Between the World and Me: An Examination
Racism and race are the prime points set up in New York Times bestseller, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Throughout the book’s pages he talks about his own upbringing and the acts of racism he witnessed which fortified his view on life and the way that he looks at everyone around him; the book is also told through first person narration as a message to his son. Out of the themes and ideas presented in the book, racism, disembodiment, and the idea of blinding oneself to the atrocities one may impose are the forefront of the topics as the author discusses things that he observed and experienced over the span of his life, his constant position on the black person’s body in regards to how fragile it truly is in the world and how it governs the life of African Americans, as well as his interpretation and explanation of the white people’s “Dream,” which he mentions several times throughout the book as the driving force for many white people’s actions which are forgotten in order to sustain this “Dream”.
In writing this book, the author seems to want to ascertain the fact that it is impossible for black people to “awaken” the Dreamers from the “Dream” that they’ve believed so strongly. The only way for the Dreamers to be awakened is for the Dreamers themselves to see their faults and to wake up to the atrocities that they’ve committed over the course of America’s lifespan. America’s tendency to forget these crimes against humanity is seen in the line, “The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream” (143), and the problem with the Dream is pointed out, progress cannot be made if the Dreamers forget what they’ve done to the blacks and others throughout history. By the end of the book, the author offers no suggestion as to how to awaken them from their dreams, but he affirms the idea that it is up to the Dreamers to awaken for themselves and that blacks must keep fighting until the point that whites do awaken.
Sociologically, this book is significant for the ideas and the topics that it discusses. Within the pages of the book, the author goes into detail about how African Americans are treated even today and the discrimination they faced solely because of their bodies. The recurring topic of the “Dream” holds sociologic weight as well because it suggests that the concept of America is nothing more than a dream in which bad deeds are done with the blind assumption that “good” is all that America is and that America came to be as it is through fundamentally good progress. The book discusses points of race and interactions between humans and races and evaluates them from a sociological perspective, lending the book its sociological presence and making it a valuable tool in understanding and learning about the conflict between black and white and why it occurs.
Personally, I found the book very interesting and found myself absorbed in all of the content regarding the author’s life, especially when he set the events of his life against a sociological perspective and evaluates the truths and meanings behind some of these events. The parts that lost me were those that are more historical and textbook-oriented. The personal parts interested me more, and the constant, painfully detailed push to humanize people that could easily just be used as bullet points in the argument helped fuel my interest in the book and the concepts it tackled.
In regards to modern America, the book contains relevance as it is a sort of wake up call to the Dreamers and those that perceive themselves as White. The problems and the issues surrounding discrimination and racism have continued to this day, as they are not solved and cleaned up by the time the final page of the book turns, and so it points out the problems with the American upper class and the way that their actions have hurt others. The relevance of this book comes with that simple fact that racism isn’t gone. The Dreamers still have not woken up.
Continuing the idea of racism; on page seven of the book the author states, “But race is the child of racism, not the father,” in reference to the origins of race. By this excerpt, the author seems to indicate that the idea of races among people was not around before racism and that the concept of race only came into existence after racism originated in people. Therefore, racism proves to be the father of race, as people used race to “justify” prejudice and discrimination against groups they perceived to be different from them. The author goes on to write, “And the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as of hierarchy,” (7), meaning that the idea of race has never been about the genes that are passed from one person to another, or the facial and physical features that one race may have as opposed to another, but rather that the basis of “naming” people by race came about as a means to construct hierarchy between existing races. Historically, this defines the origins of race and racism, which came first, and for what reason both concepts developed. The Dreamers needed a hierarchy to prove themselves better than other races, and, deciding to make their race the justification for their superiority, they constructed the idea of race and imposed it on others via racism. Frequently within the book, the author refers to Caucasians as those who “believe themselves white,” such as on page 28 during which the author states that his family shuns the holidays because they are “[m]arketed by the people who wanted to be white,” referring to the previous point that “White” people assert their dominance in a hierarchical society by utilizing race as the system through which power is assigned. Those who are “White” are typically deemed to be the ones with more power. According to Coates, “Perhaps being named “black” was just someone’s name for being at the bottom” (55), and “The power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white” (42), leading to the belief that being White gives a person more self-perceived power over those of other racial identities. The reason that Coates does not refers to Caucasians as actually White, and only as those that “believe” themselves White, is because being White is not a real thing. Race is just a social construct born out of racism and the need to subjugate others. Caucasians are not white, but, to justify an unjust social hierarchy, they believe that they are.
