The 100 best books of the 21st century
No 7
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates review
– a now exalted writer and spokesman for black America
The prominent journalist has issued a passionate call for change. But where are the discussions of class, and is he guilty of parochialism?
Sudhdev Sandhu
Thursday 8 October 2015
E
ver since 1976, when the US government officially recognised Black History Month, February has been a time – especially in state schools – to celebrate the emancipatory struggles of runaway slaves, pioneering medics and lawyers, and poets and “freedom riders”. For the young Ta-Nehisi Coates, growing up in Baltimore, it was also a time of mystification and shame. Watching newsreel footage of the civil rights movement, he got the impression that “the black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life – love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the firehouses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into their streets”.