Between the World and Me is a 2015 nonfiction book written by American author Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It was written by Coates as a letter to his then-teenage son about his perception of what the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States are. Coates recapitulates American history and explains to his son "racist violence that has been woven into American culture." Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore, detailing his beliefs about what are the ways in which, to him, institutions like schools, the local police, and even "the streets" discipline, endanger, and threaten to "disembody" black men and women.
The work takes structural and thematic inspiration from James Baldwin's 1963 epistolary book The Fire Next Time. Unlike Baldwin, however, Coates views white supremacy as "an indestructible force, one that Black Americans will never evade or erase, but will always struggle against."
The novelist Toni Morrison praised the book, in that Coates "filled an intellectual gap in succession to James Baldwin."[3] Editors of The New York Times and The New Yorker described the book as "exceptional."[4][5] The book won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction[6][7] and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.[8]
