When ‘Between the World and Me’ Faced a School Book Ban, Ta-Nehisi Coates Decided to Report It Out

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book, The Message, is out October 1 and can be preordered now.

The only book learning we ever got was when we stole it. Master bought some slaves from Cincinnati, that had worked in white folks’ houses. They had stole a little learning and when they came to our place, they passed on to us what they knew. We wasn’t allowed no paper and pencil. I learned all my ABCs without it. I knows how to read and ain’t never been in a school room in my life. There was one woman by the name of Aunt Sylvia. She was so smart she foreknowed things before they took place. —Mark Oliver

The summer of 2020 now feels like distant history, and it is easy to be cynical about that moment given the backlash that has followed that season of protests over the parade of Americans murdered by the forces we pay to protect us. But I remember an even more distant era, when the names of those killed died with the people who carried them. Those 2020 protests succeeded in implanting some skepticism in people who were raised on the idea of Officer Friendly. I think that is what the white supremacists feared most—the spreading realization that the cops were not knights and the creeping sense among Americans that there was something rotten not just in law enforcement but maybe also in the law itself. That fear explains the violence of the response to the protests, but even that violence redounded to the benefit of the protesters because it confirmed their critique. What was the justifiably noble interest that required tear-gassing protesters blocks from the Capitol, or the deployment of secret police in Portland, or the literal cracking of heads in Buffalo? While violence was never forsworn, by the end of summer white supremacists had learned a lesson: The war might be raging in the streets, but it could never be defeated there, because what they were ultimately fighting was the word.

Around the same time George Floyd was killed, Nikole Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for her lead essay in the 1619 Project, which argued for America’s origins not in the Declaration of Independence but in enslavement. Nikole is my homegirl, and like me, she believes that journalism, history, and literature have a place of honor in our fight to make a better world. I had the great fortune of watching her build the 1619 Project, of being on the receiving end of texts with highlighted pages from history books, of hearing her speak on the thrilling experience of telling our story, some 400 years after we arrived here, in all the grandeur it deserved. Seeing the seriousness of effort, her passion for it, the platform she commanded, and the response it garnered, I knew a backlash was certain to come. But I can’t say I understood how profound this backlash would be—that a “1776 Project” would be initiated by the president, that the 2020 protests would be dubbed by some on the right as the “1619 riots,” thus explicitly, if in bad faith, connecting the writing and the street, and that the White House would issue Executive Order 13950, targeting any education or training that included the notion that America was “fundamentally racist,” the idea that any race bore “responsibility for actions committed in the past,” or any other “divisive concept” that should provoke “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” It’s true that the order was revoked after its author lost the next election, but by that time it had spawned a suite of state-level variants—laws, policies, directives, and resolutions—all erected to excise “divisive concepts” from any training or education. The flag of parental rights was raised. In Tennessee and Georgia, teachers were fired. School boards in Virginia were besieged. And in North Carolina, Nikole’s tenure at the state’s flagship university—where she herself was an alum—was denied.

I guess it’s worth pointing out the obvious—that the very governors and politicians who loudly exalt the values of free speech are among the most aggressive prosecutors of “divisive concepts.” And I guess it should be noted that what these politicians—and even some writers—dubbed “critical race theory” bore little resemblance to that theory’s actual study and practice. So I will note it. But the simple fact is that these people were liars, and to take them seriously, to press a case of hypocrisy or misreading, is to be distracted again. “The goal,” as their most prominent activist helpfully explained, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and think ‘critical race theory.’ ” It worked. Today, some four years after the signing of 13950, nearly half the country’s schoolchildren have been protected, by the state, from “critical race theory” and other “divisive concepts.”

It may seem strange that a fight that began in the streets has now moved to the library, that a counterrevolution in defense of brutal policing has now transformed itself into a war over scholarship and art. But in the months after George Floyd’s murder, books by Black authors on race and racism shot to the top of best-seller and most-borrowed lists. Black bookstores saw their sales skyrocket. The cause for this spike was, in the main, people who had been exposed to the image of George Floyd being murdered who suddenly began to suspect that they had not been taught the entire truth about justice, history, policing, racism, and any number of other related subjects. The spike only lasted that summer—but it was enough to leave the executors of 13950 shook. And they were right to be.

