With his critically acclaimed nonfiction work, Between The World And Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates laid himself bare. Writing the book as a letter to his then 15-year-old son, Coates unearthed memories from his boyhood in West Baltimore, then moved to his son’s birth and into the present day. Between The World And Me was published in 2015, just before Trump gave new life to the United States’ rotten core. In the years since, social media and the ubiquity of cameraphones has amplified Black death in the media. Police brutality, unyielding anti-Blackness, and an exhausting presidential election cycle have dominated our day-to-day lives. With history at his back and the events of his own Black life embedded in his memory, the journalist could not have predicted our current state when he first published his manuscript. Still, the author ended up pretty spot-on. Coates was brutally realistic about Black life, even then. In HBO’s film adaptation of the New York Times best-seller, his words echo across the screen, burrowing into our past and leaving hints about the future of Black America and this country.
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