Between The World and Me

3/5

That score refers to our purposes for this class, and not the book itself.  Coates’s book is one of the most widely heralded books of 2015 and deservedly so.  It recently won the National Book Award among many, many honors.  I have not finished it all but I have to say what I have read is extremely good stuff.  Good, powerful, critical, elegant, poetic, sad, heart-breaking stuff.

It is only 152 pages, but yet quite dense.  Written as a series of letters to his son, Coates addresses recent deaths such as Tamir Rice to talk about race not as a “defined, indubitable feature of the natural world” but as a social construct that nevertheless has real, profound consequences on the bodies of young black men.

LSEM is a place that is difficult enough to even start thinking about race; this book asks us to think about race in ways you might start addressing in a grad class.

I like to think of white students having to read a book where they are not the intended audience and to approach privilege from a place of narrative, but that to is something that you have to get to slowly in a class.

My overall point I suppose is that I am glad I mentioned this book as a part of our possible reads but I also cannot believe that it would be a viable choice.  I’d love to have our students at the level where they could really tackle a book like this one, but I also understand that they aren’t necessarily ready at this stage, as much as I am not sure I am either.  It is a really, really striking book though.  I wish I could say it had a place in LSEM.

test Filed under Uncategorized | Comments Off on Between The World and Me