“The struggle is really all I have for you,” he tells his son, “because it is the only portion of this world under your control.” What a strange form of control. “It is truly horrible,” Coates writes in one of the most disturbing sentences of the book, “to understand yourself as the essential below of your country.” Herein lies the danger: Forget telling his son it will be okay Coates cannot even tell him it may be okay. But interrogation and struggle to what end? His love for books and his journey to Howard University-“Mecca,” as he calls it-serve to question the world around him.

He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world’s physical laws.īut if we are all just helpless agents of physical laws, the question again emerges: What does one do? Coates recommends interrogation and struggle. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. O one would be brought to account for this destruction.

What about all those young men and women in the streets of Ferguson, Chicago, New York, and Charleston-how should we read their efforts? Coates’s answer seems to appear in one of the pivotal and tragic moments of the book-the murder of a college friend, Prince Jones, at the hands of the police: Action is tied fundamentally to what we imagine is possible for us, but there can be no affirmative politics when race functions as a wounded attachment. When one conceptualizes white supremacy at the level of ontology, there is little room for one’s imagination to soar, and one’s sense of agency is inescapably constrained. White supremacy, in other words, does not structure reality it is reality. For him, white supremacy is not merely a historically emergent feature of the United States it is an ontology. He rejects the American mythos but also embraces the certainty of white supremacy and its inescapable constraints. But Coates does not move in that direction. The book initially seems like it will reveal the illusion of the Dream and then open up the possibility for imagining the United States anew. The worry is that if we follow along, we, too, shall be captured. The wound of racism is too fresh the sharpness of the pain captures Coates’s senses and arrests his imagination. I plan to teach the book for two of my courses this academic year.īut for all of the beauty and power of the book, it is also profoundly troubling. Coates’s prose is capable of challenging our understanding of the United States even as it captures our hearts. Between The World and Me is an exquisite book, overflowing with insights about the embodied state of blackness and the logic of white supremacy.

Prince jones between the world and me