As ‘Between the World and Me’ Faces Textbook Ban, Ta-Nehisi Coates Decides to Report
I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s the governors and politicians who loudly extol the values of free speech who are the most aggressive prosecutors. “divisive concepts.” And I guess we should note that what these politicians—and even some writers—call “critical race theory” has very little in common with the actual research and practice of that theory. So I will note it. But the simple truth is that these people are liars, and to take them seriously, to insist on a case of hypocrisy or misunderstanding, is to be distracted again. “The goal,” as their most famous activist helpfully explained, “is to get the public to read something crazy in the newspaper and think ‘critical race theory.’” It worked. Today, some four years after the signing of 13950, nearly half of the country’s school-age children are protected by the state from “critical race theory” and other “divisive concepts.”
Homes and businesses burn in the aftermath of the Tulsa race massacre, June 1921. Protesters hold pictures of George Floyd at a Juneteenth protest in Brooklyn, 2020. Indigenous warrior Medicine Owl, circa 1920.Illustration by Yannick Lowery.
It may seem strange that a fight that began in the streets has now moved to libraries, that a counterrevolution defending police brutality has now morphed into a fight over academia and art. But in the months since the murder of George Floyd, black author books on race and racism bestseller and most borrowed book list. Black Bookstore saw their sales skyrocket. The main reason for this spike was people exposed to images of George Floyd’s murder, who suddenly began to suspect that they hadn’t been taught the whole truth about justice, history, police, racism, and any number of other related topics. The spike only lasted that summer—but it was enough to shock the executors of the will of 13950. And they were right.
History is not static; it contains a story that is relevant to the present. And framed in a certain way, a story can be told to justify the current political order. A political order based not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, that is, on the unrealized possibilities that can be imagined. Our possibilities are defined by our history, our culture, and our myths. The fact that the country’s major magazines, newspapers, publishers, and social media are suddenly making room for stories that question the established narrative means that Americans, in general, may begin to question it too. And a new story—and a new set of possibilities—may then be born.
The truth is that even though I know and teach about the power of writing, I still find myself in disbelief when I see that power at work in the real world. Maybe that’s the nature of books. Movies, music, theater—they can all be experienced amid the cheers, applause, and roars of a crowd. But books work when no one else sees them, connecting the minds of the author and the audience, creating an imaginary world that only the reader can see. Their power is so intimate, so insidious, that even their authors don’t always understand it. I see politicians in Colorado, Tennessee, South Carolina protesting my work, throwing the books I’ve written out of libraries, banning them from classrooms, and I feel myself being pulled out of the present and transported into another era, an era of pitchforks and book fires. My first instinct was to laugh, but then I remembered that American history is full of men and women both deadly and ridiculous. And when I forced myself to look back, I saw something familiar: an adult’s attempt to break the child’s mind entrusted to them and rework them in a more orderly and flexible form.
What these adults ultimately seek is not simply a return to their preferred times and interpretations but the perpetuation of a whole way of learning, rigorous and authoritarian, that prioritizes the indoctrination of national dogmas over the questioning of them. The danger we, as writers, pose is not that we will simply convince their children of another dogma but that we will convince them that they have the right to form their own dogmas.
I know this well. I imagine my books as my children, each with its own personality and way of moving through the world. My oldest, Beautiful struggle, was a respectable, hard-working son. He had the union job my father had wanted, four children, and a wife he met in high school. My second son, Between the World and Me, is the “gifted” one, or rather the one whose gift is most easily communicated to the rest of the world. He plays in the NBA, likes the finer things, and talks more than he should. I find We have been in power for eight years. as an insecure child, born in the shadow of my “gifted” son and never quite getting over it. She had problems. We didn’t talk about it much. All these kids suspected that my daughter, my little girl, Water dancer, is my favorite. Probably. She’s definitely the one who’s most like me—if a little nicer, more confident, and self-assured. I look at my books this way because it helps me remember that even though I created them, they’re not mine. They leave home, travel, have their own relationships, and leave their own impressions. I’ve learned that it’s best, as much as possible, to stay out of the way and let them live their own lives.
My adherence to that lesson is instinctive—I’m often baffled by how writers defend themselves against every bad review. But it’s also strategic: My job is to set the table, make the argument, recreate the world as I imagine it, and then leave. Some people will like it, others won’t, and nothing can change that. I’m at my worst when I’m out there defending my kids and at my best when I’m out of the public eye, enjoying the joy of making more kids.
But in the months since George Floyd, it has become clear that this is a privilege. Out in the real world, teachers, parents, students, and librarian saw in the murder of this man an America they had never known before. And with this new knowledge of the world came a compulsion to understand. When these people spoke up, they saw that their livelihood was at stake. They did not have the luxury of refusing to defend themselves. I think a lot about this note I received from Woodland Park, Colorado. The school board had tried to ban Between the world and me. One resident wrote me urging me to contact one of the teachers who was struggling. “He believed in you and your message (as did I),” the resident wrote. “And he suffered because of it.” Anguished. I felt it was inhumane to let that go. So I sent a note of support. I even went on TV to call the school board. But then I retreated back into my private betting space.
And then I read about Mary Wood. The case was not much different from others I had heard of: She was a teacher in South Carolina who had been forced to drop out of school. Between the World and Me from her lesson plans because it made some of her students, in their words, “feel uncomfortable” and “ashamed of being white.” Furthermore, they were certain that the very subject of the book—“systemic racism”—was “illegal.” These complaints bore a striking resemblance to the language of 13950, which prohibits “divisive concepts” that cause students “discomfort, guilt, distress, or any other form of psychological distress due to their race or sex.” And it’s not just the student complaints that resemble the executive order—South Carolina’s 2022 budget includes a ban that’s been lifted, almost word for word, from 13950.
