Hope, oppression, and Ta-Nehisi Coates

In her endorsement of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Toni Morrison in­voked one of America’s most astute cultural observers: “I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Bald­win died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates.”

Between the World of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Christianity collects powerful and often quite personal essays on Between the World and Me. Most of the contributions circle around two questions: What does one do with Coates’s dismissal of Christianity? And how should one take the book’s seeming hopelessness? Almost all of the authors agree that the two questions are related, and they work hard to think through one of the central moral issues that arises for Christians today: Can Christian hope survive the onslaught against black life?

Between the World and Me’s central theme arises from the bodies of black men killed by police officers—two in particular. The first is Michael Brown. Coates shares an excruciating story about his son’s reaction to Brown’s death at the hands of police. Instead of sugarcoating things, Coates gives his son the talk that many black fathers give their sons about life and death in America.