Event Calendar

Anti-Racism Book Club

Tuesday, March 2 at 7:30pm

The Smith’s current Anti-Racism Book Club pick is Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

RSVP to the March 2, 2021 discussion!

From Executive Director Susie Monagan: Maybe you’re like me and are feeling the call to further educate yourself along the path to anti-racism. Maybe, also like me, you do better with some extrinsic motivation (yes, peer pressure) to organize your time and reading materials. Please join me in reading and discussing books over the next six months as part of The Smith’s Anti-Racism Book Club.

Anti-Racism Book Club

Thank you to everyone participated in our discussion of Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be Antiracist! The Anti-Racism Book Club’s next book is Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Our virtual book club discussion will be held on Tuesday, March 2, 2021 @ 7:30pm.

RSVP to the discussion! 

Between the World and Me

Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone)
In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Photo of Ta-Nehisi Coates sitting in a blue suit looking to the right

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a distinguished writer in residence at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is the author of the bestselling books The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between The World And Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. His first novel, The Water Dancer, was released in September 2019. Ta-Nehisi is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He is also the current author of the Marvel comics The Black Panther and Captain America.

 

Book cover of Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates