Between the World and Me

Coates describes his study of the Civil War. He is struck by the tone of innocence and benevolence with which the Civil War is spoken about in history books, documentaries, and tours of the battlefields. Coates reports on a story in Chicago on the history of segregation in the urban North. He accompanies police officers as they arrest and evict a man in front of his family. The arrested man rants at the police, and Coates notes the familiarity of this response to powerlessness—how the man exaggerates his physical presence “to conceal a fundamental plunder that they could not prevent” (109). Coates meets elders who have made homes for themselves in Chicago, worked three jobs to put their children through high school and college, and become pillars of their communities. Though Coates admires them, he regards them as “survivors,” the ones who successfully endured contemptuous banks, realtors who steered them back toward “ghetto blocks,” and lenders who tried to take advantage of them (110).

Coates takes Samori to meet a mother whose son was killed by a white man for playing his music too loud. The man is convicted not for murdering the boy but for shooting at the boy’s friends as they retreated. Coates clarifies that “[d]estroying the black body was permissible—but it would be better to do it efficiently” (112). The mother, though calm throughout the meeting, momentarily wonders if she did the right thing by teaching her son to stand up for himself. She wonders, “Had he not spoke back, spoke up, would he still be here?” (112). In the wake of her son’s death, the mother vows to dedicate her life to justice and activism. She turns to Samori and says, “You exist. You matter. You have value” (113).

Coates writes that his chief mission in life is not studying the problem of “race,” which he believes is simply the restatement of the problem, but understanding “the breach between the world and me” (115). He credits any insights that he has to the life changes, such as fatherhood, The Mecca, and moving to New York, that facilitated his rejection of the Dream. He claims that this rejection, this understanding that the Dream is a fallacy, has led him to further question the world around him.

Coates describes his surprise when the girl from Chicago goes to Paris for her 30th birthday and comes back changed. For the first time Coates desires to go abroad. Seven years later, Coates goes to Paris alone. At first he is afraid to communicate in a foreign language, but he soon realizes that living as a black man in the United States, “I was always translating” (121). While wandering around Paris, Coates feels a freedom in being disconnected from the responsibilities, symbolism, and dangers of being a black man, father, and spouse. This disconnection only further pronounces the way Coates is “confined by history and policy” in the United States (124).

Coates wants Samori to feel that same sense of disconnection, so Coates and the girl from Chicago return to Paris with Samori the following summer. Coates wants his son to have his own life, apart from fear and separate even from his father. Coates admits that he is wounded, “marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next” (124). Even in Paris, Coates is hypervigilant of his surroundings. He confesses that Samori’s mother had to teach Coates how to be tender with his son, how to kiss him and tell him he loved him. Coates clarifies that though Paris is free of the American context, it has its own legacy of exploitation, particularly of Haitians.