…that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.

That wisdom is not unique to our people but I think it has special meaning to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were carried off and divided up into policies and stocks. I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular,  specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feelings is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in a particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, who thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels in dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribed this love in its sacred texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, hold her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world – which is really the only world she can ever know – ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains – whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains. Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me.

I’m not sure what more to say about Between the World and Me except that this book is about how dangerous it is to grow up black in the United States, especially for boys becoming men. The conceit of the book is that it is a letter to Ta-Nehisi”s son on that son’s becoming a man but the book is really a polemic against the fiction of the American Dream. The book is an easy book to read even if it is uncomfortable at times. Do I think every thinking  white American should read Between The World and Me? Yes.