If you don’t witness a petty dispute there every week or so that escalates into stupid insults and near blows, you aren’t getting out enough.įor all his subtle plumbing of his own thoughts and feelings and his occasional invocations of the importance of the individuality of the person, Coates has to reduce people to categories and actors in a pantomime of racial plunder to support his worldview.

This is the kind of quotidian insight that can’t really penetrate the closed moral universe of Between the World and Me: White people are rude to other white people all the time, especially in New York City. It’s also possible that the woman was a jerk (there are at least a couple of them on the Upper West Side) and would have pushed anyone’s kid. Coates interprets this incident as essentially the telescoping of hundreds of years of racism down to “this woman pulling rank” and invoking her “right over the body of my son.” This would anger any parent and Coates got into it with the woman and a white man who came to her defense, pushing the guy in the resulting argument. Coates took his son to a movie theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and when they were leaving and got off the crowded elevator, a white woman pushed his kid and said, “Come on!” Given how large race hatred looms in the world of Coates, I was surprised to find the worst thing that evidently happened to him directly at the hands of a white person is recounted beginning on page 93 of the 152-page book. He argues - although that might be too generous a word it’s more like assertion shrouded in a haze of lyricism - that all that other black people did to hurt or threaten him was ultimately the product of white racism. Coates lived in perpetual fear - although largely of other black people. Other kids were a constant physical, perhaps even mortal, threat. It is a masterly little memoir wrapped in a toxic little Philippic.īetween the World and Me evokes the terror of the upbringing Coates had in West Baltimore in the 1980s with a sickening immediacy.

But if you refuse to simply stare at the book in wonder as one who admires Michelangelo’s David and subject it to even minimal critical scrutiny, you will realize that it is profoundly silly at times, and morally blinkered throughout. It is, in part, the story of the creation of a writer, and one with undeniably formidable gifts. What everyone says about the literary power of Between the World and Me is correct.

Coates between the world and me