An Analysis Of Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between The World And Me

There have been many novels written about the experience of being born black in America but only so few have been able to give the reader a vivid point of view of what African Americans have gone through for generations. The book “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a very sympathetic letter to his fifth teen year old son Samori. Coates explains his experiences in the past on how being born into the world as a “Black Body” is considered as a disadvantage in America. Coates grew up with strict parents that were consistently keeping a keen eye on him always having his father constantly beating him and an always anxious mother. But as he grew older and had a son of his own he then realized the reasons behind his parent’s actions.

“Blackness,” by Jamaica Kincaid, introduces the short story with a description of the silent and soft blackness. Even though she discovers happiness when buried in blackness, it prevents the unknown narrator from speaking her own identity. It devours her memories and retracts her voice. The narrator feels no joy when immersed in the blackness; she becomes wrapped in turmoil and anarchy. The narrator has brief moments of joy from time to time: the setting sun´s beauty, a laughing child playing with a red ball, and her gazing at clear blue skies. There is a little “blackness” in everyone. The story exposes the different types of blackness that can control one’s life through their fulfillment, stress, weary, power, and identity.

Ta- Nehisi creates pathos by also using his personal life to allow the readers to feel his past experiences. Also, the tone of the letters and the fact that is is indeed written for his son informs the audience about his concern for his son and his future. Coates challenges our understanding of America, “white America.” Coates embraces the fact that white supremacy is indeed in full effect and that we, as a black society are not aware or the fact, nor are we coming together to find a solution. As he quotes, “if we don't move soon, we are all going to die,” he speaks too the black society, rich and poor. Those with power and without, with knowledge and ignorance, if the black community does not come together we will continue to fail to the system and continue to lose lives. One example he uses for this is the system of police brutality. For many years police brutality has been in effect, where a white police officer approaches an

Between the World and Me, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is written as a letter to his son about realities associated with being black in the United States of America. His tone is somewhat poetic and quite bleak, based on his personal experiences. The book is intense, it is an address to a nation that ignores its own blatant history of racism, a nation that does not prosecute police officers who kill innocent black citizens, a nation that supports a policy of mass incarceration. He writes about growing up in Baltimore, Maryland and details the ways in which institutions (school, police, and the streets) discipline, endanger, and threaten to harm black men and women. Between the World and Me is an intimate confession of the fears of a black American father.

Racism is an issue that blacks face, and have faced throughout history directly and indirectly. Ralph Ellison has done a great job in demonstrating the effects of racism on individual identity through a black narrator. Throughout the story, Ellison provides several examples of what the narrator faced in trying to make his-self visible and acceptable in the white culture. Ellison engages the reader so deeply in the occurrences through the narrator’s agony, confusion, and ambiguity. In order to understand the narrators plight, and to see things through his eyes, it is important to understand that main characters of the story which contributes to his plight as well as the era in which the story takes place.

When writers use the epistolary form in their novels or short stories, the writers are addressing to a certain person or group about a situation they believe needs to be talked about, but the writer’s work does not have to be read by the only one particular race or gender because the writer is trying to get an important topic out to the world. In the novel, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Coates address his letter to his young son. The letter consists of truth about the world and how someone of color will be treated by society, but Coates wants his son to learn about the truth at a young age to prepare himself for the hardships of being an African American man in America. Coates talks about how cops are killing black men, but

“Between the World and Me”, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is a letter written to his son about what it means to be black and how tough it is to be a part of this race in the United States of America. In this book, Coates talks about his life in the black community, starting from childhood memories all the way to present day. Coates also tries sends a message, which is that his son should not lower his guard and be completely confident about who he is, instead he should be afraid about what the world is capable of doing to a black man. In this work, Coates disagrees on what it means to be black or white in America.

“Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body”(Coates 5). The phrase “lose my body” is reiterated numerous times in Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The topic/theme of this piece of literature may be discernable as innocence as Ta-Nehisi profusely speaks of how his upbringing changed and affected his perspective on life. Coates uses a multitude of examples to portray this from how he witnessed another boy almost being shot at a young age to him learning and understanding the laws and “culture of the streets”(Coates 24) as who and even more who not to mess with(Coates 23). Coates effectively uses these examples as perfect representations of living in an American ghetto as well as how since birth blacks do not “own” their body and are susceptible to lose it.