History is not inert but contains within it a story that implicates the present. And framed a certain way, a story can be told that justifies the present political order. A political order is not just premised on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what unrealized possibilities can be imagined. Our possibilities are defined by our history, our culture, and our myths. That the country’s major magazines, newspapers, publishing houses, and social media were suddenly lending space to stories that questioned the agreed-upon narrative meant that it was possible that Americans, as a whole, might begin to question them too. And a new narrative—and a new set of possibilities—might then be born.

The truth is that even as I know and teach the power of writing, I still find myself in disbelief when I see that power at work in the real world. Maybe it is the nature of books. Film, music, the theater—all can be experienced amidst the whooping, clapping, and cheering of the crowd. But books work when no one else is looking, mind-melding author and audience, forging an imagined world that only the reader can see. Their power is so intimate, so insidious, that even its authors don’t always comprehend it. I see politicians in Colorado, in Tennessee, in South Carolina moving against my own work, tossing books I’ve authored out of libraries, banning them from classes, and I feel snatched out of the present and brought into another age, one of pitchforks and book-burning bonfires. My first instinct is to laugh, but then I remember that American history is filled with men and women as lethal as they were ridiculous. And when I force myself to take a serious look, I see something familiar: an attempt by adults to break the young minds entrusted to them and remake them in a more orderly and pliable form.

What these adults are ultimately seeking is not simply the reinstatement of their preferred dates and interpretations but the preservation of a whole manner of learning, austere and authoritarian, that privileges the indoctrination of national dogmas over the questioning of them. The danger we present, as writers, is not that we will simply convince their children of a different dogma but that we will convince them that they have the power to form their own.

I know this directly. I imagine my books to be my children, each with its own profile and way of walking through the world. My eldest, The Beautiful Struggle, is the honorable, hardworking son. He has that union job my father once aspired to, four kids, 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 gifts are most easily translated to the rest of the world. He plays in the NBA, enjoys the finer things, and talks more than he should. I see We Were Eight Years in Power as the insecure one, born in the shadow of my “gifted” son and who has never quite gotten over it. He has problems. We don’t talk about him much. All these children suspect that my daughter, my baby girl, The Water Dancer, is my favorite. Perhaps. She certainly is the one that is most like me—if a little better, more confident, and more self-assured. I see my books this way because it helps me remember that though they are made by me, they are not ultimately mine. They leave home, travel, have their own relationships, and leave their own impressions. I’ve learned it’s best to, as much as possible, stay out of the way and let them live their own lives.

My loyalty to that lesson is dispositional—I am often struck by secondhand embarrassment watching writers defend themselves against every bad review. But it’s also strategic: My work is to set the table, craft the argument, render the world as I imagine it, and then leave. Some people will like it, others won’t, and nothing can change that. I am at my worst out there defending my children and at my best out of the public eye, enjoying the pleasure of making more of them.

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But in the months after George Floyd, it became clear that this was a privilege. Out in the real world, teachers, parents, students, and librarians saw in this man’s murder an America they had not previously known. And with this new knowledge of the world, there came an urge to understand. When these people spoke out, they found their livelihoods imperiled. They did not have the luxury of declining to defend themselves. I think a lot about this one note I received from Woodland Park, Colorado. The school board was trying to ban Between the World and Me. A resident wrote urging me to reach out to one of the teachers who was fighting it. “He believes in you and your message (as do I),” the resident wrote. “And he has been suffering for it.” Suffering. It felt inhuman to let that pass. So I sent along a note of support. I even went on TV to call out the school board. But after that I retreated into my own private space of bookmaking.

And then I read about Mary Wood. The outlines of the case were not much different from others I’d heard about: She was a teacher in South Carolina who had been forced to drop Between the World and Me from her lesson plan because it made some of her students, in their words, “feel uncomfortable” and “ashamed to be Caucasian.” Moreover, they were sure that the very subject of the book—“systemic racism”—was “illegal.” These complaints bore an incredible resemblance to the language of 13950, which prohibited “divisive concepts” that provoked in students “discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.” And it was not just the students’ complaints that resembled the executive order—the South Carolina 2022 budget contained a prohibition lifted, nearly word for word, from 13950.

