Thoughts on "Between the World and Me"

I recently finished the most powerful book I have read in years: "Between the World and Me" by Ta-Nehesi Coates. Frankly, it is not the type of book I often read; it is short and contains almost no numbers or statistics. Instead, the book is letter from the author to his son on the experience of being a black man in America today. The specifics of his story are powerful, the philosophizing is important, and the writing is quite beautiful (something which I rarely dwell on).



As I write about this book, I include some spoilers. I point this out not because this a book I could spoil in the traditional sense, but because Coates' writing is far more eloquent and meaningful than anything I could say. While I do want to share my thoughts, I would highly recommend readers get the story directly from the source.

So I assume you stopped reading this blog, read the book, and now have come back.

The most affecting part of this book is Coates' description of an acquaintance's — Prince Jones— death at the hands of a police officer. A few weeks prior to this death, Coates was pulled over by the same police force. When this occurred, Coates knew to be extremely worried for his safety, though he was doing nothing wrong. His reason to worry was sadly, but not too shockingly, reenforced by this death. Coates puts the reader in his own shoes and creates a bond with the man who was killed. It served as a powerful reminder that when I see a news story about Michael Brown or Treavon Martin, that is a real person's life. They have families. Years after the event occurs, the families' pain does not subside.

One surprising aspect of the death was that it was at the hands of an African American police officer. This allows Coates to explain something to which I am sympathetic: the problem is not that there are "racist" police officers (though there may be), but that there is a system in place that makes it far to easy for an officer to "protect" themselves at the expense of eventual victims.

My interpretation is the problem isn't that individual decisions are wrong (though sometimes they are), Instead, much of the infrastructure around policing is about minimizing false-negatives (not shooting an individual who can harm officers) and discounting the costs of false-positives (shooting and individual who did not need to be shot). With the lack of convictions , officers rarely bare the cost of the false-positive. If you throw in the many other biases that affect decision-making, the false-positives are disproportionally African American. This isn't too say police officers shouldn't protect themselves, as they are frequently in harms way. At the very least, if as a society, we want to incentivize people to be police officers, we have to guarantee some safety or few qualified people will take the job. But its a policy problem; remember I am an economist who believes people respond to incentives.

I am always uncomfortable making policy proclamations without exploring some quantitative research. So I won't say much more here. In the next few weeks hope to find some academic paper I can read, to provide a discussion of possible policy implications.

A second, also moving part of the book was Coates' description of moving to Paris. Though he recognizes that France is far from a perfect country,  the particular challenges of being black in America did not exist. He was able to escape them, temporarily. For some reason, this called to mind a This American Life segment I recently heard. In it, an African American comedian W. Kamau Bell describes, an experience of being asked to stop bothering customers by an employee of a cafe in Berkeley. The customers he was "bothering" was his white wife and her friends. I wonder if events like this are somewhat typical for African American men, and Coates didn't have to deal with as many events like this in France.

Unfortunately, I don't have any cool data analysis or relevant economic theory to pair with my analysis of this book. Though I am a self-proclaimed data nerd, I also believe the human stories are important. In the Upside of Irrationality, Dan Ariely describes some behavioral economic showing that most people are more likely to feel empathy and act on those impulses for issues and events that are personal to them. In particular, people tend to respond to closeness and vividness. Unfortunately, this research confirms Stalin's famous (but maybe apocryphal) quote: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." It is hard to fight human psychology, but we can embrace it by creating personal connections with groups and issues that aren't within our own individual experience. This book provided just that. Statistics and solid analysis matter, and so does hearing someone else's story.

For the moment, I plan to reread this book every few years as reminder (its short and powerful), but also hope we reach a point where that is no longer necessary.