1 The Division of Undergraduate Studies is grateful .docx

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The Division of Undergraduate Studies is grateful to Teaching
Effectiveness Program’s spring 2016
faculty and GTF reading group, which was a pilot community
reflecting on reading and teaching Coates’
book on our campus.
About the Book
Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ letter to his
teenage son, is a
moving personal account of what it’s like to be black in
America.
It’s also about:
• Race as the child of racism, not the father
• Resilience in the face of racism
• The “American Dream,” including its myths, privileges, and
prejudices
• The power of education for growth and awareness
• The irreplaceable value of the body, individual lives, our
collective
resources
This is not an easy book, but it is a powerful and important one.
As Coates says:

“I hope to haunt [my readers], to trouble their sense of how
things actually are.”
One thing Coates teaches is that it’s okay not to have answers.
He encourages us to face our
discomfort—to sit with our questions. It’s the asking and the
seeking that matter most.
Let’s begin the conversation!
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a correspondent with The Atlantic. He is a
2015 winner of a MacArthur Fellowship and a National Book
Award for his second book, Between the World and Me. He
published his first book, a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A
Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood in 2008.
He is also the author of Marvel Comics’ Black Panther series,
the first issue of which was released in April 2016.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me
A Teaching Guide
By Sharon Kaplan, UO Common Reading Program Coordinator
© Antoine Doyen
http://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/02/against-
endorsements/462261/

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About the UO Common Reading Program
Common Reading at UO opens doors by providing a shared
critical reading experience for first-year
students, creating a sense of community, and exposing students
to issues relevant to today’s global
society.
About this Guide
This guide offers educators jumping off points for exploring
Between the World and Me deeply with
their students through a variety of disciplines, source materials,
and forms of response. The activities
encourage students (and instructors) to reflect upon their own
experiences and draw meaningful
personal connections to the book.
Starting Off introduces some of the main questions posed by the
book and provides resources for
engaging in difficult conversations in the classroom.
The three units that follow explore the book through a variety of
lenses. Altogether, they offer more
than 20 specific teaching ideas, each including what we hope
are compelling questions and companion
texts to Coates work. The units are:
History Got it Wrong

This unit helps students rethink popular versions of “American
history” and become aware of
the myth, omissions, and privilege involved in them. It
encourages students to seek truth
through critical questioning and to grapple with historical
complexity and responsibility.
Identity across the Cultural Divide
This unit considers questions of race and identity.
Education and Inquiry
This unit explores Coates’ critiques of his formal education. It
asks students to consider Coates’
sense of the power of inquiry and coming into consciousness; it
also invites them to analyze the
learning environments that liberate or perpetuate oppression.
Instructors are welcome to adapt and use these ideas, and we
hope that they serve as a springboard for
new ideas. Additional teaching tools, including articles,
interviews, and discussion questions are posted
in the online resources on the Common Reading website. Have a
resource to add to the list? Please
share it with us! Are you using the book in your class? Let us
know! We’d love to hear from you and
continue to grow the teaching community around this year’s
Common Reading.
http://commonreading.uoregon.edu/
http://commonreading.uoregon.edu/current-book-btwam/
mailto:[email protected]?subject=A%20Common%20Reading%2
0Resource%20to%20Share
mailto:[email protected]?subject=A%20Common%20Reading%2
0Resource%20to%20Share

http://blogs.uoregon.edu/commonreading/academic-use/
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Starting Off
Setting the Stage in Your Classroom for Difficult Dialogues
by Avinnash Tiwari, UO Composition Program Instructor and
TEP Peer Mentor Award Winner
Here at the University of Oregon, there can be a number of
roadblocks towards recognizing, understanding, and
feeling the impact of those historical, social, and institutional
forces structured by American racism. Though it
may seem counter-intuitive, deepening and complicating (rather
than simplifying) an approach to discussing race
may ultimately prove beneficial in the classroom. For example,
knowledge of Critical Race Theory allows for an
intersectional approach to discussing race. Attention to
intersectional dynamics such as the law, class, gender,
etc., creates an opportunity for students from diverse
backgrounds to come together through the text and critical
inquiry. One such case: Coates’s focus on the vulnerability of
particularly marked bodies certainly resonates for
those bodies marked as black, but also resonates for many
women in the classroom given the sexist culture too
often found within a university setting. Another approach is an
economic and historic analysis of slavery’s legacy
within a global, colonial context, an especially productive frame
for students from our ever-growing international
community. A now viral ad for a Chinese brand laundry
detergent, the consequences of Bobby Jindal’s

conservative politics for Louisiana or Nikki Haley’s white-
identified voter registration card, the abuse of migrant
workers from North Africa (East to West) in the Middle-East,
South, and East Asia; these are only a few, recent
examples for discussion starting points that allow for a nuanced
interrogation about anti-black racism.
Opening up—and holding open—a classroom space where
students truly hear the text can be difficult, especially
in a place where whiteness dominates the landscape. Even with
a strong knowledge of history, students’
readiness to hear and, as Coates’ text invites, feel that history
may depend on the instructor’s ability to cultivate
openness in each particular classroom with its particular student
population. A simple first week exercise such as
a reading response assignment can give faculty a sense of what
students are bringing to the class in terms of
knowledge, experience, and reaction to Coates’ text. While it is
difficult to offer general strategies for such
context-specific situations, another simple practice is to take
things slow: begin discussions or activities with
some quiet music and simple breathing exercises; focusing on
diaphragmatic breathing by simply twisting from
the waist in the chair and allowing the breath to fall deeply into
the belly rather than the chest allows for the
nervous system to take it easy, to rest. Coming into discussion
with a clear, and somewhat relaxed thinking mind
may allow for a more open and productive dialogue, rather than
one marked by defensive reactions to difficult
ideas. To put it simply, this is key for a predominantly white
institution engaging a text critical of “people who
believe they are white.”
However, creating a space where openness and thoughtfulness,
rather than defensiveness, structures the
conversation, is not meant to hold down, or keep at bay,

discomfort, confusion, anger, frustration, or other so-
called “negative” reactions. Rather, we should all feel shame in
discussing and thinking about America’s history of
racism and learn to live with it rather than deny it. Our goal
should not be one of feeling sorry for anyone or any
group. If conversations about racism in America are not
uncomfortable, then they are not honest. At the same
time, taking a dogmatic stance, even if seemingly morally
sound, can also close down conversations. We don’t
want to tell students what they should think and believe, nor
should we chastise them for what they do know and
believe. Sitting with discomfort and confusion can be a
productive means of critically interrogating what could be
new and are always complicated ideas. After all, one of the
clearest ideas in Coates’ text is the need for continual
questioning.
Here are four of my ideas for approaching the text, which I hope
are useful. For additional teaching strategies visit
the Teaching Effectiveness Program’s (TEP) blog and the
resource “Strategies for Engaging with Emotions in the
Classroom” by TEP’s Jason Schreiner.
https://blogs.uoregon.edu/commonreading/files/2016/02/TEP_C
oates_Sample_Student-Activities_Tiwari-27f00ng.pdf
http://tep.uoregon.edu/
https://blogs.uoregon.edu/commonreading/files/2016/02/Strategi
es-for-Engaging-with-Emotions-in-the-Classroom-zgfcec.pdf
https://blogs.uoregon.edu/commonreading/files/2016/02/Strategi
es-for-Engaging-with-Emotions-in-the-Classroom-zgfcec.pdf
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Themes and Questions
By Dr. Kimberly N. Parker from her Between the World and Me
Teacher’s Guide
The following are some major themes and questions to keep in
mind as you read:
The Body: What does Coates say about the precarious nature of
his specifically African American body?
What dangers does he cite that threaten the safety of his body?
Examine the specific instances in which
Coates describes his body, the violence enacted upon it, and his
attempts to preserve his body and the
bodies of loved ones. What explicit ideas about the perceived
value of black life do these examples support?
The Dream: What, exactly, is “the Dream” as Coates describes
it? Who is able to experience the Dream?
What prevents Coates and his loved ones from realizing that
same Dream? How does Coates’ version of the
Dream differ from other, idealized versions of the Dream
favored by popular media, literature, and other
outlets? Why might Coates’ aversion to the Dream as it is
traditionally conceived be difficult for Americans
to accept?
Education: Coates repeatedly finds himself at odds with the
American system of formal education. “I was
made for the library, not the classroom,” he writes (48). Despite
his discomfort with traditional education,
however, he expresses a nearly insatiable desire to learn. What
complications and questions do his literacy
experiences raise, particularly for a young black man? Note: For

a deeper exploration of the issues
surrounding race and education, consult the ACLU’s School to
Prison Pipeline website.
Prince Jones: Examine Coates’ description of Prince Jones as a
“vessel that held his family’s hopes and
dreams” (81–82). Evaluate how this description underscores the
notion that “Black people love their
children with a kind of obsession” (82).
History Got It Wrong: Myth, Truth, Responsibility
American Ideals
In the first four pages of the book, Coates introduces the
following concepts, which are central tenets of
discourse about America:
• Race
• The American Dream
• American exceptionalism
• Democracy
• Capitalism
• White privilege
What is meant by these concepts? How does Coates speak of
them? Where do these concepts come
from? Who is included and who is excluded in these
definitions? Who benefits and who is harmed by
these definitions? What has shaped your understanding of these
concepts up to now?
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/teachers_guides/9780812
993547.pdf

