Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore, detailing his beliefs about what are the ways in which, to him, institutions like schools, the local police, and even "the streets" discipline, endanger, and threaten to "disembody" black men and women.

Unlike Baldwin, however, Coates views white supremacy as "an indestructible force, one that Black Americans will never evade or erase, but will always struggle against."

Coates, a writer for The Atlantic, had been reading James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time and was determined to make his second meeting with the president less deferential than his first.

When it was his turn, Coates debated with Obama whether his policy sufficiently addressed racial disparities in the universal health care rollout.

Since then, and especially in the 18 months including the Ferguson unrest preceding his new book's release, Coates somberly believed less in the soul and its aspirational sense of eventual justice.

[15] "You must always remember," Coates writes to Samori, "that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body."

He prioritizes the physical security of African-American bodies over the tradition in Black Christianity of optimism, "uplift", and faith in eventual justice (i.e., being on God's side).

As Coates discussed in a 2015 interview at the Chicago Humanities Festival, he was inspired by his college professor Eileen Boris who utilized an extended metaphor of the physical body for exploitation by objectification in her course, “History of Women in America" at Howard University.

Coates gives an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth "always on guard" in Baltimore and his fear of the physical harm threatened by both the police and the streets.

He contrasts these experiences with neat suburban life, which he calls "the Dream" because it is an exclusionary fantasy for White people who are enabled by, yet largely ignorant of, their history of privilege and suppression.

[10] The book ends with a story about Mabel Jones, the daughter of a sharecropper, who worked and rose in social class to give her children comfortable lives, including private schools and European trips.

[2][17][18] After reading Between the World and Me, novelist Toni Morrison wrote that Coates fills "the intellectual void" left by James Baldwin's death 28 years prior.

[21] In Politico, Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review, cited Coates' "monstrous" passage about Black people who died in 9/11.

Kakutani thought that Coates did not consistently acknowledge racial progress achieved over the course of centuries and that some parts read like the author's internal debate.

The HBO adaptation of Between the World and Me combines elements of the 2018 production at the Apollo Theater, readings from the book, and documentary footage from the actors’ home lives.