students acquire college credit. Despite the
school drawing from a state with roughly the population
of Angola, Australia, or Afghanistan, Prince was the only
black child. I asked Dr.Jones if she had wanted him to go
to Howard. She smiled and said, "No." Then she added,
"It's so nice to be able to talk about this." This relaxed me
a little, because I could think of myself as something more
than an intrusion. I asked where she had wanted him to go
for college. She said, "Harvard. And if not Harvard, Prince
ton. And if not Princeton, Yale. And if not Yale, Colum
bia. And if not Columbia, Stanford. He was that caliber of
student." But like at least one third of all the students who
came to Howard, Prince was tired of having to represent
to other people. These Howard students were not like
me. They were the children of the Jackie Robinson elite,
whose parents rose up out of the ghettos, and the share
cropping fields, went out into the suburbs, only to find
that they carried the mark with them and could not es
cape. Even when they succeeded, as so many of them did,
142 TA-NEHISI COATES
they were singled out, made examples of, transfigured into
parables of diversity. They were symbols and markers,
never children or young adults. And so they come to
Howard to be normal-and even more, to see how broad
the black normal really is.
Prince did not apply to Harvard, nor Princeton, nor
Yale, nor Columbia, nor Stanford. He only wanted The
Mecca. I asked Dr. Jones if she regretted Prince choosing
Howard. She gasped. It was as though I had pushed too
hard on a bruise. "No," she said. "I regret that he is dead."
She said this with great composure and greater pain.
She said this with all of the odd poise and direction that
the great American injury demands of you. Have you ever
taken a hard look at those pictures from the sit-ins in the
'60s, a hard, serious look? Have you ever looked at the
faces? The faces are neither angry, nor sad, nor joyous.
They betray almost no emotion. They look out past their
tormentors, past us, and focus on something way beyond
anything known to me. I think they are fastened to their
god, a god whom I cannot know and in whom I do not
believe. But, god or not, the armor is all over them, and it is real. Or perhaps it is not armor at all. Perhaps it is life
extension, a kind ofloan allowing you to take the assaults
heaped upon you now and pay down the debt later. What
ever it is, that same look I see in those pictures, noble and
vacuous, was the look I saw in Mable Jones. It was in her
sharp brown eyes, which welled but did not break. She
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 143
held so much under her control, and I was sure the days
since her Rocky was plundered, since her lineage was
robbed, had demanded nothing less.
And she could not lean on her country for help. When
it came to her son, Dr. Jones's country did what it does
best-it forgot him. The forgetting is habit, is yet another
necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten
the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror
that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the
segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They
have forgotten, because to remember would tumble them
out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down
here with us, down here in the. world. I am convinced that
the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather
live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck
Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To
awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of hu
mans and, like all empires of humans, are built on the de
struction of the body. It is to stain their nobility, to make
them vulnerable, fallible, breakable humans.
Dr.Jones was asleep when the phone rang. It was 5 A.M.
and on the phone was a detective telling her she should
drive to Washington. Rocky was in the hospital. Rocky
had been shot. She drove with her daughter. She was sure
he was still alive. She paused several times as she explained
this. She went directly to the ICU. Rocky was not there.
A group of men with authority-doctors, lawyers, detec-
144 TA-NEHISI COATES
tives, perhaps-took her into a room and told her he was
gone. She paused again. She did not cry. Composure was too important now.
"It was unlike anything I had felt before," she told me.
"It was extremely physically painful. So much so that
whenever a thought of him would come to mind, all I could do was pray and ask for mercy. I thought I was going
to lose my mind and go crazy. I felt sick. I felt like I was dying."
I asked if she expected that the police officer who had
shot Prince would be charged. She said, "Yes:' Her voice
was a cocktail of emotions. She spoke like an American,
with the same expectations of fairness, even fairness be
lated and begrudged, that she took into medical school all
those years ago. And she spoke like a black woman, with
all the pain that undercuts those exact feelings.
I now wondered about her daughter, who'd been re
cently married. There was a picture on display of this
daughter and her new husband. Dr.Jones was not optimis
tic. She was intensely worried about her daughter bring
ing a son into America, because she could not save him, she could not secure his body from the ritual violence that
had claimed her son. She compared America to Rome.
She said she thought the glory days of this country had
long ago passed, and even those glory days were sullied:
They had been built on the bodies of others. "And we
can't get the message;' she said. "We don't understand that
we are embracing our deaths."
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 145
I asked Dr. Jones if her mother was still alive. She told
me her mother passed away in 2002, at the age of eighty
nine. I asked Dr. Jones how her mother had taken Prince's
death, and her voice retreated into an almost-whisper, and
Dr.Jones said, "I don't know that she did."
She alluded to 12 Years a Slave. "There he was," she said,
speaking of Solomon Northup. "He had means. He had a
family. He· was living like a human being. And one racist
act took him back. And the same is true of me. I spent
years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging re
sponsibilities. And one racist act. It's all it takes." And then
she talked again of all that she had, through great industry,
through unceasing labor, acquired in the long journey
from grinding poverty. She spoke of how her children had
been raised in the lap of luxury-annual ski trips, jaunts
off to Europe. She said that when her daughter was study
ing Shakespeare in high school, she took her to England.
And When her daughter got her license at sixteen, a Mazda
626 was waiting in front. I sensed some connection to this
desire to give and the raw poverty of her youth. I sensed
that it was all as much for her as it was for her children. She
said that Prince had never taken to material things. He
loved to read. He loved to travel. But when he turned
twenty-three, she bought him a jeep. She had a huge pur
ple bow put on it. She told me that she could still see him
there, looking at the jeep and simply saying, Thank you,
Mom. Without interruption she added, "And that was the
jeep he was killed in."
