Between the World and Me

Coates delves into his young adulthood in Baltimore. He recalls the necessity of learning street codes to survive in his neighborhood, noting, “I recall learning these laws clearer than I recall learning my colors and shapes, because these laws were essential to the security of my body” (25). He claims that this learning contrasted with what he learned in school, which he found irrelevant when faced with the necessity of learning how to survive. Coates maintains that for black boys and girls, schools are not interested in curiosity but rather compliance. He shares the statistic that 60% of black boys drop out of high school. Believing that schools symbolize yet another form of structural oppression, Coates writes, “Schools did not reveal truths, they concealed them” (29).

In contrast, Coates’s mother taught him to write at the age of four, not as a way of organizing language but of asking questions and investigating the world. For example, when Coates got into trouble at school, she made him write about it, thus encouraging him to investigate himself as much as any other subject. Coates’s father was a research librarian at Howard University and had a large collection of books by black people for black people. He was also a local captain in the Black Panther Party. To Coates, the self-empowerment of the Black Panther Party stands in stark contrast to films on the civil rights movement he viewed in school. Coates claims that these films, which featured Freedom Riders beings attacked and hosed by police and dogs, seemed “dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera” (33). Coates wondered how schools could promote nonviolence while sending students out into Baltimore’s violent streets.

Coates finds a role model in activist Malcolm X. Tributes to Malcolm X were prevalent in the ’90s hip-hop that Coates listened to. As Coates describes him, Malcolm X was a symbol of radical honesty, “the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I’d ever heard” (38). Malcolm X’s words—“If you’re black you were born in jail”—resonate with Coates (38).

Coates next explores his social and political awakening at Howard University, a historically black university, which he calls “the Mecca” (40). In addition to delving into African and African American history while at Howard, Coates also discovers the wide breadth of identities within the African American diaspora, “the vastness of black people across spacetime” (42).