Coates’s debt to Baldwin is quite explicit. It joins Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped as recent, high-profile literary meditations on the tragedy of race in this country. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me is in the same mode of The Fire Next Time it is a book designed to wake you up. He woke me up, and gave me a way to keep moving through all of it. Meanwhile, my fellow students, the white ones, were incensed by OJ Simpson’s acquittal, even as they said nothing when a Bronx man named Anthony Baez was killed by a police officer in a chokehold.īaldwin came to me at the right time. Politicians who had just taken control of Congress were reading this book, and I could see already that it would lead to policies that would do harm. Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve – which argued that my intelligence would rate lower on the spectrum because of my race – had just been released. I had just finished a year at Columbia University as one of just a very few black students there. The months before I picked up that book had built in me a kind of dread I couldn’t name, spurred on by a constellation of events that were all designed to remind me of “my place”. At the time I was living in Morningside Heights, a neighborhood to the south-west of Harlem. I first read James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time 20 years ago, and it saved me.
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