- Spiegel & Grau
- BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME: When Toni Morrison tells you something’s required reading, pay attention.
In late 1962, with the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation approaching, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his 15-year-old nephew, offering advice and caution as to what he, as a black man in America, could expect in his days to come. The following year, the letter was included in Baldwin’s book, The Fire Next Time, along with a personal essay examining race, religion, and systemic violence against black people. Reading Baldwin’s work now, what’s striking is not how far we as a country have come since then, but just how little things have changed.
Between the World and Me, the new book by Atlantic correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates, follows Baldwin’s lead. It is an intimate and candid letter, written by a black father to his teenage son, in a society where blacks are killed with such regularity and impunity that people need to form a movement and wear t-shirts and wave placards to remind the rest of the country that, yes, black lives also matter.
Between the World and Me, which takes its title from a Richard Wright poem, was originally slated for September publication, but was released last month. Christopher Jackson, editor at publisher Spiegel & Grau, explained this decision to the Wall Street Journal, saying, “It spoke to this moment.” But this book is no more urgent now than it will be a month or two or three from now; it speaks to this moment no less than it would in 1962 or 2062. Racism and systemic violence against blacks has endured for so long, and will endure as long as Americans continue to hold onto the concept of “race.”