Join us for Between the World and Me

UNC staff are invited to join the Employee Forum book club on August 31, 2017 from 12 p.m. – 1 p.m. at Bulls Head Book Shop. We will discuss the book Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The book can be purchased at a special discount online or in the store at Bulls Head Book Shop.

Please register at http://tinyurl.com/ya74dueh

Unfortunately, due to University budget cuts, the Forum will no longer be able to offer lunch for book club attendees.

From Google Books:  In the 150 years since the end of the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, the story of race and America has remained a brutally simple one, written on flesh: it is the story of the black body, exploited to create the country’s foundational wealth, violently segregated to unite a nation after a civil war, and, today, still disproportionately threatened, locked up and killed in the streets. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can America reckon with its fraught racial history?

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to answer those questions, presented in the form of a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son the story of his own awakening to the truth about history and race through a series of revelatory experiences: immersion in nationalist mythology as a child; engagement with history, poetry and love at Howard University; travels to Civil War battlefields and the South Side of Chicago; a journey to France that reorients his sense of the world; and pilgrimages to the homes of mothers whose children’s lives have been taken as American plunder. Taken together, these stories map a winding path towards a kind of liberation—a journey from fear and confusion, to a full and honest understanding of the world as it is.