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BY TA-NEHISI COATES
Between the World and Me
The Beautiful Struggle
Between the World and Me
Son,
Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me
what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting
from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote stu-
dio on the far west side of Manhattan. A satellite closed
the miles between us, but no machinery could close the
gap between her world and the world for which I had
been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about
my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced
by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week.
The host read these words for the audience, and when
she finished she turned to the subject of my body, al-
though she did not mention it specifically. But by now I
am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the
condition of my body without realizing the nature of their
request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt
6 TA-NEHISI COATES
that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of
those Americans who believe that they are white, was built
on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and
indistinct sadness well up in me.- The answer to this ques-
tion is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American hist01y
There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans
deity democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness
that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of
their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and Amer-
ica’s heresies-torture, theft, enslavement-are so common
among individuals and nations that none can declare them-
selves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have
never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln de-
clared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure
“that government of the people, by the people, for the
people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely
being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United
States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage
in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly
meant “government of the people” but what our country
has, throughout its history, taken the political term “peo-
ple” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother
or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me.
Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of “government
of the people,” but the means by which “the people” ac- quired their names.
This leads us to another equally important ideal, one
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 7
that Americans implicitly accept but to which they make
no conscious claim. 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 be-
yond the handiwork of men.
But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the
process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of
genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.
Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the pre-
eminence ofhue 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 hope-
lessly, 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. The new people
were something else before they were white-Catholic,
Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish-and if all our na-
tional hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be
something else again. Perhaps they will truly become
American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I can-
8 TA-NEHISI COATES
not call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of
washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the
belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tast-
ings and ice cream socials, but rath”er through the pillaging
oflife, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs;
the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the de-
struction of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of chil-
dren; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to
deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies.
The new people are not original in this. Perhaps there
has been, at some point in history, some great power whose
elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of
other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to dis-
cover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse
America, because America makes no claim to the banal.
America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and no-
blest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing be-
tween the white city of democracy and the terrorists,
despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One
cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead
mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of
American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I pro-
pose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral stan-
dard. This is difficult because there exists, all around us, an
apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face
value and not to inquire too much. And it is so easy to
look away, to live with the fruits of our history and to ig-
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 9
nore the great evil done in all of our names. But you and I
have never truly had that luxury. I think you know.
I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you be-
cause this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to
death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that
Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John
Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department
store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and
murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they
were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in
the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s
grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if
you did not before, that the police departments of your
country have been endowed with the authority to destroy
your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result
of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it
originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the
destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes
without the proper authority and your body can be de-
stroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and
it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your
body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held
accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And de-
struction is merely the superlative form of a dominion
whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings,
and humiliations. All of this is common to black people.
And all of this is old for black people. No one is held re-
sponsible.
10 TA-NEHISI COATES
There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or
even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men en-
forcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting
its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our
phrasing-race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial
profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy-serves
to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dis-
lodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs,
cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from
this. You must always remember that the sociology, the
history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regres-
sions all land, with great violence, upon the body.
That Sunday, with that host, on that news show, I tried
to explain this as best I could within the time allotted. But
at the end of the segment, the host flashed a widely shared
picture of an eleven-year-old black boy tearfully hugging
a white police officer. Then she asked me about “hope.”
And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that
I had expected to fail. And I wondered again at the indis-
tinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly was I sad? I
came out of the studio and walked for a while. It was a
calm December day. Families, believing themselves white,
were out on the streets. Infants, raised to be white, were
bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these people, much
as I was sad for the host and sad for all the people out there
watching and reveling in a specious hope. I realized then
why I was sad. When the journalist asked me about my
body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 11
most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It
is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day
cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is
treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like
peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for
so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold
my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never
been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the
bedding made from our bodies. And knowing this, know-
ing that the Dream persists by warring with the known
world, I was sad for the host, I was sad for all those families,
I was sad for my country, but above all, in that moment, I
was sad for you.
That was the week you learned that the killers of Mi-
chael Brown would go free. The men who had left his
body in the street like some awesome declaration of their
inviolable power would never be punished. It was not my
expectation that anyone would ever be punished. But you
were young and still believed. You stayed up till 11 P.M.
that night, waiting for the announcement of an indict-
ment and when instead it was announced that there was , none you said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your
room, and I heard you crying. I came in five minutes after,
and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort you, because I
thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell
you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it
would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents
tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your
12 TA-NEHISI COATES
world, that this is your body, and you must find some way
to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question
of how one should live within a black body, within a
country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and
the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately an-‘ swers itself.
This must seem strange to you. We live in a “goal-
oriented” era. Our media vocabulary is full of hot takes,
big ideas, and grand theories of everything. But some time
ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a
gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console
me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preor-
dained American glory. In accepting both the chaos ofhis-
tory and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly
consider how I wished to live-specifically, how do I live
free in this black body? It is a profound question because
America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the
black body is the clearest evidence that America is the
work of men. I have asked the question through my read-
ing and writings, through the music of my youth, through
arguments with your grandfather, with your mother, your
aunt Janai, your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in
nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on
other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is
not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant inter-
rogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my coun-
try, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.
14 TA-NEHISI COATES
And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely whenever
you leave me. But I was afraid long before you, and in this
I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I
knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, ada-
mantly; dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young
life, though I had not always recognized it as such.
It was always right in front of me: The fear was there in
the extravagant boys of my neighborhood, in their large
rings and medallions, their big putty coats and full-length
fur-collared leathers, which was their armor against their
world. They would stand on the corner of Gwynn Oak
and Liberty; or Cold Spring and Park Heights, or outside
Mondawmin Mall, with their hands dipped in Russell
sweats. I think back on those boys now and all I see is fear,
and all I see is them girding themselves against the ghosts
of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered
’round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black
body might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived on
in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big
T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a cata-
log ofbehaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief
that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.
I saw it in their customs of war. I was no older than five ‘ sitting out on the front steps of my home on Woodbrook
Avenue, watching two shirtless boys circle each other close
and buck shoulders. From then on, I knew that there was
a ritual to a street fight, bylaws and codes that, in their very
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 15
need, attested to all the vulnerability of the black teenage
bodies.
I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music
that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and
bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty
up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them,
against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of
their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I
saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded
bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over.
And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how
they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with
their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my
name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch
them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vas-
elined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each
other.
I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Phila-
delphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what
I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I
knew that my father’s father was dead and that my uncle
Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and
that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in
my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who
slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very
afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which
he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who
beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is
16 TA-NEHISI COATES
exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had
lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to
guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey
and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had
just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives
around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear.
Have they told you this story? When your grandmother
was sixteen years old a young man knocked on her door.
The young man was your Nana Jo’s boyfriend. No one
else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait
until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother
got there first. She asked the young man to leave. Then
she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so
that she might remember how easily she could lose her
body. Ma never forgot. I remember her clutching my small
hand tightly as we crossed the street. She would tell me
that ifi ever let go and were killed by an onrushing car, she
would beat me back to life. When I was six, Ma and Dad
took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and
found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious
minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did
what every parent I knew would have done-he reached
for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze,
awed at the distance between punishment and offense.
Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice-“Either I can beat
him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t.
All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke
BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 17