Throughout the book, the author makes constant reference to an idea that he calls the “American Dream.” The first mention of the “Dream” comes on page 11, when the author, in the midst of describing the perfect dream of life, says, “The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake” before then confessing that he had wanted to escape into the Dream for a long time. Coates writes, “Fear ruled everything around me...this fear was connected to the Dream out there, to the unworried boys, to pie and pot roasts” and that a “very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream...Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved . . . .” (29). He says that “‘[g]ood intention’ is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream” (29) and that this “hall pass” has been used for centuries by White people performing acts of injustice. The Dream most clearly refers to the American Dream of a perfect country where all are free and where there is no stains in the spotless, White history of the country. The Dream encompasses the lives that all Americans want to live, and for that Dream to sustain itself, the White people must forget all the evil they do to others. “The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream,” (143), and for those acts that they cannot simply ignore and forget they convince themselves that they act with “good intentions” so that all that America had done in its past and present only is out of goodness. This Dream works in conjunction with fear as well, as the author states, explaining how the Dream imposes fear into all those that the Dream does not want to include, and scares them out of the Dream to a place where the White people can forget about them and continue living their Dream. However, White people live their Dream with a cost. Coates explains that “the Dreamers...would rather live white than live free” (143) and proclaims that those Dreamers are not living their lives free but rather in the prison of their own ignorance. The Dreamers forget about all the bad they do, and they continue to perform awful acts and proceed to forget about those same acts because “to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world” (143). To remain heroes to their country, to maintain the image that they are a just society and a shining example of goodness on earth, the Dreamers forget. To sustain their Dream, they give up a full view of the world and their place in it, and being woken up would “reveal that they are an empire of humans,” which would be “a stain on their nobility” (143) causing them to give up their perfect Dream. By living in this closed-off world, the Dreamer “thrives . . . on limiting the number of possible questions ...The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing,” (50), and through their Dream, Dreamers confine how much of the world they allow themselves to see. They would rather live White and pretend that they are spotless than open their eyes and accept that their spotless record is tarnished several times over.
Within the book, Coates pulls no punches when it comes to shaming the White people for what they have always have done throughout history. At a point he declares that, “They were not human to me,” (87) and there doesn’t seem to be a moment in which he lets up on them and decrees them to be less bad than they were previously. However, as he mentions whites that he thinks kindly of, such as his friend from Paris, Coates is not directly shaming all light skinned people; rather, he is singling in on the Caucasians that he cites as having started the idea of “White” people and instituting racism in the first place. The author grew up under constant racism and persecution by these Caucasians, and as a child he says that “one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with...the manner of our walk...who or what I smiled at,” (24), showing his constant fear of White people that stuck with him throughout his life. It appears fair that he shames White people as a whole instead of letting some White people off the hook, as he discusses the topic of race all throughout the book and the fact that Black people were all treated as if they were the same race, despite being different in culture and hailing as the author describes on page 42 when he first arrives at the Mecca: “And some of them were from places I had never heard of. But all of them were hot and incredible, exotic even, though we hailed from the same tribe.” Tragically, these diverse populations were all treated with the same horrible cruelty, as is captured by Coates on page 132 when he writes, “Black life is cheap,” referring to how White people have treated him all his life. He was not treated as an individual by Caucasians, and so he treats them similarly in his book, discussing them as just a race rather than a group of individual people and holding them all responsible in some way for the prevalence of race and racism in society.
Within the book there is a theme of disembodiment that echoes throughout, with a constant reiteration and reference towards the black “body”. This theme works to hammer the point in that race is just a social construct, and the constant mention of the black body reminds the reader that race is just based on a person’s skin tone and is not anything deeper. Coates appears to advocate for disembodiment in the sense that bodies confine the black people and restrict their freedom, as such when he states, “How do I live free in this black body?” (12), referring to the fact that society is ruled by whites who deplore the blacks and that there were countless rules and procedures that he had to learn in order to stay safe and alive in the white world while he was growing up. He writes that he “memorized a list of prohibited blocks” and “learned the smell and feel of fighting weather...I recall learning my colors and shapes, because these laws were essential to the security of my body” (24), reflecting the feelings of other black people and showing that even with his own race he felt a fear for himself. “I felt the old fear,” (152) Coates states in reference to driving through a neighborhood much like the one he had grown up in, all of this showing how black people can’t truly live with a black body and are confined to the rules that society force them to live under. Disembodying themselves would allow them to be people, to be the same as everyone else and remove race from the equation entirely since the concept of race at the core is based around the body. Black people must always be protective of their body, as Coates has stated, because their body was the subject of their persecution throughout history. “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body-it is heritage” (103), he writes, lending to the credit of the black body being the point of enslavement for African Americans, and that disembodiment is the only they would be able to fully leave behind the persecution so many of them face. “If you’re black, you were born in jail” (36), their own bodies being the vessels by which they are unfairly chosen to be subjugated.
Closing the final pages of the book, the reader will find that all of the questions that Coates brings up for discussion have not been truly answered over the course of the book. All of the problems that are talked about and brought to the forefront of the reader’s attention are put up for thought but are not answered by the author himself, and the reader leaves the book with more questions than he/she had when he/she began reading.This is a realistic way to approach the ideas that are brought up because the scope and importance of the questions at hand do not have concrete answers or easy solutions that can fix or deal with the problems that exist in society as a result of race and racism. The answers are ours to find on our own, and the author leaves it to us to think and reflect on the ideas he has given to us, allowing us to come to our own conclusions. While it may be bleak to think that there is no definitive answer for what to do regarding the problems of race and racism, it is meaningful that it is left for us to find the answers on our own, as it is us and only us that are capable of tackling the problems ourselves, using the answers that we come up with to combat the very real, very present problems that Coates has brought to our attention.
