Letter to My Son

Between the World and Me (2015) by American writer and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates was conceived of as a letter from Coates to his teenage son, Samori. Coates discusses his views on how a black man can grapple with the realities of racism in a white nationalist United States. Much of the book is given to rich imagery depicting the enslavement of the black people, and other acts of pillaging, violence, and oppression, as fundamental to the power structures that sustain America’s illusory “greatness.” Yet, Coates refuses to say that race is fixed or inevitable; for example, he argues that whiteness is a product of belief, entangled in suppressed knowledge about America’s social and economic legacy of exploiting others. The essay was highly acclaimed for its candid approach to explaining the inheritances and open problems of racial privilege to a child.

Coates recalls a day in the recent past when he was interviewed on live television. The news anchor, who was speaking to him over a remote connection, asked Coates “what it meant to lose [his] body.” Coates remembers experiencing a wave of sadness as he sensed the impasse between his inner response, as a black man, to the question, and the response that would be received by the host and her predominantly white audience. He notes that he is used to this kind of questioning, relating that questions about a black man’s body and lived experience are often proxies for discussing the progress of white America. Most forms of American expression and rhetoric, including its media channels, conceive of progress as the furthering of entrenched, uniquely white, ideals that are founded on a mythos of white America’s historical goodness.

Coates elaborates on white Americans’ illusory version of their home. He argues that most are ignorant of America’s long legacy of reneging on democratic values, often employing them rhetorically only to exploit and oppress in practice. He breaks down examples of where this has occurred. For example, Abraham Lincoln, in conceiving of American democracy as a “government of the people,” actually had a very specific and biased view of which human groups were to be included in the category of “people.” Indeed, abstractions such as “people” have historically been used to encode the exclusion of groups such as women, gays, and racial minorities. He expresses irritation at the fact that Americans also conceive of race as a fixed natural reality when it is wholly socially constructed. Treating race as a natural reality normalizes atrocity and oppression.



Coates breaks down the category of “white.” He illuminates the fraught history of whiteness, explaining that it, too, was once utilized to exclude groups that people in power wanted to marginalize. Whiteness has, at different times, excluded Jews, Catholics, and Welsh people. He notes that self-identifying white people are unique in being the only group to try to kill and enslave entire races. On these grounds, Coates denounces the ignorant notion of American exceptionalism. The key distinguishing trait that makes America “exceptional” is its rich history of atrocity.

Coates next turns to his son’s immediate social and political environment, particularly the wrongful deaths of Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Renisha McBride, and Eric Garner. Each of these individuals was Black and executed by police officers. Coates argues that whiteness has endowed police in America with the “authority to destroy,” warning that this authority will endure. He also critiques the language of racism, which obfuscates the horrors of its lived experience in favor of abstract tools for endlessly reconceptualizing it. Returning to his moment on live television, he laments that his segment ended with a picture of a black child hugging a white police officer. This moment, to Coates, confirmed that he had not successfully relayed his inner answer.

After the TV segment, Coates wanders the streets and sees a number of white families engaged in the “gorgeous dream” of whiteness. He realizes that the news anchor’s question about his body had been a momentary invitation to wake her from this dream. Admitting that he has craved the power and protection of whiteness in the past, he realizes that this racial “fabric” only exists as a product of black oppression from which it is impossible to extricate himself. Later that weekend, Samori despaired upon hearing that the officer who executed Mike Brown would not face any charges. Coates recalls deciding not to comfort his son in order not to pretend that the end of American atrocity is on the horizon. Coates goes on to discuss conversations with his friends, family, and partner about the unanswerable question of how to end America’s problem with whiteness.



Coates concludes with an apology to his son. He laments that he is not able to save him from the specter of whiteness that saturates America’s air and soil. He exhorts his son to use his vulnerability to reflect on the preciousness and fragility of life, and to recognize the destroyed conscience of whiteness. He notes the irony that white people are “shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world” only once they are made vulnerable. Coates’s essay is, therefore, a powerful, philosophical excoriation of ignorance and an invitation to grapple with the beast of white nationalism.