White People Problems →
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me is written as a letter to his 15-year-old son. It’s available for the rest of us to read wherever books are sold, but this epistolary trope makes reading it an act of voyeurism. I believe Coates is fully aware of this. The white faces peering over the picket fences are a constant presence at the book’s margins. I believe Coates wants “white” America to see and at the same time to know its distance from the realities he describes.