Between the World and Me has been called a book about race, but the author argues that race itself is a flawed, if anything, nothing more than a pretext for racism. Early in the book he writes, “Race, is the child of racism, not the father.” The idea of race has been so important in the history of America and in the self-identification of its people and racial designations have literally marked the difference between life and death in some instances. How does discrediting the idea of race as an immutable, unchangeable fact changes the way we look at our history? Ourselves? In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and the current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the

One of the most prominent components of the text is that the black body is constantly under threat. Coats argues that “the question of how one should live within a black body… is the question of life.” He shows how racism works through the control and exploitation of black bodies and the delicateness of black bodies that results within a racist society. Coats writes that racism is a natural experience. Throughout American history, black men and women were chained, beaten, labored, and killed. Now, they experience police brutality and nonsensical shootings. Arrested for trying to get into their own homes and shot because they look suspicious or their hood is up. Shot because they inhabit a black body. It is the subtle ways in which a black body must conduct itself in public. Violence is consistent in an America that is still divided by race.

Ta-Nehisi Coates addresses his son in this book, Samoi, who is fifteen years old. Coates recalls his memory of the atrocities and violence that he witnessed in the past against black people. He hopes that his experience will provide him better understanding of the present-day violence committed by white supremacist against the black body. From the beginning, Coates argues that the problem of many Americans is that they did not consider African Americans to be people. As a result, the dehumanization of black body will persist. Coates writes this as a response to the recent deaths of black people by the police officers. To him, the police are “endowed with the authority to destroy” blacks and they will never be safe from violence. When Coates

Rogers’ critique of Coates’ lack of hope is apparent when Rogers mentions James Baldwin the man in which Coates modeled his book after. “For all his channeling of James Baldwin, Coates seems to have forgotten that black folks ‘can’t afford despair.’ As Baldwin went on to say: ‘I can’t tell my nephew, my niece; you can’t tell the children there is no hope.’ The reason why you can’t say this is not because you are living in a dream or selling a fantasy, but because there can be no certain knowledge of the future. ”(Rogers)

Rosa Parks once said, “Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully we shall overcome.” Between The World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Coates writes a letter to his son explaining what his life was like growing up in America as an African American man, and he also tries to give his son some moral advice on how to take charge of living as a man in a black body. Spike Lee directs a film on Malcolm X, who was a black activist and a leader of the struggle for black freedom. Both the book and film discuss slavery, civil rights, and police brutality. Coates and Malcolm X advocate that the malicious history of slavery has contributed to the shaping of modern day racism in America.

For Coates, the real and allegorical black body and blackness writ large are imperatives of American capitalism: their historic subjugation as foundational to the American political economy. For Coates, to be black in a racist white society is to live in constant fear of disembodiment. Even if one’s body is not taken from him/hur/them, the fear of losing one’s body steal’s one’s energy, vivacity, spirit, time, and liberty. Coates portrays the black male body as essentially vulnerable. In Between the World and Me, Coates describes black womyn lovingly, almost ethereally, yet they seldom emerge as complicated, fully fleshed-out people.

Does being Black inherently define a station in life, regulated by a global system of white supremacy and racism design to forever deem an entire person to the bottom of the woodshed pile? Some would even dare to challenge the definition of Walker’s work as literature. Yet arising to the eloquence of fame during the period known in America, as the Black Renaissance, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s work is breathtakingly stunning. In “We Wear the Mask,” Dunbar is not discussing how people avoid the truth. The poem depicts the unfortunate and sometimes nastily embarrassing factor that Black people need to hide their true feelings from the treachery of White people. In other words, pretending to be nice to them (and most polite) when they act rudely, and condescendingly (and hatefully) inappropriate. Thus, the point it Dunbar approaches an expression of dealing with psycho-social pain by trying to tell the reader what the true deal is. One might say that Paul Laurence Dunbar ‘stays level-headed’ but the fact of the convoluted matter is he is offering an expression of how difficult life is in the American world for the Black man, which is why he writes: “We wear the mask that grins and lies,” when you really want to kill White people, scream, die or cry sometimes, and “With torn and bleeding hearts we smile” to convey the gnawing sense of ongoing despair to have an insidious glass ceiling to full success held over one’s head. Tahir calls the particular brand of gender violence traumatic, and “inhuman treatment” (1). In conclusion, these two fictional world-class literature writers take a different approach, leaving readers feeling sorry, resentful, sad, confused or anything but neutral. You must take a position. The depth of these literary gifts confronts and