Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book, Between the World and Me, is not an easy read, nor should it be. Presented as a letter to Samori, his 15-year-old son, Coates’s brutally honest diagnosis of the current state of affairs for the black male in America reads as a searing rejoinder to anyone convinced that progress is at hand.
Does Coates have any hope for this country’s future? It’s a tricky question, one left unanswered by Between the World and Me. He writes: “Your life is so very different from my own. The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known thing to you.” Coates seems to sense that Samori, who has grown up with Barack Obama as his president, has the possibility of expecting something different from the world, something better.
