Pastor Jerad’s book review

As a way to mark the three-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd on May 25, the DRT shares the following excerpt from Pastor Jerad’s review of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, Between the World and Me:

Readers of racial justice literature may be familiar with the phrase "black bodies" but as a white male I don't think I'd understood what the utility of the term was. But with Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, a mixture of autobiography and reflection on the lived experience of systemic racism in the United States written as a note to his then-teen son, this reader understood more viscerally what an emphasis on the embodied experience of being black achieves.

In the book, Coates recalls a moment leaving a movie theater with his son. A white woman pushes the 5-year-old because he is apparently walking too slowly. The protective father, Coates yells at her. A white man defends her. As a predominantly white crowd grows, Coates pushes the man, who then threatens to have him arrested. Coates feels certain that the man does have that power over him - that the man could cause him to be incarcerated, cause his son to be taken away by civil servants. In order to avoid this nightmare scenario arising from his own attempt to protect his son's body from white hands, the father finds another way to conclude the incident. But his own shakenness causes him to reflect on the violence he experienced growing up. For Coates' whole life in the United States he has been in a state of constant vigilance and readiness for danger.

Coates later shares that the constant thread of disembodiment - of not being in control of what happens to his own body - alters everything he knows. Has shaped every facet of who he understands himself to be, how he behaves and how he parents in the world. Not only does he have less control over what happens to his body - white bodies have more control over what happens with his and his son's bodies.

White bodies like mine do not experience that same constant vulnerability. For black bodies the danger of being misinterpreted - or even correctly interpreted but overreacted to - carries the real risk of physical and emotional pain in a way that people with white bodies do not experience with remotely similar regularity. That danger for a black body in the United States is near-constant.

Between the World and Me is recommended for the insight and visceral empathy it can engender towards black bodies. It helped me to better understand how my own presence, words and actions can be something against which black bodies must be vigilant whatever my intentions might be. The book gave me another lens through which to acknowledge white privilege and motivate repentance of the system that creates it.