https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/what-school-prison-pipeline
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History and Myth-Making
It may strike some students how much Coates’ telling of
American history diverges from the often
celebratory accounts they’ve encountered in school. James W.
Loewen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me:
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
investigates the role of history textbooks
themselves in our national miseducation. Loewen reveals that
much of what passes as history has been
crafted to tell a proud national story (a mythology with its
heroes), and in doing so glosses over, or omits
entirely, more difficult facts.
What do you know/think you know about slavery and its
consequences to this day? Are these facts or
opinions? This exercise can help you get a sense of where
students are starting from, and what
information, ideas, or misconceptions they may be carrying with
them into the reading of the book.
Present students with a historical figure (Christopher Columbus,
Rosa Parks, etc.) who is often
mythologized or idealized and invite them to uncover and
present a more factual historical portrait of
this person and the context of his or her actions. Identify
references to your historical figure in current
news stories. How is this person represented? What aspects of
his or her contribution are most

discussed? Are there important stories that are omitted or
stories that are distorted about this
individual in the textbook and popular references? If so, why
might that be? How does each student’s
fuller portrayal differ from the textbook or popular treatment of
this individual? What implications does
this have for our knowledge about our American history and our
current national conversation about
race?
Making of a Museum
The National Museum of African American History and Culture
opens on the National Mall in
Washington, D.C. in September 2016. The New York Times
article “How Do You Tell the Story of Black
America in One Museum?” shows the complexities of getting it
right. Among the many questions to be
debated are: What artifacts and whose stories should be
included (and what must be excluded)? Where
will the chronology and narrative end (does it continue into the
future or end at a certain historical
achievement)?
Read Smithsonian Magazine’s Q&A with the architect David
Adjaye to learn more this project and his
work. What ideas does Adjaye seek to convey through his
architecture? Compare Adjaye’s winning
design with the proposals by the other finalists for the project.
Which design do you think sets the most
appropriate tone for this project? Identify specific elements of
the design which inform your response.
What is the role this museum (or others, like the National
Museum of the American Indian) in validating

preserving, and shaping the narratives of groups who face
discrimination. What is its role a forum for
continued conversation on these issues? How does the museum
help you connect emotionally to
individual lives affected? (Coates reminds us that slavery was
about individual lives.) What does it mean
to finally have a national museum dedicated to the African
American experience? Is it significant in that
it has taken until 2016 for this museum to be realized?
You’ve been commissioned to design a memorial or work of
public art honoring one of the individuals
whom Coates speaks of in Between the World and Me. What
aspects of the individual’s historical
significance or personal story will you represent in it? Will you
also want to tie it to a larger community
or cause, or keep it as a commemoration of this one life? Where
will it be located? What will the scale
http://alliance-
primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/UO:everything:CP71148484830
001451
http://alliance-
primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/UO:everything:CP71148484830
001451
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/arts/design/how-do-you-
tell-the-story-of-black-america-in-one-museum.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/arts/design/how-do-you-
tell-the-story-of-black-america-in-one-museum.html?_r=0
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/q-and-a-with-
architect-david-adjaye-18968512/?no-ist
http://nmaahc.si.edu/Building/Finalists
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be and what medium will you use? How will visitors experience
it (i.e., will they be invited to sit and
contemplate, will there be water or a reflective surface for
literal reflection, will it be in a private space
or in the city center, will it be large and intimate, etc.)? Identity
a text that would be an appropriate
epitaph for your memorial. Sketch at least 5 ideas.
You’ve been invited to curate a small exhibition in 5 objects
related to ideas connected to Between the
World and Me. Determine the thesis of your exhibition. (In
other words, what is the main idea you want
visitors to your exhibition to understand? You should be able to
state your thesis in one sentence.) Give
your exhibition a title. Write an essay presenting a guided tour
you will lead through your
exhibition. Introduce the thesis of your exhibition. Describe
each work you view and explain how it
supports your thesis, identifying the specific details visitors
should learn about each piece. Also explain
how the selected works relate to each other. Be sure to include
a transition statement to connect
between each work you discuss.
Front Page News
In her print series Modern History, artist Sarah Charlesworth
(1947-2013) took as her source material
the front pages of newspapers, from which she typically
removed all the text, leaving only the masthead
and images. The resulting works invite us to compare the
editorial decisions of multiple newspapers on
the same day or as a story develops over time, and invite us to
consider how these news sources visually

communicate the perspectives they value.
Details from Modern History: April 21, 1978 by Sarah
Charlesworth
Study one set of works within this series. What differences do
you notice in image choices, size, and
placement? What do these editorial decisions communicate
about the stories or perspectives that seem
most important? What might account for these differences (local
or regional priorities and history,
political bent of editors, etc.)? What, if anything, do these
decisions suggest about the politics of the
particular publications?
Using Modern History as model, investigate different
presentations of a single current news story
related to a theme discussed in Between the World and Me. (An
excellent source for comparative front
pages is D.C.’s Newseum, which maintains a daily database of
today’s front pages from newspapers
http://www.sarahcharlesworth.net/series.php?album_id=144934
1
http://www.sarahcharlesworth.net/series-
view.php?album_id=1449341&subalbum_id=1449397
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/
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around the world, as well as a front page archive for dates of
historical significance.) Compare the visual

layout (including image choice, size, and placement, use of
color or black and white, and font treatment,
as well as the differences in language (see Charlesworth's
"verbs” and “nouns” in the Modern History
series to see how she isolates the words being used to report the
news). In what ways do editorial
decisions in presenting these articles impact the message and
the story being told?
Putting Personal Story into History
Through the intimate format of a letter, Coates reminds us again
and again of the irreplaceable value of
individual lives—and impresses upon us that the lives of which
he speaks are of real people. He reminds
us that “Slavery is not an indefinable amount of flesh. It is a
particular, specific enslaved woman, whose
mind is active as your own, whose range of feelings is as vast as
your own…” (69). And when he speaks
of recent instance of black citizens killed in police encounters,
he makes us feel the individual loss of this
specific person, into whom so much love had been invested—as
we see especially with his treatment of
Prince Jones.
Seek autobiographical slave narratives and other primary source
materials (such as photographs) that
give insight into the personal experiences of these people.
Places to start include:
• Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’
Project, 1936-1938
• Portraits of African American Ex-Slaves from the U.S. Works
Progress Administration Federal

Writers’ Project Slave Narratives Collection, Library of
Congress
What was life like for these people? To what did they aspire?
How did they struggle? What did they
value? How did they work within or fight against the system
which enslaved them? Use these first-
person accounts to write (or illustrate) a response that counters
the official historical narrative with a
more personal one. One example to consider is poet Paul B.
Janeczko’s poetry anthology Worlds Afire, a
work of historical fiction documenting, through the voices of
witnesses, the 1944 Harford circus fire.
Researching Coates’ Names
Throughout Between the World and Me, Coates drops names of
writers, artists, leaders, musicians,
philosophers, and others. They include people whose books he’s
read and whose names were
mentioned in those pages, individuals with ties to Howard
University or whose names now grace its
buildings, and people whose names surfaced during discussions
and whose work he didn’t know at the
time but felt he need to know more about.
What was Coates’ experience of coming across these names?
How is your experience of encountering
them similar or different? Study the People Index to Between
the World and Me compiled by Howard
Rambsy II and Cynthia Campbell (Southern Illinois University
Edwardsville).
How well do you know the names on this list? Have you

listened to Malcolm X’s own words, delivered by
him, for example?
Coates discusses the determination and method with which he
set about to learn about all these people
(p. 46). What did he expect to find when studying the history?
Why do you think he was surprised to come
across “a brawl of ancestors” (p. 48)?
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/?tfp_display=archive
-summary
https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml/snhome.html
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=LOT%2013262&fi=num
ber&op=PHRASE&va=exact&co!=coll&sg=true&st=gallery
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=LOT%2013262&fi=num
ber&op=PHRASE&va=exact&co!=coll&sg=true&st=gallery
https://bookpage.com/reviews/3461-paul-b-janeczko-worlds-
afire#.V1XUbiGPMVA
https://blogs.uoregon.edu/commonreading/files/2016/02/People-
referenced-index-Rambsy-27x01l7.pdf
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/
mx.html
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Follow Coates’ example of investigating what you don’t know.
Use primary sources and reputable
secondary sources to learn about one of the people above (or
other people, places, or events identified in
the book). As you come across mentions of other names in your
research, follow those leads, too.
• What did this person stand for or believe in?
• Whom did he/she admire, ally with, disagree with—and why?

• What contributions did he/she make?
• What is the relevance of this person to Coates’ narrative?
• Why is it important that we know of this person now?
Some resources which may be helpful:
-American History research guide from UO Libraries
guide from the Library of Congress
the Library of Congress
lture,
Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public
Library
Acknowledgement & Reparations
As a nation, what is our responsibility for redressing violent
and exploitative aspects of U.S. history ? This
exploration of moral and legal issues may be of particular
interest to students studying economics, law,
political science, history, sociology, psychology, philosophy, or
public policy.
Start by reflecting on your own experience of identity and
privilege. Read “Unpacking the Invisible
Knapsack” and “Explaining White Privilege to a Broke White
Person.” What most spoke to you? What most
surprised you? How have you benefited or been disenfranchised
as a result of your identity? Have you
been privileged in some ways and disadvantaged in others?

