Black Epistles in the Twenty-First Century: Between the World and Me and Breathe

Much contemporary African American writing has been deeply concerned with how to parent Black children. Both Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) and Imani Perry’s Breathe (2019) reckon with the threat of police violence posed to young Black men, as well as other racist patterns of behavior that their children must learn to confront. The obvious conceit of the epistolary approach in both texts raises questions about the nature of Coates’s and Perry’s audience and the rhetorical effect of making public an intimate exchange. These books draw on a literary genealogy that begins with James Baldwin’s 1962 letter to his nephew but spans into the twenty-first century. Coates’s and Perry’s books mark a significant shift from the earlier epistles by specifically articulating race and Black precarity. While letters by Toni Morrison (2008) and Barack Obama (2009) avoid direct mention of race, Coates and Perry center Blackness. This striking change reflects the forces that galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement and the importance of confronting the challenges of living as a Black person in contemporary American society. Despite their frank discussion of Blackness, Coates and Perry capitalize on making a private correspondence public and performing a form of intimacy urgently if indirectly aimed at white readers.