The connection between the legislation and 13950 was obvious. Still, for the first time I began to think about the vocabulary being employed—discomfort, shame, anguish—and how it read like a caricature of the vocabulary of safety that had become popular on campuses around the country. I suspect this was intentional. Oppressive power is preserved in the smoke and fog, and sometimes it is smuggled in the unexamined shadows of the language of the oppressed themselves. The strategy banks on the limited amount of time possessed by most readers and listeners and aims to communicate via shorthand that is just as often sleight of hand. It’s not surprising that everyday people grappling with laundry, PTA meetings, and bills do not always see the device and the deception. But the difference is clear—Mary’s protesting students were not looking to attach a warning to Between the World and Me about its disturbing imagery or themes but to have the book, by force of law, removed from the state’s school altogether.

Literature is anguish. Even small children know this. I was no older than five, crying in the back seat of my parents’ orange Volkswagen while they argued up front. When they turned to comfort me, they were shocked to learn that I was crying not about their argument but about the grasshopper who starved in winter while the ant feasted. The wolf devours Grandma. The gingham dog and the calico cat devour each other. I was not born into a religious home, but I knew that my peers had been raised on stories of God casting Adam and Eve from paradise for biting an apple, that he had destroyed all life save that contained in the ark on a whim, that he had condemned me and every other nonbeliever to eternal suffering. I suspect these believers would say that the anguish, this discomfort radiating out of their own gospel, is not incidental but is at the heart of its transformative power. For my part, the anguish of the story of the grasshopper and the ant was in the moral of the story: that laziness and foolishness made one worthy of starvation. This kind of retribution left me empty, and even then I felt I wanted no part of a world that called starvation just. That was my personal revelation—and one that apparently ran contrary to the story’s intended message. But in my anguish, in my disagreement with the core of the text, I found my truth. And that, I suspect, is the real problem. Whatever the attempt to ape the language of college students, it is neither anguish nor discomfort that these people were trying to prohibit. It was enlightenment.

I tracked down Mary’s number. We spoke for about a half an hour. She talked about the whole ordeal—the paranoia incited by anonymous complaints; the school board meetings where she was pilloried; the threats to her job. She spoke of the conservative tilt of the area where she taught, Chapin, South Carolina—a lakeside town to the northwest of the state capital of Columbia. She spoke of her own enlightenment, of going off to college and reading postcolonial literature until she felt the puzzle pieces of the world locking into place. She talked of George Floyd’s murder and how she’d formed a book group with her department in that watershed summer. That was how she found Between the World and Me. We were the same age. We both had children who drove us crazy. We both practiced yoga for sanity. And she needed it now, more than ever. All this she said in an accent that told me that she was not just from someplace but of that someplace. I have an accent just like that, remarkable as a facial scar. And there was something else just as remarkable. Mary didn’t teach civics or current events. She taught writing. Advanced Placement language and composition, to be precise. For the exam, students would have to write an argumentative essay themselves, and to help them learn how, she’d called upon Between the World and Me, my loud and boisterous second son. Perhaps I am straining the metaphor, but I really did feel like one of my children had gone and gotten someone else into trouble.

“What will you do next year?” I asked Mary toward the end of our phone call.

“I’m going to finish the lesson I started,” she said. “I’m going to teach Between the World and Me.”

I sat on the phone, silent, for eight seconds. Writing is all process to me, not finished work. It begins in the kind of anguish South Carolina sought to forbid, sometimes originating in something I’ve read, but more often in the world itself—in peoples and systems whose declared aims run contrary to their actions. And through reading, through reporting, I begin to comprehend a truth. That moment of comprehension is ecstatic. Writing and rewriting is the attempt to communicate not just a truth but the ecstasy of a truth. It is not enough for me to convince the reader of my argument; I want them to feel that same private joy that I feel. When I go out in the world, it’s gratifying to hear that people have shared part of that joy, but Mary didn’t just enjoy reading the book. The book had brought her into the fight.