In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations,” a cover story
in The Atlantic, he lays out extensive
documentation on slavery and the legacy of institutional racism,
and argues for the payment of
reparations. Do any of the facts he uncovers or connections he
draws between slavery and its legacy
surprise you?
How have other nations faced their national scars? In “National
Apologies: Mapping the Complexities of
Validity: A Practical Paper,” Eneko Sanz (The Centre for Peace
and Conflict Studies, Phnom Penh,
Cambodia) details the complex process of issuing national
apologies, and offer examples of various
approaches and a review of the research in this area.
One of the first steps, Sanz writes, is acknowledging that
“something happened.” In what ways does
Between the World and Me seek to raise our consciousness of
what happened and what continues to
occur?
What has been done in the United States to acknowledge slavery
and its legacy? (Have these efforts been
appropriate, sufficient, productive?) Individual state
legislatures (such as Mississippi and Missouri) have
http://www.loc.gov/teachers/usingprimarysources/index.html
http://researchguides.uoregon.edu/between-the-world-and-me
http://researchguides.uoregon.edu/c.php?g=360516&p=2434910
https://www.deanza.edu/faculty/lewisjulie/White%20Priviledge
%20Unpacking%20the%20Invisible%20Knapsack.pdf
https://www.deanza.edu/faculty/lewisjulie/White%20Priviledge
%20Unpacking%20the%20Invisible%20Knapsack.pdf
http://occupywallstreet.net/story/explaining-white-privilege-
broke-white-person

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-
for-reparations/361631/
http://www.centrepeaceconflictstudies.org/wp-
content/uploads/National_Apologies.pdf
http://www.centrepeaceconflictstudies.org/wp-
content/uploads/National_Apologies.pdf
http://billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/documents/2016/pdf/HC/HC0012I
N.pdf
http://www.house.mo.gov/billtracking/bills081/billpdf/intro/HC
R0022I.PDF
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issued apologies for slavery. These resolutions have not been
without opposition, however. (Consider the
case of the Louisiana.) The U.S. Senate issued a Concurrent
Resolution Apologizing for the Enslavement
and Racial Segregation of African-Americans in 2009; it failed
to pass the House of Representatives.
Consider Canada’s legacy of institutional racism against its
First Nations peoples, and Canada’s 1998
Statement of Reconciliation. In what ways is Canada’s
treatment of its native people similar and different
to that of native peoples in the United States? At official
functions in British Columbia, the master of
ceremonies acknowledges the First Peoples on whose land the
function is taking place. How does this act
of recognition and acknowledgment change the dialogue, or set
a particular tone? Do you think such a
practice would change the conversation about race, plunder,
capitalism, and resources in the United
States? If so, how? Imagine for example, if acknowledgment
had to be paid prior to the first bell of the

New York Stock Exchange.
And can we calculate our national indebtedness to slaves who
helped build the country’s wealth and
power? Students may want to research, calculate, and debate
how to operate a reparations board, how to
compensate, and what would be an appropriate solution.
Attributing Success and Responsibility
Throughout Between the World and Me, Coates expresses that
nothing—not the struggle for civil rights,
nor his own trajectory (for which he credits his support network
of family, friends, and mentors)—has ever
been achieved alone. Similarly he attributes blame for violence,
ghettos, and poor inner city schools not to
individual actions, but to systems that have been established to
maintain these injustices.
One of the iconic images in America is that of the self-made
man. The African proverb “It takes a village” is
a counter to that image. Consider these two countering world
views through the lens of privilege and
power. How do they explain success and blame?
In what ways do Coates’ personal stories, and the story of
Prince Jones in particular, serve to counter the
usual narratives about who’s to blame?
Analyzing Contemporary Rhetoric to Uncover Slavery’s
Enduring Legacy
Throughout Between the World and Me, as well as in his article
“The Case for Reparations,” Coates shows

that systemic oppression and institutional racism—systems that
have become so ingrained and invisible
that they are accepted as inevitable—are legacies of slavery in
the United States. Investigate one of the
issues Coates identifies as an enduring scar of slavery (i.e.,
ghettoization, mass incarceration, police use of
lethal force). What stories are usually told to explain this issue?
What evidence does Coates present that
reframes these problems as a direct result of purposeful
institutions and policies?
Keep an open eye and ear for examples that related to your
topic as you follow current news, the political
debates, advertising, your coursework, and even conversation.
Given your now-heightened awareness of
the connections between past and present, what questions arise
for you regarding the argument being
made or the attribution of the problem? Who is the intended
audience of the media you selected? What’s
the perspective or politics of the information’s source? Does
example encourage viewers to buy into
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/229597-minutes-highlight-
scalise-efforts-to-kill-resolution-apologizing-for-slavery
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/111/sconres26
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/111/sconres26
http://www.tolerance.cz/courses/papers/hutchin.htm
https://safeharbourblog.wordpress.com/2014/04/18/acknowledge
ment-of-traditional-aboriginal-territory-in-british-columbia/
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-
for-reparations/361631/
10

accepted understandings or challenge them to think about things
in a new way? In what ways does this
add to the current national conversation about race in a positive
or negative way?
Identity across the Cultural Divide
Black-White Divide
Coates points to many instances where the societal rules and
expectations—and the cost of making
mistakes—differ for individuals who identify as black and those
who identify as white.
In what ways does Coates describe the rules:
In school?
In the street?
If you’re black
and female?
and male?
If you’re white
and female?
and male?
If you’re black in a black neighborhood?
If you’re black in a white neighborhood? (pp. 93-96)
If you’re white in a black neighborhood?
If you’re white in a white neighborhood?

Are the rules different when within your culture versus outside
of it? Reflect on a time when you acted
differently or were aware of a different expectation of you for
being an outsider. What was that
experience like?
The 1967 film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” centers on two
families’ responses to the relationship of
an interracial couple. Artist Christopher Metzger created an
updated movie poster for the film based on
his own relationship. How do these depict racial-based rules and
expectations? What is the community’s
responses to the couple breaking the norms?
In what situations are you seen as a stereotype or do you see
others as a stereotype? Reflect on an
experience of meeting someone of an identity (sexual
orientation, ability, nationality, language, etc.) you
did not know before. What assumptions did you have prior to
getting to know this person? In what ways
did your perspective change as a result of this relationship?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061735/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt
http://www.christophermetzger.com/guess-whos-coming-to-
dinner/
11
Cultural Crossing, the Power of Representation, Visibility in
Art
This section explores three American artists, George Catlin,

Kehinde Wiley, and Ramiro Gomez, and issues
of representation, identity, cultural crossing, and visibility.
George Catlin
George Catlin (1706-1872) was a [white] American painter,
documentarian, and
showman who painted Native American life as it was being
threatened and
destroyed as a result of westward expansion and the forced
removal of the native
peoples from their lands. Catlin made five trips to the Plains
Indians territories in
the 1830s, and the resulting paintings, which comprised his
Indian Gallery,
document a way of life and the nobility of his subjects (such as
the painting of the
Blackfoot chief Stu-mick-o-súcks). But Catlin was also a man of
his times and there is
a clear Eurocentric view in his rhetoric about preserving the
native people’s
“primitive looks and customs.” Catlin was also an entertainer,
who exploited his
subjects through the performance of Indian shows—the first
Wild West shows—in
which Native American performed staged rituals and white men
dressed in Indian
costumes (such as Catlin’s nephew Theodore Burr).
Consider how Catlin has portrayed himself in his self-portrait.
What does his pose,
costume, and the objects he chose to include in the image tell us
about his identity?
What clues suggest this reading?

Compare Catlin’s portrait of Stu-mick-o-súcks to that of Wi-
jún-jon, Pigeon's Egg Head (The Light), Going
To and Returning From Washington. Consider the figures’
postures and body language. How do the
presentations of the two men differ?
Stu-mick-o-súcks, Buffalo Bull's Back Fat, Head
Chief, Blood Tribe, 1832. Smithsonian
American Art Museum
Self portrait of George Catlin,
National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution
Wi-jún-jon, Pigeon's Egg Head (The Light),
Going To and Returning From Washington,
1837-39, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Theodore Burr Catlin in Indian Costume,
1838. Smithsonian American Art Museum
http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/catlin/highlights.ht
ml
http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=3949
http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/catlin/catlin_highlig
hts2.cfm?StartRow=29
http://americanart.si.edu/images/luce/artists/portrait_image_113
604.jpg
12

Compare Pigeon’s Egg Head’s portrait with that of the self-
portrait of George Catlin. Both represent a
cultural crossing. How are the two portrayals different? What is
being said about how Pigeon’s Egg Head
returns after contact with white men’s cities? How is the
cultural crossing of white men into the dress and
culture of Native Americans presented differently from Native
Americans being influenced by white
culture? What does this suggest?
There’s a long tradition of white actors playing people of color.
In her essay An Open Letter to the Artist as
a Young Woman or Man; Or, Why We Need to Talk about Race
Canadian theater director Marilo Nuñez
writes her own letter to young people of color in her field,
speaking honestly about issues of racism they
will face. She writes, “…directors, producers, and casting
directors regard “white” actors as colourless and
cultureless, able to play any ethnicity.” And she says, “In the
words of August Wilson, ‘Colorblind casting is
an aberrant idea that has never had any validity other than as a
tool of the Cultural Imperialists who view
American culture, rooted in the icons of European culture, as
beyond reproach in its perfection.’” How do
these ideas play out in George Catlin’s paintings?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/01/28
/100-times-a-white-actor-played-someone-who-wasnt-white/
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/609615/pdf
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/609615/pdf

13
Kehinde Wiley
Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977) is a Los Angeles-born,
New York-based artist who paints brown bodies
(young men, mostly, and more recently women)
in the poses of (white) Old Master paintings of
the art historical canon. He scouts his models
from the streets and depicts them in their own
dress, but has them assume “the poses of
colonial masters, the former bosses of the Old
World.” His subjects frequently choose the
artwork which they will recreate.
Image credit: http://moveablefest.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/12/KehindeWileyEconomyofGraceJeffDup
re.jpg
DOWN series, Sleep, 2008, Oil on canvas 132" x 300"
How do Wiley’s works differ from Catlin’s? What do they have
in common?
As you read Between the World and Me, note Coates’ references
to the body and how the black body in
particular is targeted for pillage. How do images like Sleep and
Chancellor Séguier on Horseback alter the
narrative? What is the significance of Wiley asserting the
dignity, power, and beauty black bodies as they

are? What commentary do you think Wiley’s work is making
about the original subjects of the pieces he is
appropriating?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kisa-lala/kehide-wiley-on-the-
world_b_1418058.html
http://kehindewiley.com/
http://kehindewiley.com/about
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kisa-lala/kehide-wiley-on-the-
world_b_1418058.html
14
Kehinde Wiley’s Chancellor Séguier on Horseback
Chancellor Séguier and his Suite, Charles Le Brun, circa 1670,
Musée du
Louvre. Depicts the entry of Louis XIV into Paris in 1660.
Compare Wiley’s Chancellor Séguier on Horseback to Charles
Le Brun’s Chancellor Séguier and his Suite.

