Havurah Shalom

Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
    
October 27, 7 - 8:30 pm

Written as a series of letters to his teenage son, his memoir, Between the World and Me, Coates walks the reader through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University, New York and Paris. His message to his son is “in America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.”  Coates feels that the concept of race itself is a fabrication, elemental to the concept of American (white) exceptionalism. Thus, in his view Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, and South Carolina are not bumps on the road of progress and harmony, but the results of a systemized, ubiquitous threat to “black bodies” in the form of slavery, police brutality, and mass incarceration. Coates’s writing is direct, insightful and powerful. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, a MacArthur “Genius Grant” fellow, and recipient of the National Magazine Award, and the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

Discussion led by Marjorie Walters.