Coates writes that the killing and the absence of any subsequent prosecution of the officer 'took me from fear to a rage … and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days.' Not only was the officer's suspicion mistaken, there is good reason to believe that he acted wrongly, probably criminally, in shooting Jones and that his plea of self-defense was fraudulent and should have been discounted. An event that occurred shortly after he left Howard University left an especially deep mark on his thinking: A schoolmate, Prince Jones, was shot to death in September 2000 by an undercover Prince George's County, Maryland, police officer who suspected the student of being a drug dealer. He recalls the day when a white man in Manhattan threatened to call the police on him when, in defense of his son, he raised his voice against a rude white woman. He notes the time when, as a youngster growing up in West Baltimore, he found himself on the receiving end of a black boy's brandished pistol, a twitch away from serious injury or even death. The consolidation of white America, he writes, '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.' Portraying the recent, highly publicized killings of blacks by police officers as reflections of racist business as usual, Coates tells his son that 'there is nothing uniquely evil' about these officers 'endowed with the authority to destroy your body' they 'are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy.' 'You and I, my son, are that 'below.'' True in 1776, 'it is true today.'Ĭoates presents American history as a chronicle of atrocities.

'A mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below,' he observes. He asserts that the subordination of blacks has been an integral feature of the good fortune that Euro-Americans have enjoyed. Coates's portrayal of the African American past, present, and future is gloomy. It conveys worry over Samori's prospects and posits a stoical parental philosophy on raising a black man in America. Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me is an open letter to his 15-year-old son, Samori. This book review appears in the Fall 2015 issue of The American Prospect magazine.

Prince jones between the world and me