This country is reckoning with how it values – or rather, devalues – black American lives. Baldwin oscillated from hope to harsh despair, but Coates is a realist, finding beauty and dirt in equal measure. Each has a different modus operandi: Baldwin was a preacher, Coates is a poet. I’m not sure if Coates fills the Baldwin void, though. Baldwin, too, published such a letter in 1963, addressed to his nephew at the height of the civil rights movement.
Coates’s book takes the form of a letter to his 15-year-old son, Samori. Toni Morrison declared, after having read it, that Coates filled the “intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died”. Coates’s debt to Baldwin is quite explicit.
It joins Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped as recent, high-profile literary meditations on the tragedy of race in this country. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me is in the same mode of The Fire Next Time it is a book designed to wake you up. He woke me up, and gave me a way to keep moving through all of it. Meanwhile, my fellow students, the white ones, were incensed by OJ Simpson’s acquittal, even as they said nothing when a Bronx man named Anthony Baez was killed by a police officer in a chokehold.īaldwin came to me at the right time. Politicians who had just taken control of Congress were reading this book, and I could see already that it would lead to policies that would do harm. Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve – which argued that my intelligence would rate lower on the spectrum because of my race – had just been released. I had just finished a year at Columbia University as one of just a very few black students there. The months before I picked up that book had built in me a kind of dread I couldn’t name, spurred on by a constellation of events that were all designed to remind me of “my place”. At the time I was living in Morningside Heights, a neighborhood to the south-west of Harlem. I first read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time 20 years ago, and it saved me.
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