15
Ramiro Gomez
Los Angeles-based artist Ramiro Gomez is son of Mexican
immigrants. In his works, he seeks to raise viewers’
consciousness about labor, racism, privilege, and who has the
power to tell a community’s story—and he inserts “invisible”
people squarely back into the scene. Often his works
appropriate the perfectly-manicured Los Angeles scenes of
artist David Hockney. But in Gomez’s work the dark-skinned
gardeners, groundskeepers, cleaners, janitors, and nannies are
pictured doing their labor. It is as if he’s saying to the workers,
the subjects of his art, “This perfect world is all held together
because of you.” In other works, Gomez inserts cardboard
cutout figures of laborers into the cityscape, where the public
will come across them, unexpectedly, and will be forced to see.
Gomez’s work is both about being seen and not being seen.
Gomez represents faceless figures. Why do you think he does
this?
In what ways is Gomez’s work similar to Kehinde Wiley’s?
How
do they work to assert the dignity of the people they represent
and challenge the typical narratives and
treatment of people like themselves? What is similar and what
is different about how they approach
their appropriation?
Coates speaks often about “The Dream.” What is this Dream?
To whom is it available? Is it the same and
open to all? What is the Dream of Gomez’s subjects? What the

Dream of Hockney’s? In what way does
Ramiro Gomez’s art make us confront the realities of the
inequities and the economic and racist forces
that propel the myth of the American Dream?
Brian David Johnson, Professor of Practice in the School for the
Future of Innovation in Society at
Arizona State University, is leading a team of faculty and
students conducting research on the future of
the American Dream. You can participate in the study by
responding on the project’s website (through
text and/or images) to the question, What is the Future of the
American Dream?
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/magazine/ramiro-gomezs-
domestic-disturbances.html?_r=0
http://www.npr.org/2016/04/11/473384990/gardens-dont-tend-
themselves-portraits-of-the-people-behind-las-luxury
http://www.npr.org/2016/04/11/473384990/gardens-dont-tend-
themselves-portraits-of-the-people-behind-las-luxury
http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/08/16/magazine/16gomez1/
16gomez1-articleLarge.jpg
http://futureoftheamericandream.com/
16
Ramiro Gomez “A Lawn Being Mowed”
David Hockney, “A Lawn Being Sprinkled” (1967)

Ramiro Gomez “No Splash”
David Hockney “A Bigger Splash” (1967)
17
Reflecting on Identity & Being Part of the Conversation
A number of established projects exist that encourage reflection
and conversations around identity and
race. As you and your students read Between the World and Me,
you may wish to join this wider
community through these initiatives and craft your own
responses (and perhaps even contribute) to
these ongoing projects.
• French artist JR’s Inside Out Project is a global project in
which members of a community share
their stories and produce a shared philosophy statement which
they submit, along with self-
portraits, to be printed as posters and hung in the community as
public art. Christopher Metzger
and his art students at Morgan State University, in Baltimore,
named Black Lives Matter as the
identity statement for their Black Lives Matter Inside Out
Project.

• This I Believe is a national conversation around philosophy
and the beliefs that guide us in our
lives. The subject index has a category for race:
http://thisibelieve.org/theme/race/
• Michele Norris’ The Race Card Project invites us to think
about our experiences, questions,
hopes, dreams, laments or observations about race and identity
and to distill them into one
sentence that has only six words.
Between
As you read, note the repetition of the word “between”
throughout the book. Starting from the title,
drawn from Richard Wright’s poem of the same name, the word
“between,” and a sense of distance or
separation, appears frequently in the book.
In what ways does Coates feel he is between cultures as an
African-American? As a male? A child of
Baltimore? A journalist? A father? An atheist? The product of a
book-rich home? An American in Paris?
How does the sense of “distance” play into the memories
recounted by Mable Jones? (p. 137)
Reflect upon your own experience of being “between” cultures.
What was this experience like? How did
you bridge the divide?

Parenting and Love
Throughout Between the World and Me, Coates speaks about
love. In his childhood, the love he
experienced had a “hardness” to it, he says, which included
corporal punishment. He later comes to
interpret these actions on the part of his father as violence
“administered in fear and love”—grounded
in the understanding of his father and other black parents that
their kids were vulnerable in a white
supremacist society and could be taken away at any time. Later
he talks of learning to be soft with love
with his own child, under the guidance of his wife, who’d had a
different childhood experience than his
own. This softness does not come naturally to him. In another
point in his narrative, Coates tells us it’s,
http://www.insideoutproject.net/en
http://www.christophermetzger.com/black-lives-matter-inside-
out-project/
http://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2015/june/25/jr-
helps-baltimore-students-say-blacklivesmatter/
http://thisibelieve.org/
http://thisibelieve.org/theme/race/
http://theracecardproject.com/
http://edhelper.com/poetry/Between_the_World_and_Me_by_Ri
chard_Wright.htm
18
in part, how deeply Prince Jones was loved (reflected through
all the ways his family nurtured and
invested in him) which makes his loss all the deeper (“Think of

all the love poured into him” p. 81).
As you read, note how Coates recounts memories in which he
personally experiences differences in how
black and white parents teach their children to be in the world.
Explore the idea that black parents teach
their children fear while white parents teach their children
mastery (p. 89).
Parents of black boys talk about having “The Conversation”
with their children, the conversation in
which they introduce the children they love and who are coming
of age to the realities of racism and the
dangers they will face as black men (i.e., you will be targeted
and pulled over by police, do not argue….).
Watch the short documentary “A Conversation with My Black
Son” to hear parents talk about The
Conversation. How might Coates’ letter to his son Samori be
considered an example of “The
Conversation”? Does Coates’ letter also contain within it a
Conversation which “white” parents should
be having with their children? What would this “Conversation
with My White Son” say? What other
conversations are standards (or should be standards) with
parents and children of marginalized
identities (such as Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project). You
may wish to write this conversation telling a
young person about what he or she should know or what you
wish you’d known (see p. 19). What is
your personal experience with these conversations?
Opening Worlds
At The Mecca (Howard University): “I first witnessed this
power out on the Yard, that

communal green space in the center of campus where the
students gathered and I saw
everything I knew of my black self multiplied into seemingly
endless variations.” (p. 40)
Of Paris: “It had never occurred to me that giant doors could
exist, could be so common in one
part of the world and totally absent in another (p. 119)
Of New York: “I had never seen so much life. And I had never
imaged that such life could exist
in so much variety. It was everyone’s particular Mecca, packed
into one singular city” (p. 93).
Coates speaks of the hardness he knew as a child growing up in
inner city Baltimore—the failing schools,
the violence of the streets, parental love expressed through
corporal punishment, the fear (which
continues in him still), a lack of imagination for his future, and
little hope of making it out unscathed. He
also speaks again and again of experiences that showed him
other worlds—worlds that he discovered
through his hunger for books, his transformational encounters
with the richness of black culture at The
Mecca, through love and parenthood and journalism, and living
in his adopted cities, New York and
Paris. Through these experiences, Coates’ world expands, he
renegotiates his identity, and finds his
voice.
Identity one of Coates’ “world-opening” experiences. What was
his perspective or position before this
event? What change did this experience mark in him? What was
it about the experience that made it so
fundamental and formative to him?

Reflect on your experience. Write or respond in a medium of
your choice (video, drawing, etc.) about a
transformative experience that opened you to a new world
(perhaps meeting someone of an identity
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/17/opinion/a-conversation-
with-my-black-son.html?_r=0
http://www.itgetsbetter.org/
19
different from your own, traveling, studying something new).
What was your perspective prior to this
experience? How did you grow as a result of this encounter?
Code Switching
Coates recounts being in the airport and accidentally bumping
into a man. When he apologizes, the man
replies “you straight.” In this small moment, Coates recognizes
the comfort of being with people of his
“tribe,” people who share his culture and language.
When traveling in Paris, Coates makes the realization about his
life up to that point: “I was always
translating” (p. 122). What does he mean by this? In what ways
was he living between two worlds?
Writes Eric Deggins in Learning How to Code-Switch:
Humbling But Necessary for NPR's race, ethnicity,
and culture blog Code Switch, “I learned early on, thanks to that
g-word [guys] nonsense, that expertly
navigating another culture wasn't a rejection of where I'd come

from or a signal that I was any less
authentically black. And returning to my roots wasn't being
phony or perpetrating a put-on. It was being
fully who I am.”
Letter to a Young Person
“I did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not
want you forced to mask your
joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you to grow into
consciousness.” (p. 111)
Why and for whom do you think Coates wrote Between the
World and Me? Though it is addressed to his
son, do you think there are other intended audiences? If his son
is the intended audience, why might he
chosen to publish the letter, rather than just giving to his son
directly?
Why do you think Coates wrote his book in the form of a letter?
What does this format allow to be said
that a more journalistic approach cannot? When might a
journalistic approach be preferred? (In an
interview with Democracy Now! Coates gives some insight into
this stylistic choice.)
Read James Baldwin’s (1962) “Letter to my Nephew on the One
Hundredth Anniversary of
Emancipation,” addressed to Baldwin’s 14 year-old nephew.
Coates indicates in an interview in The
Guardian that he was reading Baldwin’s book The Fire Next
Time, in which the essay appears, while
thinking about writing Between the World and Me. Baldwin’s
letter was written 50 years earlier than

