It was hard to get through BtWaM, and not because of the dense, beautiful prose or the sprawling indictment of the American institution. The central thing Coates keeps returning to is the physical body as a symbol of freedom, and how whips and belts and chains and bullets don’t just rend the flesh but slay the freedom supposedly bestowed on each American. I’m a white kid from suburban Virginia; I can’t say that the idea of bodily harm resonated with me, but its lack of resonance — and the conviction with which Coates refuses to eulogize a “stillborn” American dream — speaks volumes to me about my privilege and the harrowing experiences I’ll never suffer from.

★★★★★

Highlights

I drove away from the house of Mable Jones thinking of all of this. I drove away, as always, thinking of you. I do not belive that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones’s home. They were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years ago, the same ghettos where my mother was raised, where my father was raised. Through the windshield I saw the marks of the ghettos—the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and crumbling houses—and I felt the old fear. Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets.