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When Between the world and me landed on shelves five summers ago, it only had one blurb, from Toni Morrison. The late standard-bearer called Ta-Nehisi Coates’ second book the follow-up to his 2008 memoir The beautiful fight, “Required reading.”
For people around the world, this is what it has become. Between the world and Me exceeded New York Times bestseller, won a National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. This seminal work on racism in America, billed as a letter to Coates’ then 15-year-old son, has only become more popular and vital since then, as the conversation about the importance of black lives in America has stepped up. Now he’s ready to reach an even wider audience, as a film adaptation debuts tomorrow night on HBO and HBO Max (8 p.m. EST).
Designed and directed by Apollo Theater Executive Director Kamilah Forbes – a friend of the Coates family and alumnus of Howard University – the film features luminaries such as Oprah Winfrey, Mahershala Ali, Black Thought and Angela Bassett reading passages from the book. It is dedicated to the late actor Chadwick Boseman, whose moving 2018 Howard launch speech is included, as well as documentary footage of the civil rights unrest this summer and even Amy Cooper’s infamous 9-1-1 call. in Central Park. Crucially, it is also adds the voice of Tamika Palmer, mother of Breonna Taylor, speaking in interviews Coates conducted for Vanity Fair about what happened to his killed daughter.
Like the book, the film invites all who watch to identify with and be intimate with black experiences. It is easy to see how, given Between the world and methe metamorphosis of metamorphosis into a global media phenomenon, some might confuse it with some sort of antacid to American racism and the bile it produces. However, Coates told me during our conversation, “I never thought my art or what I did was meant to get white people to do the right thing. What was it used for then? “I thought the responsibility of my writing was to let black people know that they are not crazy.”
Coates, who is now working on a script adaptation from his first novel The water dancer, spoke in depth about The HBO Project, its writing process, the misdeeds of Twitter, life in the Covid era and much more in the latest edition of our Interview RS: special edition.
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