Tower of Iron Will

Between the World and Me has been praised and criticized by many many reviewers, so I will limit myself to a couple of textual elements that struck me as odd.

Coates has some unusual rhetorical devices that take a little getting used to. He constantly refers to "black bodies" in such a way that I assumed he was building to some sort of dualist worldview in which oppressors could break or destroy bodies but could not steal minds or spirits. Instead he makes it clear that he is a materialist who does not believe that there is any part of an individual other than the physical body. If people are nothing more than bodies then discussing the body as if it was a thing apart from the person is an odd argument. He may be arguing that American society devalues black people down to nothing but bodies, or it may be the imbalance of power requires black people to struggle to preserve their bodies on a fundamental level of basic survival.

Coates often refers to white Americans as "Dreamers." He means this contemptuously, implying that white people live in a fantasy world of security and opportunity while deliberately ignoring the historic crimes on which American society is built. This is also an odd rhetorical device considering every since Martin Luther King's historic "I Have a Dream" speech, references to "The Dream" have been a staple of the Civil Rights Movement. It is surprising to see the term turned around and applied to whites as a term of derision.

Neither of these observations are intended as criticisms of the book as a whole or its author's message. They are just a couple of textual factors I found interesting.