On Reading: Between the World and Me — What We Inherit

I recently joined a book club for Black men here in Austin. The first book on the docket was Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a book written as a three-part letter to his son exploring the fear and vulnerability that comes from living in a Black body in America.

What stuck with me were not the larger emotionally charged moments, but the quieter ones that live between them. That is where life happens. It is where we grow through experience and connection.

The book reveals a tension between fear and expansion. Between the survival rules we inherit when we are young and the frameworks we eventually choose to apply when we are older.

Observation 1: The Rules We Inherit

The book begins with Coates discussing rules for survival. These are the implicit ones we learn from our environments.

Parents often instill these rules through fear. Not out of malice, but out of love. Sometimes they are delivered harshly because there is no time to explain the system behind them. Better a parent’s discipline than the violence of the world.

Some rules feel universal for Black people. Others are shaped by the specific neighborhoods and environments we grow up in. Rules about how to move, how to speak, and how to be perceived. Rules meant to keep you safe. Rules meant to keep you alive.

But rules for survival are not always sufficient for living.

They create tension between who we are and who we are expected to be. Between caution and freedom.

There are still rules I am unlearning or loosening in my own life as I search for a sense of harmony. There are also rules I think about potentially passing down to my own children one day, if I have them. I can only hope to deliver them with more care and context.

Observation 2: Expansion Through the World

The moments that stayed with me most in this book were the smaller ones where Coates describes his world expanding.

He writes about new people he meets, new ideas he encounters, and the way his thinking shifts as he moves through different spaces. That expansion grows even more when he finally travels abroad. After hearing about his wife’s experiences in Paris, he overcomes his fear of leaving the country and makes the trip himself.

That moment made me think of the Aaron Aye song Afraid and the lyric:

“On the other side of fear, life is beautiful.”

I once heard Donald Glover say this might be the first generation where Black people truly have room to fail. That also means room to explore.

Historically, Black children heading to college are often encouraged toward stability-driven paths such as doctor, lawyer, engineer, or business. There is nothing wrong with those careers, but they’re often chosen out of fear, not desire. Our options are limited to the world we know. 

During a recent discussion, someone mentioned not wanting to send their child to college because they could learn everything on YouTube and save money. It’s foolish. That completely misunderstands what education offers.

The value of college is not just knowledge. It is exposure.

It is the people you meet.The environments you experience.The ideas you encounter that challenge how you see the world.

In that same conversation another person once told us about a former classmate studying agrostology, the science of grass, to manage golf course turf at country clubs. It was a six-figure career path most people would never even imagine existed.

So many experiences, interactions, or even what we consume have the possibility to expand how we see and navigate the world. 

Our understanding of ourselves is limited not only by the world we’ve encountered, but the world we can imagine and the person we can envision living in that world.

Fear shrinks the imagination and in turn our identity.

Experience builds confidence and possibility. It expands both.

Observation 3: Rules Become Frameworks

The experience and encounters that expand our world, shift our perspectives, and cultivate our identities, change how we navigate the world. 

We rethink the rules we inherited. What once helped us survive may not apply in the same way in new environments. Neighborhoods change. Opportunities change. Our understanding changes. The rules of survival and the lessons of life cannot remain rigid or deterministic.

As adults, the task is not to discard those rules or deny their usefulness. Instead we transform them. We use our judgement, wisdom, and perspective to shift the rules into frameworks.

Frameworks we carry and decide when and where to apply. Frameworks that allow us to navigate different situations and environments, even those that bring about fear, with a level of safety, competence, and confidence. 

The rules kept us alive. The frameworks allow us to live.

What father’s pass down

The final reflection from my time reading Between the World and Me is not so much an observation. It was a feeling of yearning. 

Reading Coates’ vulnerable letter to his son made me think about my own relationship with my father.

My father and I talk every week. Still, the connection often feels surface level. Last year we traveled together to London and Paris. I quietly hoped the new environment and the shared experience might spark something deeper. I hoped for more fatherly guidance that was only sparingly shared during my youth. I hoped to see a new side of my father, a more open and vulnerable side. I hoped the trip might create space for the kind of wisdom fathers pass down to sons once they become men. A step beyond the rules and lessons shared when boys are young. I hoped for a deepening of connection.

But those conversations never really came. And that too has to be okay.

It may simply be a limitation he inherited from his own father.

Recognizing that becomes part of the framework I carry forward. It shapes how I live now and what I may one day pass down myself.