Ta-Nehisi Coates is the James Baldwin for today

Ta-Nehisi Coates is unflinching in his address to the next generation of black men

Between the World and Me By Ta-Nehisi Coates Spigel & Grau 176 pp; $31

In living one’s life as a “minority” member of the population, it can be difficult to not feel like you’re living two lives. You’re always aware of the majority, who are the farthest thing from silent; you see how you are seen by others as readily as how you see yourself. There are the moments of peace with your friends, maybe your family, the people for whom you don’t have to preface certain thoughts, ideas and cultural references; and then there’s everyone else. Writing specifically about the African-American experience, preeminent thinker W.E.B. DuBois termed this phenomenon of multiple social identities as “double consciousness.” More than a century later, black people and immigrants still navigate life in Western societies in this way; today we have a term for how one’s language and behaviour may shift between social settings, it’s called “code switching.” Post-racialism can only really make sense when these lines are blurred; when white is not default and multiplicity isn’t deviant. To be able to be black or brown and Canadian without being made to feel insane is the goal.

The work of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic and burgeoning public intellectual, gives weight to this modern political identity. In the past week I’ve run into friends for whom Coates’ name, and news of his new book, Between the World and Me, inspires excitement, curiosity, a knowing nod.

His work, which can be divisive, is crucial reading for people of all races, particularly at a time when America is blithely exposing its own deep-rooted violence toward the black citizenry.

Double consciousness is at the root of Between the World and Me, Coates’ second book and an epistolary memoir written for his son, Samori. Early in his education, Coates was preoccupied with establishing a narrative that centralized his own very real experiences of being black in America, while re-animating centuries of narrative, mythology and history that had been rendered invisible by the construction of racial hierarchy. Coates looked for his own Tolstoy because, he writes, “Tolstoy was ‘white,’ and so Tolstoy ‘mattered,’ like everything else that was white ‘mattered.’” It was an attempt at heaving the overwhelming evidence (Malcolm X, rap music, the 16th century Central African ruler Queen Nzinga, Howard’s thriving black quad) at a world that erased or siloed knowledge as form of power.

So while Between the World and Me does address many of the contemporary issues covered in his essays and journalism for The Atlantic — such as economic and social inequity and police brutality — its underlying thesis, and maybe the only actionable solution other than outright revolution, is that we need to consolidate our consciousness. It is important for racialized people, particularly black people living in white, Western societies, to ensconce themselves in mirroring communities for both intellectual refuge and emotional sustenance. Not to hide, but as fortification against inescapable oppression. “I would not have you descend into your own dream,” Coates writes his son. “I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”

For a letter to a family member, Coates’ writing is quite intellectually rigorous. But he leaps from thought to lean thought — a technique picked up from an early infatuation with poetry, he writes — with the cadence of presumed comprehension. Between the World and Me isn’t a book for those who need to be convinced of the magnanimous depths of American racism; it’s intended to reinforce what Samori already knows on account of being his father’s son — what he knows about the colour of his own skin, and about the men who killed Michael Brown going free.

Exposing the seemingly invisible, or at least undocumented, forces that continue to atrophy large swaths of American society is Coates’ way of securing his son’s future. What James Baldwin did for one generation, Coates attempts for his son’s because, as he writes, “so much of my life was not knowing.” Between the World and Me dismantles the intense isolation that accompanies double consciousness as if to say, “You are not alone with these thoughts.” It builds on the work of the African-American intellectual canon, from Frederick Douglass to Malcolm X to Mobb Deep. And it also exposes Coates’ weak spots; he writes about overcoming his early homophobia, while reviews from some critics, such as Buzzfeed’s Shani Hilton, have singled out his continued blind spot toward the experiences and perspectives of black women.

Here, Coates’ ideas are neatly composed, but incomplete. Then again, Coates wouldn’t be who he is — a reluctant beacon of modern black thought, a font of communal vitriol and empathy — without being somewhat of a masochist, the thinker-out-loud unafraid to be right and wrong. “I found that I liked the pain of confusion, that I liked the incoherence between (Richard) Wright and (Zora Neale) Hurston, that I cared more about the search for royalty than about the discovery itself,” he writes. Coates knows that he works in a world that would permit just one of him, instead of multiple men and women asserting their humanity by dissenting and complicating the long-simplified narrative of the American black experience, and so Between the World and Me doesn’t have the answers. Instead, Coates is creating exactly the kind of new story he’d obsessed over finding in college, a helpful preface for his son’s future.