By Brit Bennett
Coates’s “Between the World and Me” is written as an open letter to his teen-age son. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN VOSS/REDUX
The night Trayvon Martin’s killer walked free, I stood outside a Los Angeles movie theater, in line to watch “Fruitvale Station.” Maybe I would’ve picked a different movie had I foreseen the verdict, but I was young and hopeful, and I believed that someone would be held accountable for snuffing out a seventeen-year-old’s life. Instead, I blinked back tears as a well-meaning white woman approached—she couldn’t believe that verdict, she said, the injustice of it all. I didn’t want to hear her disappointment. I didn’t want to be a conduit for her guilt. I wanted to understand how a jury could determine that a child’s unarmed black body posed more of a threat than a grown man with a gun.
Later, I sat in the darkness of a theater, watching the final moments of a different young black man’s life. I was a freshman at Stanford when Oscar Grant was killed, living on a campus that was an hour away from the Oakland BART station where Grant, lying face down and handcuffed, was shot in the back by a white officer. When the film’s epilogue revealed that Grant’s killer was sentenced to two years, and he was released after one, someone yelled at the screen, “At least he went to jail!” The audience clapped, as if this were the happiest ending we could hope for.
This was two summers ago. Two summers since I sat glued to my laptop, streaming grainy courtroom-video feeds, endlessly refreshing and retweeting. I’ve since memorized a litany of names, an endless march of the young black dead. That summer, the night Trayvon Martin’s killer walked free, a black friend called me from a park where he’d gone to clear his head. It was late and I lay in my dark bedroom, long silences hanging between us. I wanted to say something comforting. I was worried about him, alone in a park late at night. “Why don’t you go home?” I wanted to say. “It’s safer.” Then I remembered what he would say to me, in the white college town where we had met, whenever we walked somewhere late at night. “Don’t worry. You’re with me. And I’m the scariest thing out here.”
This was a summer before Michael Brown bled out in the streets, before marches and protests and hashtags crystallized into the Black Lives Matter movement. Two summers before a white policeman assaulted black teen-agers at a pool party, before a white terrorist massacred nine black people in a church, before black churches throughout the South were burned. That summer, as my country splintered over whether an unarmed black teen-ager deserved to die, something shifted inside me. That summer, I awoke.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, “Between the World and Me,” opens with a similar awakening. The book, written as a letter to Coates’s teen-age son, begins as Coates struggles with how to help his child after Michael Brown’s killer is not indicted. He does not offer comfort, which would feel, to him, dishonest, and instead sets out to explore the question of how to “live free in this black body.” To Coates, a defining feature of black life is that your body can be taken from you easily, and with little consequence. Throughout the book, he awakens repeatedly to this reality: when, as a child, a boy points a gun at him; when he loses his temper at a white woman who shoved his son and a man threatens to call the police; when Prince Jones, a Howard University classmate, is gunned down in front of his house by a police officer who faces no charges. Coates begins to see patterns in the brutality within his own community as people try to protect their bodies and the bodies of those they love against all the easy ways those bodies can be destroyed. “This was the war for the possession of his body,” Coates writes, “and this would be the war of his whole life.”
To Coates, to be black in a white supremacist society is to live in constant fear of disembodiment. Even if your body is not stolen from you, the fear of losing your body steals your energy, your time, and your freedom. Coates threads this fear throughout the narrative—it haunts him from West Baltimore to New York City to Paris. His relentless fear is striking, jutting up against the popular American vision of black men as impervious to fear. Black male bodies are unfeeling, superhumanly strong, and dangerous. Michael Brown was a demon who charged into a hailstorm of bullets toward an officer’s gun. Trayvon Martin, a lanky teen-ager, bashed a grown man’s head into concrete with the strength of an M.M.A fighter. But Coates depicts the black male body as essentially vulnerable. What does it mean, then, to live in a body that is both scared and scary? Coates dives into this question, and while open letters often feel didactic, his elegiac prose and deep curiosity allow his book to continually open up to meaning.
Although the book has been widely praised as a monumental text about black life, it’s more specifically a book about how to live free in a black male body. Coates’s first book, “The Beautiful Struggle,” also explores the relationships between blackness and masculinity; in that book, a memoir, Coates describes his coming-of-age, which is aided mostly by male role models, from his Black Panther father to Afrocentric rappers. Black women hover on the margins of the story, at times shoved there, as when Coates describes his relief when the radio DJ would “drive off Whitney [Houston] and all the feminized rhythm and bullshit until Afrika Bambaataa owned the night.” Coates directs little attention to the feminine, focussing instead on the men who raised him to manhood even as he, a nerdy, awkward kid, struggled to live up to a masculine ideal.
Similarly, in “Between the World and Me,” Coates describes black women lovingly, almost ethereally, but they rarely appear as complicated, fully fleshed-out people. He closes the book with a conversation with Mabel Jones, his dead classmate’s mother. Her loss, to Coates, is her “legacy,” the time and energy and love she poured into a son who was stolen from her. Jones worries about her daughter—not about her daughter’s own body but about her daughter birthing a son whose body she could not protect from “the ritual violence that had claimed” her own son. Here, black women are vulnerable because of their love for black men. Coates writes extensively about the vulnerability of the black body, but he only briefly alludes to the additional ways black women’s bodies are vulnerable to sexual and physical violence. To his credit, he does not presume to be an expert on black women’s experiences, but his reluctance to interrogate them further feels odd for a narrator who is otherwise insatiably curious. “The women around you must be responsible for their bodies in a way that you never will know,” he writes to his son, and the lesson stops there. The dangers of living in a black female body are mysterious, forever unknowable.