Coates’. What has changed? What remains the same? In what
ways are the authors’ tones, world views,
and purpose for writing similar or different? Is there a
particular reason, in your opinion, that the letters
are addressed to 14- and 15-year-olds?
Drawing inspiration from these two letters or other epistolary
works, write a letter to a young person
you know. (You might consider writing to someone around the
same age of the recipients of Coates’ and
Baldwin’s letters—or even a 14 or 15 year-old version of
yourself). To whom will you address your
letter? How is your life different than the life of the person to
whom you are writing? What do you wish
someone had told you at his or her age? What do you want to
impart to this person from your
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/04/10/176234171/
learning-how-to-code-switch-humbling-but-necessary
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/7/22/between_the_world_a
nd_me_ta
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/7/22/between_the_world_a
nd_me_ta
http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/12/5047/letter-my-
nephew
http://www.progressive.org/news/2014/12/5047/letter-my-
nephew
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/20/ta-nehisi-
coates-interview-between-the-world-and-me-black-america
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/20/ta-nehisi-
coates-interview-between-the-world-and-me-black-america
20

experience? What are your hopes for this individual and the
world in which he or she lives? Reference
aspects of the two other letters in the format of your letter.
Education and Inquiry
A central theme in Coates’ book is learning, modeling through
his own experience how he became
conscious, learned to ask questions and search for his own
answers.
Coates on Education
“If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my
left….I was a curious boy but the
schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were
concerned with compliance.” (p. 25-26)
“The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare
your own curiosities and
follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the
library not the classroom.” (p.
48)
How does Coates describe his formal educational experiences,
and what are his critiques of them?
Through what experiences outside of the classroom does Coates
learn (at home, in the streets, in the
library, at the Mecca, from the women he loved, as a father, as a
journalist, in New York, in Paris)? What
does he learn from these experiences, and why does he value
them so highly?

Race, Privilege and Schooling
What is the role of race and privilege in schooling? Educator
and author Jonathan Kozol has been a
preeminent voice on race and education for the past fifty years.
His work with children in inner city
schools in Boston and New York show how children, families,
and teachers are impacted by policies
which allow separate and unequal to continue. See Kozol’s
article “Still Separate, Still Unequal:
America’s Educational Apartheid” and the ACLU’s School-to-
Prison pipeline for information on the
continued barriers to racial equity in education.
Reflect on Your Own Learning
What has your formal education been like up to now? What kind
of student were you? What drove you?
What were the values of your school? Did they fit you? What
have been your most formative informal
learning experiences? In what way were they different from
your formal education? Have you been
encouraged to ask questions? Were there particular people who
impacted you or methods that you
used to learn about things you did not know? What do you
expect your college education will be like
(what do you want out of it)?
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/American-Apartheid-
Education1sep05.htm
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/American-Apartheid-
Education1sep05.htm

https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/what-school-prison-pipeline
21
Writing and Revising as a Tool for Understanding
Professor Howard Rambsy II (Southern Illinois University
Edwardsville) describes Coates as a rare public
intellectual who doesn’t merely speak his ideas in public, but
thinks publicly. We can trace the
development of Coates’ ideas through his prolific writings.
Read Coates’ article Black and Blue, which
appeared in the Washington Monthly in 2001, less than a year
after the killing of Prince Jones. This
article lays the groundwork for the book that became Between
the World and Me. In what ways does
Coates’ thinking about Jones’ death and the culture which led to
it become more developed and refined
from the early version of his telling the story to the later
version?
Envisioning Education
What is formal education for? What should it be about? What
are examples of programs or initiatives
that are working to combat the notion of education for
compliance? How can we effect change?
http://www.culturalfront.org/
http://www.alternet.org/story/11128/black_and_blueAbout the

BookStarting OffSetting the Stage in Your Classroom for
Difficult DialoguesThemes and QuestionsHistory Got It Wrong:
Myth, Truth, ResponsibilityAmerican IdealsHistory and Myth-
MakingMaking of a MuseumFront Page NewsPutting Personal
Story into HistoryResearching Coates’ NamesAcknowledgement
& ReparationsAttributing Success and ResponsibilityAnalyzing
Contemporary Rhetoric to Uncover Slavery’s Enduring
LegacyIdentity across the Cultural DivideBlack-White
DivideCultural Crossing, the Power of Representation,
Visibility in ArtReflecting on Identity & Being Part of the
ConversationBetweenParenting and LoveOpening WorldsCode
SwitchingLetter to a Young PersonEducation and InquiryCoates
on EducationRace, Privilege and SchoolingReflect on Your Own
LearningWriting and Revising as a Tool for
UnderstandingEnvisioning Education
Unit IV Assignment
For your assignment, you will conduct an exercise in which you
break a folkway, a norm governing everyday behavior. Then,
you will complete a worksheet by answering a series of
questions about your experiment. You can break the norm with
family members or friends only.
Please pick one of the following social norms to break for this
assignment:
1. Proximity norms — sit or stand too close or too far from
people (friends or family only).
2. Food norms — eat non-finger foods with your fingers, or eat
with the wrong utensils.
3. Clothing norms — wear your clothes backwards or inside out,
wear socks with sandals, wear sunglasses indoors, wear a funny
hat or costume, or wear casual clothing to a formal event or
formal clothing to a casual event.
Once you have selected a social norm, you will complete the
worksheet.

Unit IV Norm-Breaking Worksheet
For this assignment, you will be completing the following
questions about your norm-breaking experience. Answer the
questions directly on this document. When you are finished,
select “Save As,” and save the document using this format:
Student ID_UnitIV. Upload this document to Blackboard as a
.doc, .docx, or .rtf file.
What norm did you decide to break?
Was it a formal or informal norm you were breaking?
What were your thoughts, concerns, and feelings about breaking
the norm before you broke it?
What were your behaviors or actions while breaking the norm?
Discuss what happened during the experience.
How did you feel while breaking the norm?
How did others react when you broke the norm?
How did the reaction reinforce or not reinforce the norm?
What did you learn about yourself or others from this
experience?

Between the World and Me is a work of
nonfiction. Some names and identifying
details have been changed.
Copyright © 2015 by Ta-Nehisi Coates
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spiegel &
Grau, an imprint of Random House, a
division of Penguin Random House LLC,
New York.
SPIEGEL & GRAU and the HOUSE colophon are
registered trademarks of Penguin Random House
LLC.
The title of this work is drawn from the poem
“Between the World and Me” by Richard Wright,
from White Man Listen!
copyright © 1957 by Richard Wright. Used by
permission of John Hawkins & Associates,
Inc., and the Estate of Richard
Wright.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the
following for permission to reprint previously
published material:
Chris Calhoun Agency: Excerpt from “Ka’ Ba” by
Amiri Baraka, copyright © Estate of Amiri
Baraka. Reprinted by permission
of the Chris Calhoun Agency.

John Hawkins & Associates, Inc., and the Estate of
Richard Wright: Excerpt from “Between the World
and Me” from White
Man Listen! by Richard Wright, copyright © 1957 by
Richard Wright. Reprinted by permission of
John Hawkins &
Associates, Inc., and the Estate of Richard Wright.
Sonia Sanchez: Excerpt from “Malcolm” from Shake
Loose My Skin by Sonia Sanchez (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1999),
copyright © 1999 by Sonia Sanchez. Reprinted by
permission of Sonia Sanchez.
ISBN 9780812993547
eBook ISBN 9780679645986
randomhousebooks.com
spiegelandgrau.com
Book design by Caroline Cunningham, adapted
for eBook
Cover design: Greg Mollica
Cover art: Bridgeman Images
v4.1
a
http://randomhousebooks.com
http://spiegelandgrau.com
Contents
Cover

Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Dedication
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
About the Author
kindle:embed:0002?mime=image/jpg
And one morning while in the woods I
stumbled suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by
scalyoaks and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose,
thrusting themselves between the
world and me….
—RICHARD WRIGHT
I.
Do not speak to me of martyrdom,
of men who die to be remembered

on someparish day.
I don’t believe in dying
though, I too shall die.
And violets like castanets
will echo me.
SONIA SANCHEZ
Son,
Last Sunday the host of a popular news showasked
me what it meant to lose my body. The
host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I
was seated in a remote studio on the
far
west side of Manhattan. A satellite closed the
miles between us, but no machinery could
close
the gap between her world and the world for
which I had been summoned to speak.
When the
host asked me about my body, her face faded
from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll
of
words, written by me earlier that week.
The host read these words for the audience, and
when she finished she turned to the
subject of my body, although she did not
mention it specifically. But by now I am
accustomed
to intelligent people asking about the
condition of my body without realizing the nature of

their request. Specifically, the host wished to know
why I felt that white America’sprogress,
or rather the progress of those Americans
who believe that they are white, was built on
looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old
and indistinct sadness well up in me. The
answer to this question is the record of the
believers themselves. The answer is American
history.
There is nothing extreme in this statement.
Americans deify democracy in a way that
allows for a dim awareness that they have, from
time to time,stood in defiance of their God.
But democracy is a forgiving God and America’s
heresies—torture, theft, enslavement—are so
common among individuals and nations that none
can declare themselves immune. In fact,
Americans, in a real sense, have never
betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln
declared,
in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must
ensure “that government of the people, by
the
people, for the people, shall not perish from the
earth,” he was not merely being aspirational;
at the onset of the CivilWar, the United States
of America had one of the highest rates of
suffrage in the world. The question is not
whether Lincoln truly meant “government of
the
people” but what our country has, throughout its
history, taken the political term “people” to
actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean
your mother or your grandmother, and it did
not

