Teaching Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)

            Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is an epistolary biography to his fifteen-year-old son about what it means to be a black man in a black body in urban America. The first part is a biographical account of Coates’s youth in West Baltimore where he learned the black body carries the burden of the constant plundering and destruction of it. As a young man he attends Howard University where “the history, the location, the alumni combined to create The Mecca – the crossroads of the black diaspora” (40). At the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard he dives into an independent study of African-American identity, and he develops interrogation, writing, and poetry skills through these informative years. The second part of the letter speaks to the very personal crisis of police brutality when his friend Prince Jones is killed in Virginia by a black undercover Prince George’s County cop. Coates discusses the several cases of racial profiling and abuse of police power that have ravaged America over the last few years and how that burdens the black body. With the third and final part of this letter Coates finds some peace and acceptance after he speaks, years later, and at length to Prince Jones’s mother. The letter ends with some hope and reconciliation through love and identity for what it means to be a black man inhabiting a black body in today’s America.

            This non-fiction biographical epistle would be an excellent text to teach in 11^th or 12^th grade English literature class and/or an AP class. This text is considered young adult in that it is a letter addressed to a fifteen-year-old, a coming-of-age biography, information and advice from a father to a son. The text is poignant, historical, emotional, and poetic: the complexity of the text is beyond question. The relevance of the subject matter, especially with current events, would not only capture student interest but also necessitate further investigation of racial profiling and police brutality. The themes are beautifully crafted with novel ideas and the historical and current-events information is powerfully presented yet lends itself to further investigation on how the information is used to present Coates’s ideas and beliefs. The genre lends itself to critical analysis of the personal story and the questioning of subjective experience.

            Bucher and Hinton explain in critiquing a non-fiction text for the classroom, “Also important is a style and organization appropriate to the content, appeals to young adults’ interests, and is written at their reading levels” (283). The language of Between the World and Me is poetic and powerful and exists at the reading level of 11^th and 12^th grades, but the language offers some ideas, phrases and vocabulary for students at a highly proficient level of reading and comprehension to further develop their comprehension skills. This non-fiction text also offers quite a bit of content appropriate to the style, tone, and organization of the subject-matter. In examining the structure of the text the class can examine how form follows function.

            To continue to develop critical analysis, text investigation, and reading comprehension with these upper-classmen, a teacher can spend a few lesson plans lecturing and questioning the structure of the text. The letter as a whole and each of the three sections are framed with poignant poetry packed with metaphor and allusion to the black experience. The text structure is set up as a religious offering because of the three sections, because of the subject-matter, because of the information and guidance so required in this letter to his son, and because of even the size of the book—a small 5x8 hand-held guidance to what it means to be a black body in America. All of these investigations call to the nature of this non-fiction and confirms that the “style and organization is appropriate to the content” (Bucher & Hinton 283).

            To help students prepare for college-level reading, Between the World and Me offers plenty of challenging poetic narration and vocabulary phrases worth examining in the upper-level high school classroom. These would be presented and discussed in traditional lecture format with a short essay quiz for learning assessment. Some examples include: “[Coates’s parents] were skeptical of a preordained American glory” (12); “young students like me who confused agitprop with hard study” (54); “even then, in some inchoate form, I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth” (78); “I could see that the very smallness of these restaurants awarded the patrons a kind of erudite cool” (92-93); “the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration (97). These are a few of several complicated terms that college-bound students need to learn not only word definition of terms such as “inchoate” and “erudite”, but also they need to learn to unpack phrases such as “preordained American glory” and the “politics of personal exoneration.” Examining the text language in this way would satisfy core assessment guidelines and national standards for reading comprehension.

            So far this discussion on how to teach Between the World and Me has just begun to scratch the surface of the complexity and beauty of this piece of non-fiction. It’s necessary in the classroom to dive deeper into the text after preliminary investigation. Coates sets up some important premises in the initial pages that he uses to discuss black identity throughout the letter. These premises are crucial to understanding his experiences and his presentation of black history, and they are central original ideas for his reader to consider. One of the main ideas is that the race of black and white are socially constructed concepts born out of the human nature to control and destroy the Other: “Race is the child of racism, not the father” (7). Coates describes how “being white” is a socially based construct simply used to define the dominant and powerful race:

[T]he elevation of the belief in being white [was achieved] through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents […] and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies (8).    