I finally broke the silence. I told Mary that I had been thinking of coming down there, but I feared making a tense situation worse. Still she urged me to come. There was a school board meeting in a week, which she and some of her supporters would attend. I agreed to join them.

By the next week I was with Mary, eating salad and drinking iced green tea at a restaurant near Chapin. She was the portrait of a familiar Southern archetype—blond, kind, outgoing, homegrown, daughter of the local football coach and a kindergarten teacher. Her claim to Chapin was strong—stronger even than some of the parents who despised her. The town had seen an influx of families looking to live somewhere conservative and traditional. Mary wasn’t that. She was fighting for her job in the very school where she had earned her own high school diploma. How much this fact would help was unclear. Chapin High School was overseen by Lexington-Richland School District Five. The district has long leaned conservative. During the Trump years, it toppled. School board meetings had become an open mic for reactionaries, conspiracy theorists, and attention seekers. The visible radicalization began with the district’s response to COVID—local residents began queuing up at meetings to denounce quarantining as tyranny. I’ve watched videos of these events, and they feel formless—a rage in search of a cause. The rage went from masking and vaccination to DEI and pronouns. Something called “emotional learning” would catch an occasional stray. But mostly, the great enemy of Chapin was critical race theory. It was said that District Five had become a staging ground for “educational warfare” on CRT, a doctrine that was held responsible for “anxiety, depression, and self-hatred,” that raised suicide rates, and that made students “ashamed to be white.” I was told that there was an occasional air of menace at the meetings, as when one speaker warned the board, “We are watching,” or another claimed that the country was under the sway of practitioners of “pagan ways” and exponents of “child sacrifice” and the “drinking of blood.” And it was quite normal for such sentiments to be applauded by spectators.

That District Five school board meetings had become contentious was reflected in the security that greeted me at the door. I had to empty my pockets, permit my bag to be searched, and pass through a metal detector. On the other side I saw two beefy men dressed in army green with visible bulletproof vests. This struck me as a bad omen. But the guards greeted me politely, and when Mary and I turned the corner into the hallway leading to the meeting room, we were met by a woman named Brandi, a middle school science teacher. She stood in front of a table handing out flyers against censorship, and when she saw us, she smiled warmly.

Inside the meeting room, people milled around and chatted. There were tables at the front of the room, assembled in a U shape, with microphones and nameplates for the various officers of the district. We walked over to the side of the room opposite from the tables, where Mary’s mother, Kathryn, waited for us. I shook her hand and her eyes grew big and she smiled. She pointed us to our seats, which she’d reserved, and in mine I found a copy of Between the World and Me.

“Would you sign, please?” Kathryn asked, still smiling.

I signed, sat down, and scanned the crowd. What I noticed was that half the people in the room were wearing blue T-shirts. Mary explained that blue was the school color, and Brandi had organized a group of sympathizers on Facebook, asking them to wear blue to show their support for Mary. An older woman named Bobbie sat next to me and we struck up a conversation. She did not know Mary and did not wear a blue T-shirt. But she explained that after George Floyd’s death, her church had created a reading group around race. (She’d become a huge Colson Whitehead fan.) The head of that group read about Mary and urged all the members to come out and show support. This was the second time I’d heard of a reading group in this town as the epicenter of political disruption. From bell hooks on, books by Black authors helped Mary understand “why things are so fucked up.” And it was these books that had brought Bobbie out to support Mary.

I understand the impulse to dismiss the import of the summer of 2020, to dismiss the “national conversations,” the raft of TV specials and documentaries, even the protests themselves. Some of us see the lack of policy change and wonder if the movement itself was futile. But policy change is an end point, not an origin. The cradle of material change is in our imagination and ideas. And whereas white supremacy, like any other status quo, can default to the clichéd claims and excuses for the world as it is—bad cops are rotten apples, America is guardian of the free world—we have the burden of crafting new language and stories that allow people to imagine that new policies are possible. And now, even here in Chapin, some people, not most (it is hardly ever most), had, through the work of Black writers, begun that work of imagining.

