Ta-Nehisi Coates on the tribulations of being black in America
Coates didn't expect his long essay to become the runaway success it has but reckons he was lucky the national conversation turned in his direction
Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, a dark, angry and eloquent meditation on the state of being black in America, would seem a highly unlikely bestseller. And yet, since it was published in July, this slim book has been reprinted 12 times, as America agonised over a succession of deaths of black people at the hands of police. Coates, a senior correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, just won a MacArthur "genius" grant and the Kirkus Prize. The book is a National Book Award finalist in nonfiction. Coates talks to about his sudden fame and growing up in Baltimore's dangerous neighborhoods.
No. I don't quite know what to make of it. I had no anticipation of the kind of success it's experienced. It just happened that the conversation [about the subject] was boiling. You can't know what the conversation is going to be.
It was inspired by The Fire Next Time, more by its gravity than anything. I thought - why don't people write short, powerful books like this? I had a memory of myself as a young person, sitting in the Founder's Library at Howard University, and reading Baldwin's Fire cover to cover. I wanted a book that a young person could do that with. I wrote it three or four times before I came up with the idea of a letter to my son.