Between the World and Me (extra book)

On the eve of Thanksgiving, I decided to start and finish Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, a book he writes (as a letter) to his son about Coates’s experience as a black man growing up in the inner city of Baltimore within the context of “white America.”  Coates shares his fear between school, where things were taught from one context, and the streets, which taught another context of how to survive, and keep one’s body living.  The rawness of the real-life experiences of how embedded fear becomes a part of the inner city lessons for youth, join-in or try and live by evading the drugs, the gangs, the fear of living.  Coates finds repose when he gets to “the Mecca,” Howard University in DC.  A historically black college, he finds people like him, all with similar experiences, trying to survive and make meaning.    He meets his wife and another central figure in the book, Prince Carmen Jones Jr., a college friend, whom later is killed by a police officer while driving to see his girlfriend, unarmed.  Police brutality towards black American males is a continuation from the days of slavery from the beginning of this country.  Not much has changed as characterized in the book.  The lessons he presents to his son is his way of trying to keep his son alive and aware that he needs to keep his body safe.  Coates’s world is real and for anyone who has not entered his world, it may be hard to fathom, because we don’t want to experience it, it may mean looking at ourselves and question, what are we doing to make this world continue to flourish?   So is the “American Dream” accessible for all?  In his concluding paragraphs, Coates visits the mother of Jones, Jr., Dr. Mable Jones, the granddaughter of a sharecropper who rose in social standing in her life to become a doctor as a black woman, yet as Coates captures, education and financial means did not protect her own son from being saved from white America.  Gripping, powerful, sad, real, and much more.  It was hard reading so much fear from a society that is fractured and unable to recognize all humans are worthy of equality.