The definition of “white” in America and the claiming of this identity came at a direct cost to the subduing and torturous acts of the Other identity construct of “black.” This is one of many threads throughout the whole letter. This thread presents itself later in the text: “For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the [black] bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization” (104). Another colorful thread in this text is Coates’s central premise and idea that to be black in America is to be a black body that carries its history of enslavement and oppression with the fear of destruction. As with the premise of racism begetting race, this central idea is woven into the entire text. Examining these crucial premises allows the students to closely examine the text while questioning and investigating the notions of black identity that Coates claims in this epistle.

      The nature of the letter of father to son requires didactic discourse fraught with emotion. It is important to examine how Between the World and Me is not an objective account of history and current events and to examine how Coates’s emotion heightens and contributes to the letter. Bucher and Hinton caution that “Fortunately, many non-fiction books have factual and unbiased material […] Unfortunately, not all do. Thus, teachers and library media specialists must read reviews and engage in firsthand evaluation” (282). Between the World and Me received laudable praise and dismissing criticism. There is one part of the text where Coates confides an emotional reaction to 9/11 that many people have taken issue with and have dismissed this important work. Shortly after the death of his friend Prince Jones, Coates, his wife and young son move to New York. Two months later on 9/11, filled with rage and disillusionment, Coates stands on his rooftop thinking:

I did know that Bin Laden was not the first man to bring terror to that section of the city. […] In the after, I watched the ridiculous pageantry of flags, the machismo of firemen, the overwrought slogans. Damn it all. Prince Jones was dead. And hell upon those who tell us to be twice as good and shoot us no matter. Hell for ancestral fear that put black parents under terror. And Hell upon those who shattered the Holy vessel. I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died. They were not human to me. (87)

It is important to note that Coates never claims he was wrong to feel and think these things, but he places these ideas and feelings in the past tense. He recognizes that this was a justified emotional reaction that passed, and although it brought truth to him at that time, he might no longer feel this way. His anger at the history of terror in this country on the black body should not be dismissed even though many would take objection to this passage. And indeed they did. It would be crucial in teaching this text to examine the response to this passage. Here is a link to one such article by Randall Kennedy: http://prospect.org/article/ta-nehisi-coatess-caricature-black-reality. This article offers an excellent argument for discussing the emotional nature of this epistle and it questions the how the emotional side of the text is grounds for dismissal. It would be worthy to examine this article’s issues with the text and how the argument is portrayed. To reach beyond the text and question its merit and quality is necessary to students’ development of critical thinking.

Another research and presentation assignment that would grab student interest and incorporate current events is to have them present in poster form the stories of the several cases of racial profiling and police brutality mentioned in the text. Have students print a picture of the victim/suspect and then as objectively as possible present the facts of the event that caused the death of the black boy, man, or woman. Have them give a detailed story of the community backlash, and the judicial response and outcome. Center classroom discussion around whether these events were accidental or if the acts of the victims and of the police involved were predicated on racial stereotype and fear. This would be another activity for students to develop investigative and research skills.

      Another way to reach beyond the text is to have the class do presentations on one of the many writers and social activists Coates studied at Howard. Or they could present the poets of his poetry quotations: Richard Wright, Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and James Baldwin. Have students discuss the excerpts that frame the sections and present another relevant poem by these poets. This activity is necessary for students to begin to examine inter-text dialogue and investigate where Coates learned about his black history. This might encourage students to do some further readings with some of these authors and activists on their own or for other classes. Finally, it is necessary that they be exposed to the information in this non-fiction text and learn how to reach further beyond to conduct their own research.

      There are many valid and pertinent reasons to teach Between the World and Me in an upper high-school English literature curriculum. This text presents many opportunities for students to continue to develop their critical thinking and analysis skills and to develop research and investigative skills while reaching beyond the text. Situated in the context of history, current events and multicultural American identity this text is a good cross-curricula subject that would truly challenge students to prepare for college and life in today’s society.

Works Cited

Bucher, K. and Hinton, K. Young Adult Literature: Exploration, Evaluation, and Appreciation. 3^rd Edition. Boston: Pearson, 2014. Print.

Coates, Ta-Nahisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015. Print.

Kennedy, Randall. “A Caricature of Black Reality.” The American Prospect. Fall 2015 Issue. Web. 17^th June 2016.