summary

"Thisis 1

this is your t

In a profo biggest qu andideab of a father fers a pow standing< crisis. Am theideaoJ usallbutJ blackwm throughsl threatene allpropo black bod And how thisfraug itsburde

Betwf

Coates's: in a lett~ sharesth about hi: ries ofre1

Universi the Sou1 his child mothers asAme1 from per

BY TA-NEHISI COATES

Between the World and Me

The Beautiful Struggle

Between the World and Me

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 TA-NEHISI 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 hist01y

There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans

deity 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 7

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 ofhue 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 machinery 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 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 rath"er 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 innocence 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 9

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-bound 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.

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 11

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-NEHISI 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 ofhis-

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 myth, 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 of my coun-

try, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.

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 powerfully, 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 putty 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 ofbehaviors 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 someone 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 ifi 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-NEHJSJ 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 pulled 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 pulled 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 ifi 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 ofWest

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

seeri 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 of]o-

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 of this 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" " " h b or street, per aps ecause 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-

von 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

itsel£ 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 at three-year-olds; I saw their futures in the

men out on the corner yelling obscenely at some young

girl because she would not smile. 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

fr_om me. Two years later, he beat me for threatening my

nmth-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

~ot 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

~~ on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city Jatl. 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 would 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-NEHISJ COATES

subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing-

myself 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 of both. 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 ofbeing, 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 of 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 I 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

against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin

must be guarded against bleach, that our noses and mouths

must be protected against 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 fas;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 said 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 against 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 jails, he returned wielding

some old power that made him speak as though his body

were his own. "If you're black, you were born injail," Mal-

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 37

colm said. 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, explained 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 claim

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 Certificate:

"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.