Coates insists on his vulnerability to spew hatred as he writes that the police officers and firefighters who died on September 11 “were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

Any interaction between Coates and a white person becomes invested with racial tension. A white woman pushes his son on an elevator and to Coates; it’s a case of her invoking her “right over the body of my son.” “Between the World and Me” is a fountain of such pseudo-Marxist legalisms in which “black bodies” are the engines of commerce and culture on which a vast evil white conspiracy squats.

The world of “Between the World and Me” is a cramped place in which white people are forever spindling, exploiting and mutilating black bodies whether it’s through slavery or elevator pushing. White people have oppressed Ta-Nehisi Coates in every literal and metaphorical sense possible, before moving on to oppressing his son and his descendants after him until the sun finally explodes and the earth dies.