A self-conscious step back from a present whose crimes and bloodiness it sees as consistent with American history, the volume is a rather strange blend of epistolary non-fiction, autobiography and political theory that has at its heart a simple message: “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.” They could certainly do a lot worse than Coates, whose book has already been lauded by Toni Morrison (“I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died”), and helped him to win a prestigious MacArthur “genius” award. What they want is a figurehead, a mansplainer, a gravitational node amid all these centrifugal conversations. Black Twitter, Black Lives Matter, hashtag activism: it is a marvellous noise, an Occupy-style swarm energy that, for veterans of an older media imperium, can appear befuddling. It appears at a moment when, thanks to mobile phones and social media, the ghastly spectacle of black Americans – many of them young and unarmed – being strangled, clubbed or shot by police officers has created a cacophony calling for change.
It is understandable, then, that there has been a lot of fanfare for Between the World and Me. In 2014 he published “The Case for Reparations”, a lengthy and widely debated essay in which he argued that reparations would mean “a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratiser with the facts of our history”.
In “Fear of a Black President” (2012) he wrote of Barack Obama’s “remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites” and how “this need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offence, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration”. These days, Coates is a prominent journalist for the Atlantic where his tendency to puncture sunny-side-up political platitudes has not abated. Watching newsreel footage of the civil rights movement, he got the impression that “the black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life – love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the firehouses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into their streets”. For the young Ta-Nehisi Coates, growing up in Baltimore, it was also a time of mystification and shame.
E ver since 1976, when the US government officially recognised Black History Month, February has been a time – especially in state schools – to celebrate the emancipatory struggles of runaway slaves, pioneering medics and lawyers, and poets and “freedom riders”.
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