“This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”

Oh, this book. This book, you guys.

“But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.”

Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his son, a letter that tries to explain the world, to answer questions, to ask more questions. It’s about race and history and injustice. It’s beautifully written. Coates mentions several times that he used to write “bad poetry”, and I doubt it could have been all that bad because this book sounds like poetry. I listened to the audio version, read by the author, and while I wish that I’d had a hard copy to highlight lines in, I’m also so glad that I listened to him read it because he brought it to life. It was like listening to music read aloud — his cadence, his emphasis. Amazing.