The board chair gaveled the meeting to order at 7 p.m. sharp. She noted the full house and seemed to be girding herself for what was coming. The board called for a moment of silence for “a great tragedy,” the specifics of which the chair did not explain. There was a prayer and the pledge of allegiance and a report from the superintendent on “academic freedom.” From that point, allusions to Mary’s case crept into the board’s business until about an hour in, when, the undercard having been completed, the main event commenced. The board was giving the community its opportunity to speak.

As the first woman approached the microphone, I scanned the room, trying to ascertain the breadth of Mary’s support. Only a few weeks earlier, parents were queued up, at this same meeting, to demand her firing. Now when I looked out, I saw that the blue T-shirts were populous enough to indicate that her backers were deep. And then the comments began. It was a blowout. Parent after parent lined up to support Mary, most of them met by whooping cheers. A 14-year-old girl stood up and quoted from Between the World and Me, noting that in all her time in school she had never been assigned a book by a Black author. Mary cried silently and whispered to me a running commentary about each speaker—their family, their occupation, whether they had kids in the district. No one, not a single speaker, stood up to support the book’s banning. I was initially surprised by this, but later I understood—school board meetings, and local politics, are small affairs, easily dominated by an organized faction, and that night the faction was Mary’s.

Sometimes I will be at a reception or an event or even out on the street, and a brother will approach me to thank me for my work, and his build, how he moves, his language, his haircut will inform me that he has just finished a bid. I see these brothers and I remember my time teaching in a prison. I see these brothers and I see that shadow version of myself that my parents and teachers warned would take shape if the notes in lipstick red continued, if my “conduct” did not improve. The line between me and them, between me and the shadow, feels thin. I don’t think I have an intended reader—audience is not something I think about directly—but if I did, it would be those brothers, or rather that younger version of them trying to navigate the line. There was not a single person like that in the audience at that hearing, which was about what I expected. And I’d spoken to enough audiences to understand that if you’re lucky, your writing moves beyond its imagined recipients. But I wasn’t speaking here. I wasn’t even the subject. What I seemed to be witnessing was less about a book as it was about something more localized—a kind of referendum on the school district’s identity.

Mary taught an Advanced Placement class, which is to say her audience was not kids meandering off to college, as I had, but students aiming for college credits and a head start in that world. There was a sense in the room that avoiding “divisive concepts” was not just wrong on moral grounds but that it represented a lowering of standards; that to ban a book was to erect a kind of South Carolina exception for Advanced Placement—one that validated the worst caricatures of Southern whiteness often bandied by the kind of Northerner who thinks, We should have just let them secede. The room was embarrassed. I remember one man, Josh Gray, a professor at the University of South Carolina, standing up, his hair pulled back in a ponytail, and bringing this self-inflicted humiliation into view in a way that would never have occurred to me. “I can tell you, as a redneck who’s worked all over the world and met people from all over the world,” he said, “don’t make the perception that [the students] have to compete against worse by actions like this that do not reflect well on our community.”

This may seem self-interested, a stance taken more to avoid a stigma than to break an arrangement of power. It’s a legitimate question—especially in the age of social media and loud virtue signaling that followed 2020. But virtues should be signaled, and the signalers should act to make their virtues manifest. It is the absence of the latter, not the presence of the former, that is the problem. And I doubt that anyone ever parts with power in the name of charity. In this case, self-interest meant that here in the heart of Jim Crow, and Redemption, ideas to the contrary could not be driven from the public square. And that is progress. It just isn’t inevitable that such progress continues.

The following afternoon, I met Mary for barbecue. I was actually giddy from the night before. I had expected to come into a den of hectoring fanatics. And instead I’d found that there were allies fighting back. Allies. When I started writing, it felt essential to think of white people as readers as little as possible, to reduce them in my mind to resist the temptation to translate. I think that was correct. What has been surprising—pleasantly so—is that there really is no translation needed, that going deeper actually reveals the human. Get to the universal through the specific, as the rule goes. Still, even as I have come to understand this, it feels abstract to me. What I wanted was to be Mary for a moment, to understand how she came to believe that it was worth risking her job over a book.

