Ta-Nahesi Coates, Between the World and Me 
Why continue working with BTWAM in WR 122 and WR 123? Avinnash Tiwari responds to this question, considering UO’s selection of BTWAM as the school’s “Common Reading” for 2016-2017, the text’s place in African American literary history, and the challenges, responsibilities, and possibilities tied up in using Coates’ text as the central course reader for writing classes.
—by Avinnash Tiwari, Career Instructor of English, September 2017
In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live—specifically, how do I live free in this black body? It is a profound question because America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. I have asked the question through my reading and writings, through the music of my youth, through arguments with your grandfather, with your mother, your aunt Janai, your uncle Ben. I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment. (Coates 12)
The University of Oregon selected Ta-Nahesi Coates’s Between the World and Me as their “common reading” selection for AY 2016. As with most common reading programs, committees select a new text each year and the wider campus community supports student engagement in a myriad of ways. And as a campus community, we experienced museum exhibits, all kinds of classes, a visit from Coates, town-hall style discussions, speakers and screenings. Heck, even the abbreviation for the book, BTWAM, became its own readily-recognizable signifier on campus. By spring term, a student relayed to me that all four classes they were taking that term were using, in some capacity, BTWAM.
Along with worrying about “Coates overload,” I also heard from students that the plethora of Coates-centered offerings were not all that productive, i.e., faculty were not necessarily prepared for working with the text, especially when it came to difficult moments teaching racism, race, blackness, and power. Defaulting to a (more familiar?) critical lens of “whiteness” seems to make sense here at the UO; however, this approach towards thinking about power and difference is something Coates himself pushes back on, as do others (a great talk on the limits of “white privilege” as critical lens about 20 min in). And while many people around the nation were blown away by the “newness” of the thing, BTWAM actually exists in long and deep African American literary and cultural traditions, like the Jeremiad for example (here’s some thoughts about the text’s place in Af-Am Lit by actual African Americanists!). A brief literary history alone would bring up the very simple question: why this same/different letter from the same/different man, again? In other words, lots of shit could go sideways working with this text in this place and time. Robin Kelley takes a nuanced approach to understanding just how sideways things can get when a singular text like Coates garners so much attention in our particular moment of readily-spectacular state and extra-state violence, Black Lives Matter, and resurgent student activism.
In addition to all that context, one of the most frustrating components of writing around power and difference lies simply in the fact that this stuff doesn’t make sense. None. The ideas behind raced and sexed differences, making the unequal distribution of power possible, are completely and utterly illogical. And really, if we honestly follow how “reason” has come to us English-speaking folks, then the colored peoples of the world are incapable of reason; as Fanon put it in Black Skins, White Masks, “reason takes flight whenever the black enters the scene” (see Gordon’s discussion on this). Diving headfirst into intellectual work on America, power, and difference already means we’re going to be pushing our logical bounds, testing our reason, and we’ll have to be particularly careful about how we write it all up. So why keep going, why continue with the text?
Despite and Because of all these complications, Between the World and Me is an incredible resource for facilitating work around written inquiry and reason, especially within our American context (see Angela Rovak’s post for an idea of just how timely this work can be). In the quote above, Coates presents his stakes for writing and his “question at issue,” the question of his life: “how do I live free in this black body?” He identifies the major contradiction and unstated assumption that undergirds his question, that makes it an “unanswerable” question: “America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men.” What does it mean that America sees itself as the fulfillment of providence, even when “G-d” is not explicitly mentioned? How does understanding what Coates means by “black body” counter America’s holy mythology? Why are stories, words, and their circulating meanings so important? How does writing and reading and thinking, you know, an education, become this thing that makes it possible for Coates to “live within the all of it” (12)? Why does Coates, whenever he drops a beautifully-crafted bomb on the reader, like the one above, or the homecoming passage at the end, break things up with an image of Samori and his pop? Does he remind both the reader and himself that words are somehow inadequate to capture that (afro-pessimist) contradiction he attempts to articulate of living in social death (see Jared Sexton’s piece here): “They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people” (149)?
These are incredibly difficult and challenging questions. I don’t have any answers to these questions, just ideas I test with those most difficult critics, my students while they also get a chance to push the bounds of what they know. Every time I pick this book up, every time I met with colleagues (and later students) at our informal Friday afternoon chats, and hopefully for students working with it, we were all so aware of just how little we know and understand, and just how important our questions are. We are constantly forced, as Coates is throughout the text, to find balance between calling shit out for what it is, and not getting lost in it, for finding those ways of living within the all of it. We must, as Coates does, craft our questions carefully only by working through the problems we face and the problems we hide (from), and by examining our question from multiple positions and viewpoints. We must be precise and mindful with our words and with how we tell our stories. And, for whatever it’s worth, we get to introduce to our students something possibly new for them, and hopefully still familiar for us, what it’s like to sit with a book for a little while.