2017 One College, One Community Reads!: Between the World and Me: About Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me is written in the form of a letter to the teenage son of the author, Ta-Nehisi Coates.  In the book Coates tries to help his son understand the racism they are subjected to every day as African Americans.  Coates writes:

     “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 beyond the handiwork of men.      

     But race is the child of racism, not the father…Difference in hue and hair is old.  But the belief in the preeminence 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 hopelessly, 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.”

From Between the World and Me, page 7.