Between the World and Me in Around the World in 80 Books

Jul 28, 2016 Ryan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: borrowed, 2016, audiobooks

No.

I don't know what it's like.
I never have known what it's like.
I never WILL know what it's like.

I can drape myself in empathy and sympathy but that is as far as I should ever expect to go. I can preach, and amplify, and support...but I cannot know.

Because I cannot know, I need to listen. I need to ask questions in the quest for understanding, and from a place of humility. I need to listen to the answers...not wait for my turn to talk.

I live in a place that is "a little better", but even here t ...more

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Nov 03, 2015 Nadine in NY Jones rated it liked it

Shelves: lotsa-buzz, essays, national-book-award-winners

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage .

this isn't what I was expecting (and I'm not even sure what I was expecting). I'm just a middle class white lady trying my damndest to be intersectional, and I try to read a broad spectrum of books so that my brain can try to be a broad spectrum. But this book wasn't written for me. It was too allegorical, or rhetorical, or something-ical, to speak to me, I think.

I think. I thin ...more

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Jul 30, 2015 Rachel rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, essays, sociology, libraryebook, memoir

12/24/19: Audio

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Jul 30, 2020 superawesomekt rated it it was amazing

Shelves: personal-narrative, letters-and-diaries

Coates's musing letter to his son is blunt, bleak, and beautifully written.

In this very short book Coates shares his thoughts on "the black body" and "the struggle" with "the dreamers" AKA "the people who think they are white" (the latter being a phrase borrowed and acknowledged, I believe, from James Baldwin). These are all powerful ideas woven throughout his meditation on their place in a world tainted by racism and exploitation.

One small recurring thread throughout is Coates' atheism. He al ...more

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Aug 26, 2015 Ali rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: _m_kin, _m_aud, _n_lib

4.5. 5 for the writing. 5 for the message. 3 for the confusion remaining.

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Jul 26, 2018 Aimee rated it it was amazing

"It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own special Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness."

In an eloquently sublime dive into that "discomfort," Coates implores his son (explicitly, and the reader implicitly) to keep his (/their) eyes open to the truth of racial injustice and to understand ...more

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