146 TA-NEHISI COATES
After I left, I sat in the car, idle for a few minutes. I
thought of all that Prince's mother had invested in him,
and all that was lost. I thought of the loneliness that sent
him to The Mecca, and how The Mecca, how we, could
not save him, how we ultimately cannot save ourselves. I
thought back on the sit-ins, the protestors with their stoic
faces, the ones I'd once scorned for hurling their bodies at
the worst things in life. Perhaps they had known some
thing terrible about the world. Perhaps they so willingly
parted with the security and sanctity of the black body
because neither security nor sanctity existed in the first
place. And all those old photographs from the 1960s, all
those films I beheld of black people prostrate before clubs
and dogs, were not simply shameful, indeed were not
shameful at all-they were just true. We are captured,
brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of Amer
ica. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the
terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape
on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the move
ment: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts
of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white,
to think that they are white, which is to think that they are
beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.
But you cannot arrange your life around them and the
small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness.
Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious.
And you are here now, and you must live-and there is so
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 147
much out there to live for, not just in someone else's coun
try, but in your own home. The warmth of dark energies
that drew me to The Mecca, that drew out Prince Jones,
the warmth of our particular world, is beautiful, no matter
how brief and breakable.
I think back to our trip to Homecoming. I think back
to the warm blasts rolling over us. We were at the football
game. We were sitting in the bleachers with old friends and
their children, caring for neither fumbles nor first downs. I
remember looking toward the goalposts and watching a
pack of alumni cheerleaders so enamored with Howard
University that they donned their old colors and took out
their old uniforms just a little so they'd fit. I remember
them dancing. They'd shake, freeze, shake again, and when
the crowd yelled "Do it! Do it! Do it! Dooo it!" a black
woman two rows in front of me,in her tightestjeans,stood
and shook as though she was not somebody's momma and
the past twenty years had barely been a week. I remember
walking down to the tailgate party without you. I could
not bring you, but I have no problem telling you what I
saw-the entire diaspora around me-hustlers, lawyers,
Kappas, busters, doctors, barbers, Deltas, drunkards, geeks,
and nerds. The DJ hollered into the mic. The young folks pushed toward him. A young man pulled out a bottle of
cognac and twisted the cap. A girl with him smiled, tilted
her head back, imbibed, laughed. And I felt myself disap
pearing into all of their bodies. The birthmark of danma
tion faded, and I could feel the weight of my arms and
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 149
hear the heave in my breath and I was not talking then,
because there was no point.
That was a moment, a joyous moment, beyond the
Dream-a moment in1bued by a power more gorgeous
than any voting rights bill. This power, this black power,
originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a
dark and essential planet. Black power is the dungeon-side
view of Monticello-which is to say, the view taken in
struggle. And black power births a kind of understanding
that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors. Even
the Dreamers-lost in their great reverie-feel it, for it is
Billie they reach for in sadness, and Mobb Deep is what
they holler in boldness, and Isley they hum in love, and
Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha is the last sound they
hear before dying. We have made something down here.
We have taken the one-drop rules of Dreamers and flipped
them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into
a people. Here at The Mecca, under pain of selection, we
have made a home. As do black people on summer blocks
marked with needles, vials, and hopscotch squares. As do
black people dancing it out at rent parties, as do black
people at their family reunions where we are regarded like
the survivors of catastrophe. As do black people toasting
their cognac and German beers, passing their blunts and
debating MCs. As do all of us who have voyaged through
death, to· life upon these shores.
That was the love power that drew Prince Jones. The
. !
150 TA·NEHISI COATES
power is not divinity but a deep knowledge of how fragile
everything-even the Dream, especially the Dream-really
is. Sitting in that car I thought ofDr.Jones's predictions of
national doom. I had heard such predictions all my life
from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hol
lered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw
the same prediction in the words of Marcus Garvey who
promised to return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors,
an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The Mecca
knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the
Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right
with them. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction;
the people who could author the mechanized death of our
ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer
their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more.
This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of
cheap gasoline.
Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technol
ogy and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the
Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of
seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of
oil into Iood, have enabled an expansion in plunder with
no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the
Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the
body of the Earth itself The Earth is not our creation. It
has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its ven
geance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky.
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 151
Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on
the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African
ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are
known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through
our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight
from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided
woods. And the methods of transport through these new
subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose
around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers
themselves. I drove away from the house of Mable Jones thinking of
all of this. I drove away, as always, thinking of you. I do not
believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must
ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle.
Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for
wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle
for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name.
But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them.
Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your
struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field
for their Dream, the stage where they have painted them
selves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the
same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that
sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw
these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones's home. They
were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years
152 TA-NEHISI COATES
ago, the same ghettos where my mother was raised, where
my father was raised. Through the windshield I saw the
mark of these ghettos-the abundance of beauty shops,
churches, liquor stores, and crumbling housing-and I felt
the old fear. Through the windshield I saw the rain com
ing down in sheets.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TA-NEHISI COATES is a national correspondent for
The Atlantic and the author of the memoir The Beau
tiful Struggle. Coates has received the National Maga
zine Award, the Hillman Prize for Opinion and
Analysis Journalism, and the George Polk Award for
his Atlantic cover story "The Case for Reparations."
He lives in New York with his wife and son.
- Structure Bookmarks
- Between
- the World
- and Me