Mary’s grandfather was a social worker and World War II vet who was blinded disarming mines. He came home a ferocious advocate for the disabled, but Black disabled veterans particularly. Although Mary knew her grandfather, he didn’t talk about his history as an activist. She found out from a book after his death. Her parents were more liberal than the norm—the type who in a red voting district still put out a Biden 2020 lawn sign. But what she mostly had growing up was an ill-defined sense that the world, as it was conventionally explained, didn’t make sense. She’d been bred to be a Southern lady, but it didn’t really take. She had to be bribed into etiquette class with Bojangles. In church, Mary did not obsess over being saved so much as she wondered why there were no women in the pulpit. And then in college, books righted the frame: She read bell hooks’s Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. When she finished, she called her mother and said, “This is why things are so fucked up.” It was exactly the experience that the purveyors of 13950, the book banners, and those targeting CRT were seeking to prevent.

We finished eating and took a drive over to the state capital. South Carolina was the first state to secede and also the state where both Reconstruction and Redemption reached their most spectacular ends. All through that period, South Carolina had been a majority-Black state, and at the height of Reconstruction, before its undoing in Redemption, the state was home to an emancipated working class and a multiracial democracy. It’s quite the story—but it’s not the one that the State House tells. There is a beautiful sculpture there wrought by the astronaut turned artist Ed Dwight. But most of the sprawling 22 acres of the State House proper are a shrine to white supremacy. A collection of giant statues sits on raised platforms, so that men like Strom Thurmond, who pinned his entire political career on segregation, loom like gods. Wade Hampton, who enslaved generations and then fought in a bloody war to uphold that system, is there. So is Ben Tillman, who once boasted of lynching from the Senate floor. Tillman knew of what he spoke. In 1876, Tillman pitched in to massacre Black people in Hamburg, and in 1895, he’d rallied white South Carolinians to write Black people out of the state’s constitution. The movement to erase Black people from politics swept through the South and won the day in legislatures, state houses, and courts. But if you just looked at the obvious organs of the government, you’d miss the breadth of the attack.

We have lived under a class of people who ruled American culture with a flaming cross for so long that we have sometimes failed to recognize the political power of culture. But they have not. And so the Redeemers of this age look out and see their kingdom besieged by trans Barbies, Muslim mutants, daughters dating daughters, sons trick-or-treating as African kings. The fear instilled by this rising culture is not for what it does today but what it augurs for tomorrow—a different world in which the boundaries of humanity are not so easily drawn and enforced. In this context, the Mom for Liberty shrieking “Think of the children!” must be taken seriously. What she is saying is that her right to the America she knows, her right to the biggest and greenest of lawns, to the most hulking and sturdiest SUVs, to an arsenal of infinite AR-15s, rests on a hierarchy, on an order, helpfully explained and sanctified by her country’s ideas, art, and methods of education.

That is the heart of it. It is not a mistake that Mary teaches writing at its most advanced level and has found herself a target. Much of the current hoopla about book bans and censorship gets it wrong. This is not personal—it is political. It is not about me or any other writer. It is about all of us—writers and readers, comrades, and the work we do together. To think. To question. To imagine. I can’t say I always knew it, but in my time teaching it soon became clear that becoming a good writer would not be enough. We needed more writers, and I had a responsibility to help them as a reader, to be an active audience for the stories they wanted to tell, or as a teacher, so that they could learn to tell them better, to reach deeper into their own truth in the same way that brought me euphoria, and reach into the hearts of readers and set them on fire, as Mary had been set on fire since college: by words on a page.

As we walked the grounds of the State House, I thought about what it meant for a young student to visit these same grounds. I thought about what it must mean to walk amongst these Klansmen, enslavers, and segregationists raised up on their platforms to the status of titans. I thought about what it means to go back to the schools, where work rooted in these truths is slowly being pushed out, to the libraries that are being bleached of discomforting stories. And I thought how it all works not simply to misinform but to miseducate; not just to assure the right answers are memorized but that the wrong questions are never asked.

The statues and pageantry can fool you. They look like symbols of wars long settled and on behalf of men long dead. But their Redemption is not about honoring a past. It’s about killing a future.