Key themes
- The Black body as the site of American racial violence
- What it means to be a parent in a country that may kill your child
- Knowledge and the examined life as forms of resistance
About this book
A letter to a son about being Black in America; urgent, lyrical and unflinching.
Published in 2015, Between the World and Me won the National Book Award. Coates wrote it in the months following the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Toni Morrison said it was essential reading.
Discussion questions
- Coates addresses the book as a letter to his son. How does this epistolary form change what he can say — and what is the father-son relationship doing in a book about systemic racism?
- Coates rejects the language of the 'Dream' — the American ideal — as something built on the destruction of Black bodies. How does he make this argument — and does it convince?
- The book is shaped partly by the death of Coates's friend Prince Jones, killed by a police officer. How does this personal grief intersect with the political argument?
- Coates has been compared to James Baldwin, particularly to The Fire Next Time. What do the two books share — and where does Coates diverge from Baldwin's approach?
- Between the World and Me won the National Book Award and was immediately controversial. What in it generated the most discussion — and where do you agree or disagree with his argument?
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