mean you and me. Thus America’sproblem is not its
betrayal of “government of the people,”
but the means by which “the people” acquired
their names.
This leadsus to another equally important ideal,
one that Americans implicitly accept but
to which they make no conscious claim.
Americans believe in the reality of “race” as
a
defined, indubitable feature of the natural world.
Racism—the need to ascribe bone-deep
features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and
destroy them—inevitably follows from this
inalterable condition. In this way, racism is
rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother
Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle
Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one
deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other
phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the
handiwork of men.
But race is the childof racism, not the father.
And the process of naming “the people” has
never been a matter of genealogy and
physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.
Difference
in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the
preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that
these
factors can correctly organize a society and that
they signify deeper attributes, which are
indelible—this is the new idea at the heartof these
new people who have been brought up

hopelessly, tragically,deceitfully, to believe that
they are white.
These new people are, like us, a modern
invention. But unlike us, their new name has no
real meaning divorced from the machinery of
criminal power. The new people were
somethingelse before they were white—Catholic,
Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and
if all our national hopes have any fulfillment,
then they will have to be somethingelse again.
Perhaps they will truly become American and create a
nobler basisfor their myths. I cannot
call it. As for now, it must be said that the process
of washing the disparate tribes white, the
elevation of the belief in being white, was
not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream
socials, but rather through the pillaging of life,
liberty, labor, and land;through the flaying of
backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of
dissidents; the destruction of families; the
rape
of mothers; the sale of children; and various other
acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you
and me the right to secure and govern our own
bodies.
The new people are not original in this. Perhaps
therehas been, at somepointin history,
somegreatpower whose elevation was exempt from
the violent exploitation of otherhuman
bodies. If there has been, I have yet to
discover it. But this banality of violence can
never
excuse America, because America makes no claim
to the banal. America believes itself

exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to
exist, a lone champion standing between
the white city of democracy and the terrorists,
despots, barbarians, and other enemies of
civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to
be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I
propose to take our countrymen’s claims of
American exceptionalism seriously, which is to
say I propose subjecting our country to an
exceptional moral standard. This is difficult
because thereexists, all around us, an apparatus
urging us to accept American innocence at
face value and not to inquire too much. And it
is so easy to look away, to live with the
fruits of
our history and to ignore the greatevil done in all
of our names. But you and I have never
truly had that luxury. I thinkyou know.
I writeyou in your fifteenth year. I am writing
you because this was the year you saw Eric
Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes;
because you know now that Renisha McBride
was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot
down for browsing in a department
store. And you have seen men in uniform driveby
and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old
childwhom they were oath-bound to protect. And
you have seen men in the same uniforms
pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother,
on the side of a road. And you know
now, if you did not before, that the police
departments of your country have been endowed
with the authority to destroy your body. It does
not matter if the destruction is the result
of

an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if
it originates in a misunderstanding. It does
not matter if the destruction springs from a
foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper
authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent
the people trying to entrap your body and it
can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and
your body can be destroyed. The destroyers
will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will
receive pensions. And destruction is merely
the superlative form of a dominion whose
prerogatives include friskings, detainings,
beatings,
and humiliations. All of this is common to black
people. And all of this is old for black
people.
No one is held responsible.
There is nothing uniquely evil in thesedestroyersor
even in this moment. The destroyers
are merely men enforcing the whims of our
country, correctly interpreting its heritage and
legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our
phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial
justice,
racial profiling, white privilege, even white
supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a
visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks
airways, rips muscle, extracts organs,
cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never
look awayfrom this. You must always remember
that the sociology, the history, the economics,
the graphs, the charts, the regressions all

land,
with greatviolence, upon the body.
That Sunday, with that host, on that news show,
I tried to explain this as best I could
within the time allotted. But at the end of the
segment, the host flashed a widely shared
picture of an eleven-year-old black boy
tearfully hugging a white police officer. Then
she
asked me about “hope.” And I knew then
that I had failed. And I remembered that I
had
expected to fail. And I wondered again at the
indistinct sadness welling up in me. Why exactly
was I sad? I came out of the studio and
walked for a while. It was a calm
December day.
Families, believing themselves white, were out
on the streets. Infants, raised to be white,
were bundled in strollers. And I was sad for these
people, much as I was sad for the host
and
sad for all the people out therewatching and
reveling in a specious hope. I realized
then why
I was sad. When the journalist asked me about
my body, it was like she was asking me to
awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have
seen that dream all my life. It is perfect
houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day
cookouts, block associations, and driveways.
The
Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The
Dream smells like peppermint but tastes
like

strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have
wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold
my
country over my head like a blanket. But this has
never been an option because the Dream
rests on our backs, the bedding made from our
bodies. And knowing this, knowing that the
Dream persists by warring with the known world,
I was sad for the host, I was sad for
all
those families, I was sad for my country, but
above all, in that moment, I was sad for
you.
That was the weekyou learned that the killers of
Michael Brown would go free. The men
who had left his body in the street like some
awesome declaration of their inviolable power
would never be punished. It was not my
expectation that anyone would ever be
punished. But
you were young and still believed. You stayed
up till 11 P.M. that night, waiting for the
announcement of an indictment, and when instead
it was announced that therewas none you
said, “I’ve got to go,” and you went into your
room, and I heard you crying. I came in
five
minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I
didn’t comfort you, because I thought it
would be
wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it
would be okay, because I have never
believed it
would be okay. What I told you is what
your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is

your
country, that this is your world, that this is your
body, and you must find someway to live
within the all of it. I tell you now that the
question of how one should live within a
black
body, within a country lost in the Dream, is
the question of my life, and the pursuit of
this
question, I have found, ultimately answers itself.
This must seemstrange to you. We live in a “goal-
oriented” era. Our media vocabulary is
full of hot takes, big ideas, and grand
theories of everything. But some time ago I
rejected
magic in all its forms. This rejection was a
gift from your grandparents, who never tried
to
console me with ideas of an afterlife and were
skeptical of preordained American glory. In
accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of
my total end, I was freedto truly consider
how I wished to live—specifically, how do I
live free in this black body? It is a
profound
question because America understands itself as
God’s handiwork, but the black body is
the
clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I
have asked the question through my
reading and writings, through the music of my
youth, through arguments with your

grandfather, with your mother, your aunt Janai, your
uncle Ben. I have searched for answers
in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on
the streets, and on othercontinents. The
question
is unanswerable, which is not to say futile.
The greatest reward of this constant
interrogation,
of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is
that it has freed me from ghosts and
girded me against the sheer terror of
disembodiment.
And I am afraid. I feel the fear most acutely
whenever you leave me. But I was afraid
long
before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When
I was your age the only people I knew
were
black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly,
dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all
my young life, though I had not always
recognized it as such.
It was always right in front of me. The
fear was there in the extravagant boys of
my
neighborhood, in their large rings and
medallions, their big puffy coats and
full-length fur-
collared leathers, which was their armor against
their world. They would stand on the corner
of Gwynn Oak and Liberty, or Cold Spring and
Park Heights, or outside Mondawmin Mall,
with their hands dipped in Russell sweats. I
thinkback on those boys now and all I see is

fear,
and all I see is them girding themselves
against the ghosts of the bad old days when
the
Mississippi mob gathered ’round their
grandfathers so that the branches of the black
body
might be torched, then cut away. The fear lived
on in their practiced bop, their slouching
denim, their big T-shirts, the calculated angle
of their baseball caps, a catalog of
behaviors
and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that
these boys were in firm possession of
everything they desired.
I saw it in their customs of war. I was no
olderthan five, sitting out on the front stepsof
my home on Woodbrook Avenue, watching two
shirtless boys circle each other close
and
buck shoulders. From then on, I knew that
therewas a ritual to a street fight, bylaws
and
codes that, in their very need, attested to all
the vulnerability of the black teenage bodies.
I heard the fear in the first music I ever
knew, the music that pumped from boom
boxes
full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who
stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on
Park

Heights loved this music because it told them,
against all evidence and odds, that they were
masters of their own lives, their own streets,
and their own bodies. I saw it in the
girls, in
their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings
that announced their names thrice over.
And I saw it in their brutal language and hard
gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes
and destroy you with their words for the sin of
playing too much. “Keep my name out
your
mouth,” they would say. I would watch them
after school, how they squared off like boxers,
vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at
each other.
I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s
home in Philadelphia. You never knew
her. I barely
knew her, but what I remember is her hard
manner, her rough voice. And I knew
that my
father’s father was dead and that my uncle Oscar
was dead and that my uncle David was dead
and that each of theseinstances was unnatural. And I
saw it in my own father, who loves you,
who counsels you, who slipped me money to care
for you. My father was so very afraid. I
felt
it in the sting of his black leather belt, which
he applied with more anxiety than anger, my
father who beat me as if someone might steal
me away, because that is exactly what
was
happeningall around us. Everyone had lost a child,

somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs,
to guns. It was said that theselost girls were sweet
as honey and would not hurt a fly. It
was
said that these lost boys had just received a GED
and had begun to turn their lives around.
And now they were gone, and their legacy was a
greatfear.
Havethey told you this story? When your grandmother
was sixteen years old a young man
knocked on her door. The young man was your
NanaJo’s boyfriend. No one else was home.
Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait until
your Nana Jo returned. But your great-
grandmother got there first. She asked the
young man to leave. Then she beat your
grandmother terrifically, one last time,so that she
might remember how easily she could lose
her body. Ma never forgot. I remember her
clutching my small hand tightly as we crossed
the
street. She would tell me that if I ever let go
and were killed by an onrushing car, she would
beat me back to life. When I was six, Ma and
Dad took me to a local park.I slipped from
their
gaze and found a playground. Your
grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for
me.
When they found me, Dad did what every parent
I knew would have done—he reached for
his
belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze,
awedat the distance between punishment
and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad’s

