Between the World and Me Lesson Plan

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me is his acclaimed 2015 book, written in the form of a letter to his teenage son, Samori, in which the author discusses what it means to be a black person in America. Written in a passionate, introspective, and lyrical style, the book talks about everything from Coates’s upbringing in Baltimore, to his cultivation of a political and intellectual consciousness at Howard University in the 1990s, to the ways in which the black body has always been subjugated and marked for destruction in the United States. Coates places contemporary events like the killings of Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin within a larger narrative of black struggle, drawing...