Between the World and Me in CMU Alumni Association Faculty Bookshelf

Mar 24, 2016 Amy rated it it was amazing

"We could not get out. The ground we walked was trip-wired. The air we breathed was toxic. The water stunted our growth. We could not get out."

The United States has rigged the game for non-"white" people and blames them when they lose. Unsurprisingly, this is the result of hateful attitudes, rhetoric, and policies that have pervaded our society since its founding. Voting restrictions are a perfect example---did you see the mile-long lines to vote this week? This is engineered disenfranchisement. ...more

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Aug 10, 2015 Cindy Leighton rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: biography-autobiography-memoir, race-and-ethnicity, us-history, national-book-award-winner, essays, social-justice

"Race is the child of racism, not the father."
I have been sharing this book with all thinking people I know - of all races. Written as a letter to his son, Coates powerfully reveals the failures of our schools and our society, of the history of American "exceptionalism" built on the culturally constructed ideas of race. And the damage all of this does particularly to Black bodies, but to White bodies as well.

As an educator, I am most hearbroken by the ways schools failed Coates and so many other "Race is the child of racism, not the father."
I have been sharing this book with all thinking people I know - of all races. Written as a letter to his son, Coates powerfully reveals the failures of our schools and our society, of the history of American "exceptionalism" built on the culturally constructed ideas of race. And the damage all of this does particularly to Black bodies, but to White bodies as well.

As an educator, I am most hearbroken by the ways schools failed Coates and so many others - "I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance." a sad reality I have observed especially in "urban" schools. "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."

As an anthropologist I appreciate his exploration of the cultural concept of race "Amerians 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. . . But race is the child of racism, not the father." Let that sink in. And his exploration of identity - Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuinate 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." "There is no them without you."

As an historian I love his exploration of the progress of "Americans who believe that they are white (as Baldwin also said) was built on looting and violence. . . . But democracy is a forgiving God and America's heresies - torture, theft, enslavement - are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune."

As a human and a parent, I ache for his pain as a parent of a Black boy, having to explain to him the world he is growing up in. That he should have to restrain and refrain. "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." That the mistakes we all make and live through are dangerous when young Black men make them "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. . . 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 Martin's mythical words. . . "

I will continue to share this book with anyone who will read it. Everyone should. ...more

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Sep 26, 2021 Susan rated it it was amazing

I listened to the audiobook with the author narrating. The letter to his son is so very poignant and thought-provoking. The idea the Black people are disconnected from their body because of a system that gave them no agency over their person is one that I will long remember.

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