voice—“Either I can beat him, or the
police.”
Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. All I
know is, the violence rose from the fear
like
smoke from a fire, and I cannot say
whether that violence, even administered in
fear and
love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the
exit. What I know is that fathers who
slammed
their teenage boys for sass would then release them
to streets where their boys employed,
and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew
mothers who belted their girls, but the belt
could not save thesegirls from drug dealers twice
their age. We, the children, employed our
darkest humor to cope. We stood in the
alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed
crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose
mother wore him out with a beating in front of
his
entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number
five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some
girl whose mother was known to reach for
anything—cable wires, extension cords, pots,
pans.
We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid
of those who loved us most. Our parents
resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the
plague years resorted to the scourge.
To be black in the Baltimore of my youth
was to be naked before the elements of

the world,
before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape,
and disease. The nakedness is not an error,
nor
pathology. The nakedness is the correct and
intended result of policy, the predictable
upshot
of people forced for centuries to live under
fear. The law did not protect us. And now, in
your
time, the law has become an excuse for stopping
and frisking you, which is to say, for
furthering the assault on your body. But a society
that protects somepeople through a safety
net of schools, government-backed home loans,
and ancestral wealth but can only protect you
with the club of criminal justice has either failed
at enforcing its good intentions or has
succeeded at somethingmuch darker. However you
call it, the result was our infirmity before
the criminal forces of the world. It does not
matter if the agent of those forces is
white or
black—what matters is our condition, what
matters is the system that makes your body
breakable.
The revelation of theseforces, a series of great
changes, has unfolded over the course of my
life. The changes are still unfolding and will likely
continue until I die. I was eleven years
old,
standing out in the parking lot in front of
the 7-Eleven, watching a crew of older boys
standing near the street. They yelled and

gestured at…who?…another boy, young, like me,
who stood there, almost smiling, gamely
throwing up his hands. He had already learned
the
lesson he would teach me that day: that his
body was in constant jeopardy. Who knows what
brought him to that knowledge? The projects, a
drunken stepfather, an older brother
concussed by police, a cousin pinned in the
city jail. That he was outnumbered did not matter
because the whole world had outnumbered him
long ago, and what do numbers matter? This
was a war for the possession of his body and
that would be the war of his whole life.
I stood there for some seconds, marveling at
the older boys’ beautiful sense of
fashion.
They all wore ski jackets, the kind which, in my
day, mothers put on layaway in September,
then piled up overtime hours so as to have
the thing wrapped and ready for Christmas.
I
focused in on a light-skinned boy with a long
head and small eyes. He was scowling at
another boy, who was standing closeto me. It was
just before threein the afternoon.I was in
sixth grade. School had just let out, and it was
not yet the fighting weather of early spring.
What was the exact problem here? Who could
know?
The boy with the small eyes reached into his ski
jacket and pulled out a gun. I recall it
in
the slowest motion, as though in a dream.

There the boy stood, with the gun brandished,
which he slowly untucked, tucked, then untucked
once more, and in his small eyes I saw a
surging rage that could, in an instant, erasemy
body. That was 1986. That year I felt myself
to
be drowning in the news reports of murder. I
was aware that thesemurders very oftendid not
land upon the intended targets but fell upon great-aunts,
PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and
joyful children—fell upon them random and relentless,
like greatsheets of rain. I knew this
in theory but could not understand it as
fact until the boy with the small eyes stood across
from me holding my entire body in his small
hands. The boy did not shoot. His friends
pulled
him back. He did not need to shoot. He had
affirmed my place in the order of things.
He had
let it be known how easily I could be
selected. I took the subway home that day,
processing
the episode all alone. I did not tell my parents.
I did not tell my teachers, and if I told
my
friends I would have done so with all the
excitement needed to obscure the fear that
came
over me in that moment.
I remember being amazed that death could so
easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish

afternoon,billow up like fog. I knew that West
Baltimore, where I lived; that the north
side of
Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the
South Side of Chicago, where friends of
my
father lived, compriseda world apart.
Somewhere out therebeyond the firmament,
past the
asteroid belt, therewere otherworlds where children
did not regularly fear for their bodies. I
knew this because there was a large
television resting in my living room. In the
evenings I
would sit before this television bearing witness to
the dispatches from this otherworld. There
were little white boys with complete collections of
football cards, and their only want was a
popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison
oak. That otherworld was suburban and
endless, organized around pot roasts, blueberry
pies, fireworks, ice cream sundaes,
immaculate bathrooms, and small toy trucks
that were loosed in wooded backyards with
streams and glens. Comparing thesedispatches
with the facts of my native world, I cameto
understand that my country was a galaxy, and
this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium
of West Baltimore to the happy hunting
grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the
distance between that other sector of space
and my own. I knew that my portion of
the
American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a
tenacious gravity, was black and that the
other, liberated portion was not. I knew that

someinscrutable energy preserved the breach. I
felt, but did not yet understand, the relation
between that otherworld and me. And I felt in
this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which
infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to
unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.
Do you ever feel that same need? Yourlife is so
very different from my own. The grandness
of the world, the real world, the whole world,
is a known thingfor you. And you have no
need
of dispatches because you have seen so much of
the American galaxy and its inhabitants—
their homes, their hobbies—up close. I don’t
know what it means to grow up with a
black
president, social networks, omnipresent media, and
black women everywhere in their natural
hair. What I know is that when they loosed
the killer of Michael Brown, you said, “I’ve
got to
go.” And that cut me because, for all our differing
worlds, at your age my feeling was exactly
the same. And I recall that even then I had
not yet begun to imagine the perils that
tangle us.
You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown.
You have not yet grappled with your own
myths and narratives and discovered the plunder
everywhere around us.
Before I could discover, before I could
escape, I had to survive, and this could
only mean a
clashwith the streets, by which I mean not

just physical blocks, nor simply the people
packed
into them, but the array of lethal puzzles
and strange perils that seem to rise up from
the
asphalt itself. The streets transform every
ordinary day into a series of trick
questions, and
every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a
shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives
unscathed. And yet the heat that springs from the
constant danger, from a lifestyle of near-
death experience, is thrilling. This is what
the rappers mean when they pronounce
themselves addicted to “the streets” or in love
with “the game.” I imagine they feel something
akin to parachutists, rock climbers, BASE jumpers,
and others who choose to live on the edge.
Of course we chose nothing. And I have never
believed the brothers who claim to “run,”
much
less “own,” the city. We did not design the streets.
We do not fund them. We do not preserve
them. But I was there, nevertheless, charged
like all the others with the protection of my
body.
The crews, the young men who’d transmuted
their fear into rage, were the greatest danger.
The crews walked the blocks of their
neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only
through their loud rudeness that they might feel any
sense of security and power. They would

break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you
down to feel that power, to revelin the
might
of their own bodies. And their wild reveling, their
astonishing acts made their names ring out.
Reps were made, atrocities recounted. And so in
my Baltimore it was known that when
Cherry Hill rolled through you rolled the other
way, that North and Pulaski was not an
intersection but a hurricane, leaving only splinters
and shards in its wake. In that fashion,
the
security of these neighborhoods flowed downward
and became the security of the bodies
living there. You steered clear of Jo-Jo, for
instance, because he was cousin to Keon,
the don
of Murphy Homes. In othercities, indeed in
otherBaltimores, the neighborhoods had other
handles and the boys went by other names,
but their mission did not change: prove
the
inviolability of their block, of their bodies, through
their power to crack knees, ribs, and arms.
This practice was so common that today you can
approach any black person raised in the
cities of that era and they can tell you which
crew ran which hood in their city, and they can
tell you the names of all the captains and all
their cousins and offer an anthology of all their
exploits.
To survive the neighborhoods and shield my body,
I learned another language consisting of
a basiccomplement of head nods and handshakes. I
memorized a list of prohibitedblocks. I

learned the smell and feel of fighting weather.
And I learned that “Shorty, can I see your
bike?” was never a sincere question, and “Yo,
you was messing with my cousin” was neither
an earnest accusation nor a misunderstanding of
the facts. These were the summonses that
you answered with your left foot forward, your
right foot back, your hands guarding your
face, one slightly lower than the other, cocked
like a hammer. Or they were answered by
breaking out, ducking through alleys, cutting through
backyards, then bounding through the
door past your kid brother into your bedroom, pulling
the tool out of your lambskin or from
under your mattress or out of your Adidas
shoebox, then calling up your own cousins (who
really aren’t) and returning to that same block,
on that same day, and to that same crew,
hollering out, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I
recall learning theselaws clearer than I recall
learning my colors and shapes, because theselaws
were essential to the security of my body.
I thinkof this as a greatdifference between us.
You have someacquaintance with the old
rules, but they are not as essential to you as
they were to me. I am sure that you have had to
deal with the occasional roughneck on the subway
or in the park,but when I was about
your
age, each day, fully one-third of my brainwas
concerned with who I was walking to school
with, our precise number, the manner of our walk,
the number of times I smiled, who or
what I smiled at, who offered a pound and
who did not—all of which is to say that I

