Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates

To talk about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s social gospel may seem absurd. One, Coates is an unabashed atheist. Two, his alleged pessimism regarding America’s ability to progress beyond white supremacy appears to run directly against the root meaning of gospel—good news. And yet as a religious person reading Between the World and Me, I find his words to be deeply insightful and helpful for thinking not only about race, society, and U.S. history, but also about the place of faith within that nexus.

Addressed to his adolescent son, Coates’s book is a powerful and highly nuanced take on a black male’s life in the United States. It displays a thoroughgoing physicality in its language. Coates tells his son: “You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regression all land, with great violence, upon the body.” Violence upon the body is a concept that Coates presses on the reader at every turn. He does not want you to merely think about slavery, West Baltimore, or police violence in Washington, D.C. He wants you to feel it in the gut while you stare at the flesh behind the statistics—at the human loves severed and the fears provoked.

A recurring theme throughout the book is what Coates calls the Dream: a useful myth about innocence, upward mobility, and safety that warps how people depict this country’s history and present realities. The Dream, he explains, is tied to whiteness and to “those who believe themselves to be white.”