Fear is the basis of Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me.   Fear of the streets, fear of the schools, fear of the police – of losing control of one's body, of one's life, of one's family.  Many men have lived and died under such a fear, but few of them so inquisitive and eloquent as Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Many men living in the Baltimore ghetto have oftentimes asked why their lives are full of fear and, seeing the white world going on safely beyond them, have asked themselves why others' lives aren't.  Between the World and Me is a painful search through race and history and humanity to understand the suffering of the black American.

Like most of us Americans, Coates quickly finds the reason for the suffering.  As with most of our Democrats, his cure is worse than the cancer.

We find it difficult to blame Mr. Coates for getting angry at an ugly situation, but like the judge sentencing the junkie in Trainspotting, we believe that Mr. Coates's answer helps explain black behavior better than excuse it.  Centuries of almost unmentionable abuse; of systematic torture, rape, and indignity in general; and then being redlined into an insufferable ghetto and persecuted by Jim Crow will eventually have an effect on a people brutalized not even for their social position, but for their unchangeable color.  Whether redlining and segregation and lynch mobs are now illegal is far beyond the point.  The point is that they have had their effect.  The point is that generations of life without liberty ruins a people for generations and divorces the concept of morality from the concept of prosperity.  That whites can expect any more than a horrible ghetto proves our unfairness.  That anyone expects innocent whites to willingly integrate with the ghetto proves activists' stupidity.

What's almost immediately mentioned and cannot be denied after reading this book is that the biggest problem black people face today in America is other black people.  Mr. Coates's unmissable description of the Baltimore streets and the imminent danger they posed is enough to create sympathy for good blacks in bad places but also enough to justify the worst of white prejudices.  The purpose of this book is understanding the indescribable barrier that kept him stuck in the ghetto.  He could have found the answer by making a white friend and asking him kindly.  The reason was, is, and will be fear.  White fear of the same things Mr. Coates was explicitly afraid of.  Fear of robberies and broken ribs and rapes, of the false accusations of irrational wildmen chasing you on the streets, of dead children and devastated parents, and losing the one thing our entire bodies were engineered to not lose, which is our life.  The fact that things are going swimmingly in white neighborhoods does not mean white people have nothing to fear.  It only means we are afraid that someone is going to ruin all of it.

There are portions of the book where he almost admits as much.  If it was Mr. Coates's goal to describe the barrier between himself and the white world, he did the best job of it when explaining the barrier between himself and the more well-to-do blacks.  The existence of the middle-class, black-owned, black-run, and oftentimes black-policed Prince George County (as described in his own book!) is a testament not only to the fact that exceptional blacks can in fact succeed in America, but also to the fact that lower-class blacks are often incapable of getting along even with middle-class blacks.  A long and sordid history of black encounters with the P.G. police, culminating but not ending in the murder of Coates's saintly acquaintance Prince Jones, proves that even the blacks who escaped from the ghetto are terrified of the ghetto and are willing to profile in order to protect themselves from it.

Yet the legacy of white supremacy is predictably blamed by Coates when black men are shot even by black cops.  To Mr. Coates and Black Lives Matter, whites are Hitler's Jew: guilty if we did it, guilty if we didn't.  He complains of being profiled, right before he commits an intolerable act of profiling – right before he saddles every white man with a crime indisputably committed by a black.

This hypocrisy could have been enough for any author, but Mr. Coates seems to have an insatiable lust for double-dealing.  Aside from refusing to let others protect themselves from the same things he's terrified of, and saying black is most beautiful without giving anyone the right to say otherwise, he requires a black history without wondering whether the same thing that makes him want a black history makes other people want a white history.  He says the American Dream is the enemy, while trying to escape into the world that is living it.  He blames white Americans for benefiting from the plunder of innocent blacks, while supporting the plunder of innocent whites.  He says hates gives identity, not only without admitting it's impossible to live without positive and negative generalizations, but while calling us those who think of themselves as white.  He says we're liars for having failed our ideals, not only without giving us a better ideal, but while not even keeping to his.  In short, the entire book is him being the thing he hates.  We cannot blame him for being upset with us.  But we wonder how he can do the same things as us and not be upset with himself.

And so our common humanity wants Mr. Coates and his family out of the ghetto, as we wanted the great-souled James Baldwin out of post-war Harlem.  But we regret to say that Coates, whose Between the World and Me seems an unworthy successor to Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, is Baldwin's inferior in humanity.  While we could see in Baldwin's philosophy glimmers of the Whig Macaulay and even the conservative Edmund Burke, Coates seems in his bleak existential struggle to mirror Nietzsche more closely, and while men like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Baldwin give us the impression that we could possibly be friends, Coates leaves us with the impression that he could never think of us as anything less than an enemy.

Coates is not a criminal or a gangster or a brute.  You can look at his picture and see in it the face of a friend, with honest eyes and a kind smile, and immediately regret that things have gone horribly wrong between you.  But we want Coates nowhere near our families.  He won't defend our names.  He won't defend our property.  He won't allow us to defend or distinguish ourselves from thugs or illegals or fight against terrorists.  He won't allow us to be human – to love as we really love, to fear as we really fear, to judge with good judgment and to trust whom we trust.  If anything bad happens, he is likely to side more by his color than by facts, and by people rather than principle.  He makes rules for us and then breaks them all himself, and then asks us what the barrier between himself and the world is.  Yesterday, we would say it was Jim Crow.  Today, we would ask him to place himself in our shoes and then ask the question again.

Jeremy Egerer is the editor of the troublesome philosophical website known as Letters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter and Facebook.