My Amazon and Goodreads review of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (Rating 5) – A Father’s Caution and Pride. For years, I felt guilty that I delayed reading Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates after it came out in 2015. Now I’m glad I waited until 2020, when America is confronting its embedded racism with unprecedented intensity. The book’s impact on me was jarringly powerful in the aftermath of the recent deaths of so many Blacks at the hands of police, their disproportionate number of COVID-19 cases and mortality attributable to inadequate health care, the children unable to “attend” school virtually because they lacked access to the necessary technology, and countless other injustices. The statistics are long-standing, but awareness of their enormity by non-Blacks is new. I am among them. As the mother of an adult daughter, I have been especially haunted by the murder of Breonna Taylor. When her mother, Tamika Parker, described Breonna’s death as a slap in the face, I felt the blow. During my forty-year career in early education, I worked with Black children a decade younger than the son who Coates writes to, but I saw the same hope and fear in their faces. As a fiction writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I portray characters of diverse backgrounds, including Blacks, imagining the ever-present threats they face. Coates cautions his son, but also imbues him with pride and courage. This honest, painful-to-read book reminds me that I, that we as a society, have barely scratched the surface understanding the insidious effects of racism. We need to dig deep within ourselves and our systems to root it out.