When I say that I awoke two summers ago, I was not alone. Toward the end of the book, Coates describes the moments when black people become aware of “the chasm”—the distance between our lives and the white world. Sometimes, he writes, these moments when we gain awareness are small and quiet; other times, they are large and dramatic. The night Trayvon Martin’s killer walked free feels like one of those moments for young people like me, who had experienced many awakenings before but hadn’t yet found a way to bridge the chasm or, more importantly, bridge the distance to one another. But now we had Twitter. Now injustice was not a lonely experience but one that could be easily communicated. On Twitter, I first heard about a black teen-ager in a small town in Florida who had been killed by a man who had confessed but somehow, weeks later, had not been arrested. On Twitter, I followed the trial, the ridiculous debates about hoodies, and the courtroom theatrics, and, after the acquittal, I found comfort in collective mourning.
Looking back, that summer feels like the beginning of what would become the Black Lives Matter movement, a summer when my generation began to find the language we could use to fight racial injustice. Looking forward, “Between the World and Me” feels like a crucial book during this moment of generational awakening. In Coates’s work, racism not only disembodies but it is disembodied itself. Nowadays we love a loud racist—a Donald Sterling tape, a ranting Mel Gibson—but Coates turns away from such sensational stories and focusses instead on the slow violence of institutional racism. In his estimation, racism is neither an individual act of hatred nor some natural outside force; racism is a series of systems operating exactly as they were planned. Coates’ ongoing examination of institutional racism—as in his breathtaking Atlantic essay “The Case for Reparations”—is, in certain respects, the opposite of Twitter: it is dense, analytical writing about policy and history that shows us how systems operate. This is not the kind of story that quickly goes viral and unites us in outrage. When I saw Coates speak last winter at the University of Michigan, the mostly white audience was insistent on asking him for a grand solution to racism, but Coates politely refused to answer those questions. He seemed uncomfortable with the expectation that he was the correspondent for black America. What he knew, he kept saying, was writing. In a time of incessant takes on the latest scandals, a Coates byline promises something different: intelligent ideas expressed beautifully, sentences that hit you like body blows. “You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heel,” he writes to his son. “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.”
In her review of “Between the World and Me” for BuzzFeed, Shani O. Hilton worries that this “book about black male life is one that many readers will use to define blackness.” In a later Slate interview, Coates said that he disagreed with Hilton’s description but empathizes with her desire for broader representation. “I understand that it is the male experience and I am a male writing the book,” Coates said. “I don’t know how to remedy that.” It may be unfair to hold Coates accountable for reader expectations—books by black authors are always asked to be more representative than they ought to be. And it is unsurprising, maybe, for a book written by a father to his son to focus on black manhood. However, the book’s focus on black men is also unsurprising given the political moment when this book was born. Although the Black Lives Matter hashtag was created by three black women, the movement has overwhelmingly focussed on black male deaths. As a result, the African American Policy Forum at Columbia University released #SayHerName, a document gathering stories of black women who have been killed by police or experienced gender-based violence, like rape. “Although black women are routinely killed, raped and beaten by the police, their experiences are rarely foregrounded in popular understandings of police brutality,” Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, the director of the A.A.P.F. and a co-author of the document, said. “Yet inclusion of black women’s experiences … is critical to effectively combating racialized state violence.”
Black female bodies are vulnerable, too, in the presence of police, in our communities, and even in our own homes. Black women are disproportionately likely to be victims of violent crimes, intimate-partner violence, and sexual assault. But while we are rightly outraged by the vulnerability of black male bodies, we rarely register the ways in which black women are vulnerable. Whose vulnerability is horrifying and haunting, worthy of marching and protest? Whose is natural and inevitable? Even as a woman, I notice this contradiction in myself. I noticed it the night Trayvon Martin’s killer walked free, when I felt the overwhelming urge to comfort my friend because he should not feel vulnerable. He should be the one to walk through deserted parks late at night, even if I never could because I’m aware of all the things that men—black or white, police or civilian—might do to my body. How easily I accepted this as the natural order of things. How easily I learned all the ways my body could never be free.
As a child, I once heard that slavery was worse for black men than black women, because black men were pained by their inability to protect the women they loved. In this retelling, black women’s pain is incidental. The systemic, relentless rape that black women endured is only meaningful because of how it hurt black men. I believed this for a time, in deference to the black elder who told me, until I realized that trauma is not a competition, that there is no better or worse; there is only pain, and a woman’s pain is equally worthy of mourning.
Structurally, “Between the World and Me” is a conversation between black men, and this conversation is vital, but the strength of the Black Lives Matter movement is that it calls us to participate in and create new conversations. In “Men We Reaped,” another crucial book of this moment, Jesmyn Ward writes about losing five young black men in her small Mississippi town within four years, her beloved brother among them. Like Coates, she writes beautifully about the fragility of black male bodies in a world that easily disposes of them. While she describes her grief at losing these men, she also interrogates the vulnerability of her own body, the specific dangers that come with being a young, poor black girl in the South—everything, she writes, “the world around me seemed to despise.” As she comes of age, she struggles to understand her place in a world where black men often hurt or disappoint her, from her father abandoning her family to a boy who stalks and threatens her.
Ward humanizes young, poor black men who sell drugs and fight dogs; she imagines living in a body that is both scared and scary. In her work, the different vulnerabilities of black men and black women are not unbridgeable experiences—they reveal each other, like one big house in which each room opens into another. I’m grateful to wander through these rooms, grateful for the writers who lead me.
