Between the World and Me Lesson Plan

When speaking with Prince Jones's mother, Dr. Jones, she tells Coates of her upbringing: "We were very poor, and most of the black people around us, who I knew were poor also, and the images I had of white America were from going into the city and seeing who was behind the counter in the stores and seeing who my mother worked for. It became clear there was a distance." What is this "distance" she refers to? How does Coates explain this idea? How is it connected to the other pivotal themes in Between the World and Me?

In this section, Dr. Jones puts a slightly different set of words to what Coates has been talking about throughout the book: the distance between black...