practiced
the culture of the streets, a culture concerned
chiefly with securing the body. I do not
long for
those days. I have no desire to make
you “tough” or “street,” perhaps because any
“toughness” I garnered camereluctantly. I thinkI
was always, somehow, aware of the price. I
think I somehow knew that that third of my
brain should have been concerned with more
beautiful things. I thinkI felt that somethingout
there, someforce, nameless and vast, had
robbed me of…what? Time? Experience? I
think you know something of what that third
could have done, and I thinkthat is why you
may feel the need for escape even more than I
did. You have seen all the wonderful life up above
the tree-line, yet you understand that there
is no real distance between you and Trayvon Martin,
and thus Trayvon Martin must terrify
you in a way that he could never terrify
me. You have seen so much more of all that is
lost
when they destroy your body.
The streets were not my only problem. If the
streets shackled my right leg, the schools
shackled my left. Fail to comprehend the streets
and you gave up your body now. But fail to
comprehend the schools and you gave up your body
later. I suffered at the hands of both,
but
I resent the schools more. There was

nothing sanctified about the laws of the
streets—the
laws were amoral and practical. You rolled with a
posse to the partyas sure as you wore boots
in the snow, or raised an umbrella in the
rain. These were rules aimed at somethingobvious
—the greatdanger that haunted every visit to
Shake & Bake, every bus ride downtown.
But
the laws of the schools were aimed at something
distant and vague. What did it mean to,
as
our elders told us, “grow up and be somebody”?
And what precisely did this have to do with
an education rendered as rote discipline? To
be educated in my Baltimore mostly meant
always packing an extranumber 2 pencil and
working quietly. Educated children walked in
single file on the right side of the hallway, raised
their hands to use the lavatory, and carried
the lavatory pass when en route. Educated
children never offered excuses—certainly not
childhood itself. The world had no time for the
childhoods of black boys and girls. How
could
the schools? Algebra, Biology, and English were
not subjects so much as opportunities to
better discipline the body, to practice writing
between the lines, copying the directions legibly,
memorizing theorems extracted from the world they
were created to represent. All of it felt so
distant to me. I remember sitting in my
seventh-grade French class and not having any
idea
why I was there. I did not know any French
people, and nothing around me suggested I

ever
would. France was a rock rotating in another
galaxy, around another sun, in another sky
that
I would never cross. Why, precisely, was I
sitting in this classroom?
The question was never answered. I was a curious
boy, but the schools were not concerned
with curiosity. They were concerned with
compliance. I loved a few of my teachers.
But I
cannot say that I truly believed any of them.
Some years after I’d left school, after I’d
dropped
out of college, I heard a few lines from Nas
that struck me:
Ecstasy, coke, you say it’s love, it is poison
Schools where I learnthey should be burned, it
is poison
That was exactly how I felt back then. I
sensed the schools were hiding something,
drugging us with false morality so that we would
not see, so that we did not ask: Why—for us
and only us—is the otherside of free will and free
spirits an assault upon our bodies? This is
not a hyperbolic concern. When our elders
presented school to us, they did not present it
as a
place of high learning but as a means of
escape from death and penal warehousing.
Fully 60
percent of all young black men who drop
out of high school will go to jail. This should

disgrace the country. But it does not, and while I
couldn’t crunch the numbers or plumb the
history back then, I sensed that the fear that marked
West Baltimore could not be explained
by the schools. Schools did not reveal truths,
they concealed them. Perhaps they must be
burned awayso that the heartof this thingmight be
known.
Unfit for the schools, and in good measure
wanting to be unfit for them, and lacking
the
savvy I needed to master the streets, I
felt there could be no escape for me or,
honestly,
anyone else. The fearless boys and girls who would
knuckle up, call on cousins and crews,
and, if it came to it, pull guns seemed to
have mastered the streets. But their
knowledge
peaked at seventeen, when they ventured out of
their parents’ homes and discovered that
America had guns and cousins, too. I saw their futures
in the tired facesof mothers dragging
themselves onto the 28 bus, swatting and cursing at
three-year-olds; I saw their futures in
the men out on the corner yelling obscenely at
someyoung girl because she would not smile.
Some of them stood outside liquor stores
waiting on a few dollars for a bottle.
We would
hand them a twenty and tell them to keep
the change. They would dash inside and

return
with Red Bull, Mad Dog, or Cisco. Then
we would walk to the house of someone
whose
mother worked nights, play “Fuck tha Police,”
and drink to our youth. We could not
get out.
The ground we walked was trip-wired. The air
we breathed was toxic. The water stunted
our
growth. We could not get out.
A year after I watched the boy with the small
eyes pull out a gun, my father beat me for
letting another boy steal from me. Two years later,
he beat me for threatening my ninth-grade
teacher. Not being violent enough could cost
me my body. Being too violent could
cost me my
body. We could not get out. I was a capable
boy, intelligent, well-liked, but powerfully
afraid.
And I felt, vaguely, wordlessly, that for a childto
be marked off for such a life, to be forced
to
live in fear was a great injustice. And what
was the source of this fear? What was hiding
behind the smoke screen of streets and
schools? And what did it mean that number 2
pencils,
conjugations without context, Pythagorean theorems,
handshakes, and head nods were the
difference between life and death, were the curtains
drawing down between the world and
me?
I could not retreat, as did so many, into

the church and its mysteries.My parents
rejected
all dogmas. We spurned the holidays marketed by
the people who wanted to be white. We
would not stand for their anthems. We would
not kneel before their God. And so I
had no
sense that any just God was on my side. “The meek
shall inherit the earth” meant nothing to
me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore,
stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed
up on Park Heights, and raped in the
showers of the city jail. My understanding of the
universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward
chaos then concluded in a box. That was
the message of the small-eyed boy, untucking the
piece—a childbearing the power to body
and banish other children to memory. Fear ruled
everything around me, and I knew, as all
black people do, that this fear was connected to
the Dream out there, to the unworried boys,
to pie and pot roast, to the white fences
and green lawns nightly beamed into our
television
sets.
But how? Religion could not tell me. The schools
could not tell me. The streets could not
help me see beyond the scramble of each day. And I
was such a curious boy. I was raised that
way. Yourgrandmother taught me to read when I
was only four. She also taught me to write,
by which I mean not simply organizing a
set of sentences into a series of paragraphs,
but

organizing them as a means of
investigation. When I was in trouble at school
(which was
quite often) she would make me write about
it. The writing had to answer a series of
questions: Why did I feel the need to talk at the
same time as my teacher? Why did I not
believe that my teacher was entitled to respect?
How would I want someone to behave while
I
was talking? What would I do the next time I
felt the urge to talk to my friends during a
lesson? I have given you thesesame assignments. I
gave them to you not because I thought
they would curb your behavior—they certainly did not
curb mine—but because thesewere the
earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself
into consciousness.Yourgrandmother was
not teaching me how to behave in class. She
was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate
the subject that elicited the most sympathy and
rationalizing—myself. Here was the lesson: I
was not an innocent. My impulses were not filled
with unfailing virtue. And feeling that I was
as human as anyone, this must be true for other
humans. If I was not innocent, then they
were not innocent. Could this mix of motivation
also affect the stories they tell?The cities
they built? The country they claimed as given to
them by God?
Now the questions began burning in me. The
materials for research were all around me, in

the form of books assembledby your grandfather.
He was then working at Howard University
as a research librarian in the Moorland-Spingarn
Research Center, one of the largest
collections of Africana in the world. Your
grandfather loved books and loves them to
this day,
and they were all over the house, books about
black people, by black people, for black
people
spilling off shelves and out of the living room,
boxed up in the basement. Dad had been a
local captain in the Black Panther Party. I
read through all of Dad’s books about
the Panthers
and his stashof old Party newspapers. I was
attracted to their guns, because the guns seemed
honest. The guns seemed to address this
country, which invented the streets that secured
them with despotic police, in its primary language—
violence. And I compared the Panthers to
the heroes given to me by the schools, men
and women who struck me as ridiculous and
contrary to everything I knew.
Every February my classmates and I were herded
into assemblies for a ritual review of
the
Civil Rights Movement. Our teachers urged us
toward the example of freedom marchers,
Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it
seemed that the month could not pass
without a series of filmsdedicated to the glories
of being beaten on camera. The black
people
in thesefilmsseemed to love the worst things in

life—love the dogs that rent their children
apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs,
the fire-hoses that tore off their clothes
and
tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to
love the men who raped them, the women
who cursed them, love the children who spat on
them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why
are they showing this to us? Why were only
our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the
morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that
blacks are in especial need of this morality.
Back then all I could do was measure these
freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to
say, I
measured them against children pulling out in
the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents
wielding extension cords, and “Yeah, nigger, what’s
up now?” I judged them against the
country I knew, which had acquired the land
through murder and tamed it under slavery,
against the country whose armies fanned out
across the world to extend their dominion.
The
world, the real one, was civilization secured and
ruled by savage means. How could the
schools valorize men and women whose values
society actively scorned? How could they
send us out into the streets of Baltimore,
knowing all that they were, and then speak of
nonviolence?
I came to see the streets and the schools as
arms of the same beast. One enjoyed

the
official power of the state while the otherenjoyed
its implicit sanction. But fear and violence
were the weaponry of both. Fail in the streets
and the crews would catch you slipping and
take your body. Fail in the schools and you would
be suspendedand sent back to those same
streets, where they would take your body.
And I began to see these two arms in
relation—
those who failed in the schools justified their
destruction in the streets. The society could
say,
“He should have stayed in school,” and then wash its
hands of him.
It does not matter that the “intentions” of
individual educatorswere noble. Forget about
intentions. What any institution, or its agents,
“intend” for you is secondary. Our world is
physical. Learn to play defense—ignore the head
and keep your eyes on the body. Very few
Americans will directly proclaim that they are in
favor of black people being left to
the streets.
But a very large number of Americans will
do all they can to preserve the Dream. No one
directly proclaimed that schools were designed to
sanctify failure and destruction. But a great
number of educators spoke of “personal
responsibility” in a country authored and
sustained
by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of
this language of “intention” and “personal
responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were
made. Bodies were broken. People were

1 The Division of Undergraduate Studies is grateful .docx

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