between the world and me.

Title: Between the World and Me

Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates

Why Read: 

“I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”

This one has been on my radar for a while, and after listening to an episode of This American Life, I remembered that I'd been meaning to read his book. (The segment is fun to listen to, pretty different from reading the book, though.)

The book is a good read. A difficult read, even though the book is short. As previously (and previously) mentioned on this blog, I do like an epistolary book - and this qualifies - it's a letter to his teenage son about his own experiences growing up Black in America, intertwined with a stories from Black American history. It's about how how much we've changed as a society, and how much we haven't, and what that means when we look at current events.

It is naive to be saddened by recent events and think that it's the beginning of tumultuous times. When in reality, these kinds of things have always been happening, we just didn't hear about them in the news; mainstream (white) society didn't care. It was normal. So here's to change, realizing that it takes time for things to change.