Between the World and Me Background

21st-Century Race Relations in America

Structured as a letter from father to son, Between the World and Me acknowledges generational shifts taking place regarding race. The opening years of the 21st century marked several milestones in African American advancement. In 2001, General Colin Powell (1937–) became the first Black individual to hold the office of Secretary of State. November 2008 witnessed a major milestone with the election of Barack Obama (1961–) as the first Black president of the United States. Obama would go on to win re-election in 2012.

But the first two decades of the century also brought increasing awareness of systemic racial disparities and injustices. Several fatal shootings of Black men by whites led to widespread protests and civil unrest. In 2012, for instance—in an event to which Coates refers specifically—Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager, was shot dead in Florida. The following year, a jury found the assailant not guilty. Protests of the verdict soon led to the founding of the Black Lives Matter social movement.

Coates also reflects specifically on two other high-profile cases involving Black men killed by police. In 2014, there were several such high-profile cases, including the death of Eric Garner in New York after he was put into a chokehold by police for selling loose cigarettes. A Black teenager named Michael Brown was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Both men were unarmed.

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ work continues to be timely in light of events occurring after the book’s publication. In 2017, a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, broke out into violent conflict with distinctly racial overtones after a white supremacist deliberately drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing a 32-year-old woman. In 2020, national protests erupted after a Black man named George Floyd was killed by white police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The officers pinned Floyd to the ground for nearly 10 minutes, ignoring his desperate pleas that he could not breathe. The protests focused not only on Floyd but on the broader issue of the lack of justice for Black people killed by police. Also in 2020, analysis revealed that during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, African Americans were contracting the virus at a far higher rate than whites. They also had a higher rate of mortality due to poorer medical care, another reflection of structural racism and its resultant economic disparities.

The cumulative effects of such events resulted in a major social and political debate in America over racial profiling and systemic racism. Black Lives Matter, founded in 2013, calls for the demilitarization of law enforcement and a number of other social reforms. The movement has become international in its scope.

Coates and the American Tradition of 20th-Century Black Writers

Coates makes significant mentions of his predecessors in American literature, especially three Black writers of the 20th century: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X.

• Richard Wright (1908–60) was a novelist, poet and essayist whose works provided a major source of inspiration for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Wright’s most influential works were his novel Native Son (1940) and his memoir Black Boy (1945). The title of Between the World and Me is drawn from a poem of the same name by Wright, first published in 1935. The poem’s narrator recounts how he came upon the bones of a lynching victim.
• James Baldwin (1924–87) was an essayist, poet, playwright, memoirist and activist. Coates structures Between the World and Me in emulation of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963). That work included an essay addressed as a letter from the author to his teenage nephew, and Coates similarly frames his text as letters to his teenage son. In addition, Coates singles out Baldwin in the epigraph to the third and final section of his work.
• Malcolm X (1925–65), born Malcolm Little, was a Black Muslim cleric and civil rights activist. Malcolm X was a pivotal figure in establishing the Black Power movement. He exercised a charismatic influence on many young Black Americans through the power of his rhetoric and the eloquence of his autobiography, published posthumously. He was assassinated in New York City in 1965.