Banned Book #4: Between the World and Me

Note: This is a paid post, but a version of it is also free here, courtesy of the Center for Educator Wellness and Learning.

I’m working on a series of pieces on significant banned/ challenged books. I also wrote about Jason Reynolds’ Stamped, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist, and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s WE. I plan to continue with books that are either being banned/ challenged today, or add more to the historical/ literary context of movements to ban books and ideas.

There is some passing acknowledgement of the bad old days, which by the way, were not so bad as to have any ongoing effect on our present. The mettle that it takes to look away from the horror of our prison system, from police forces transformed into armies, from the long war against the black body, is not forged overnight. This is the practiced habit of jabbing out one’s eyes and forgetting the work of one’s hands.

-Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

My most vivid memory of reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me for the first time is of sitting in my car in downtown Columbia, reading a passage—probably one about the death of Coates’ former Howard University classmate and friend Prince Jones¹— and sobbing. At the time, protestors were gathering only blocks away at the South Carolina State House, holding signs and chanting about yet another killing of a young, unarmed Black American. Suddenly, Coates’ book wasn’t abstract, a series of “issues” upon which to reflect. It was raw and human. It made me think forcefully of young Black men I had worked with in English classes over the years, about their past experiences, about their possible futures.

That is the true, obvious power of literature: it transports you without warning into something like another person’s existence. The best literature does this in a way that is painful, jarring, uncomfortable. It strikes your psyche with its weight and moves you, perhaps against your will, out of your own being and briefly into a glimpse of someone else’s.

That’s the kind of literature that got me through sixteen years of teaching in a state that increasingly hates its teachers and increasingly sees its students as numbers on a political balance sheet.