The idea of a dominant group is present with the constant iteration of the “White” person and their Dream; the idea that White people are superior and dominant when compared to the inferior black people. Prejudice and discrimination is exhibited throughout as Coates talks about things he faced growing up, namely on an individual basis such as when the boy on page 19, “reached into his ski jacket and pulled out a gun,” depicting singular people being racist against others. The concept of white privilege is also brought about in the way that Coates says that black children are raised, with the rule that they must, “‘be twice as good,’ which is to say ‘accept half as much,’” (91) because black children must be extra good comparative to white children, for the fact that there is such discrimination against them in the world and that authorities are just waiting for them to fail or slip up in some way and be punished. The book delves into racism at its core and shows it as a highly interpersonal level, showcasing the basis of everything we are learning about and gives us a new medium in which to realize it for ourselves, helping to fully actualize what racism does to people and why it is such a societal flaw.
By the end of the book, Coates has discussed several ideas stemming from the singular theme of racism in America, from the origins of racism being birthed from race and White people’s need to be superior, to the concept of the White person’s “Dream” and the impact it has had on racism and race through history, to how one lives in a black body. Coates goes over all of these topics with great concern and worry for his son in the future, hoping that he understands not only that it is up to the White people to change their own ways but also that the struggle that African Americans have gone through and the strides they have made thus far to gain full freedom. “They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people,” Coates declares on page 149, and even if he grew up in fear of the ghettos and the neighborhoods he lived in with other black people, he proclaims pride with his race and the society they have made despite the centuries of cruelty and discrimination they faced from the Whites.
In writing this book, the author seems to want to ascertain the fact that it is impossible for black people to “awaken” the Dreamers from the “Dream” that they’ve believed so strongly. The only way for the Dreamers to be awakened is for the Dreamers themselves to see their faults and to wake up to the atrocities that they’ve committed over the course of America’s lifespan. America’s tendency to forget these crimes against humanity is seen in the line, “The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream” (143), and the problem with the Dream is pointed out, progress cannot be made if the Dreamers forget what they’ve done to the blacks and others throughout history. By the end of the book, the author offers no suggestion as to how to awaken them from their dreams, but he affirms the idea that it is up to the Dreamers to awaken for themselves and that blacks must keep fighting until the point that whites do awaken.
Sociologically, this book is significant for the ideas and the topics that it discusses. Within the pages of the book, the author goes into detail about how African Americans are treated even today and the discrimination they faced solely because of their bodies. The recurring topic of the “Dream” holds sociologic weight as well because it suggests that the concept of America is nothing more than a dream in which bad deeds are done with the blind assumption that “good” is all that America is and that America came to be as it is through fundamentally good progress. The book discusses points of race and interactions between humans and races and evaluates them from a sociological perspective, lending the book its sociological presence and making it a valuable tool in understanding and learning about the conflict between black and white and why it occurs.
Personally, I found the book very interesting and found myself absorbed in all of the content regarding the author’s life, especially when he set the events of his life against a sociological perspective and evaluates the truths and meanings behind some of these events. The parts that lost me were those that are more historical and textbook-oriented. The personal parts interested me more, and the constant, painfully detailed push to humanize people that could easily just be used as bullet points in the argument helped fuel my interest in the book and the concepts it tackled.
In regards to modern America, the book contains relevance as it is a sort of wake up call to the Dreamers and those that perceive themselves as White. The problems and the issues surrounding discrimination and racism have continued to this day, as they are not solved and cleaned up by the time the final page of the book turns, and so it points out the problems with the American upper class and the way that their actions have hurt others. The relevance of this book comes with that simple fact that racism isn’t gone. The Dreamers still have not woken up.
Continuing the idea of racism; on page seven of the book the author states, “But race is the child of racism, not the father,” in reference to the origins of race. By this excerpt, the author seems to indicate that the idea of races among people was not around before racism and that the concept of race only came into existence after racism originated in people. Therefore, racism proves to be the father of race, as people used race to “justify” prejudice and discrimination against groups they perceived to be different from them. The author goes on to write, “And the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as of hierarchy,” (7), meaning that the idea of race has never been about the genes that are passed from one person to another, or the facial and physical features that one race may have as opposed to another, but rather that the basis of “naming” people by race came about as a means to construct hierarchy between existing races. Historically, this defines the origins of race and racism, which came first, and for what reason both concepts developed. The Dreamers needed a hierarchy to prove themselves better than other races, and, deciding to make their race the justification for their superiority, they constructed the idea of race and imposed it on others via racism. Frequently within the book, the author refers to Caucasians as those who “believe themselves white,” such as on page 28 during which the author states that his family shuns the holidays because they are “[m]arketed by the people who wanted to be white,” referring to the previous point that “White” people assert their dominance in a hierarchical society by utilizing race as the system through which power is assigned. Those who are “White” are typically deemed to be the ones with more power. According to Coates, “Perhaps being named “black” was just someone’s name for being at the bottom” (55), and “The power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white” (42), leading to the belief that being White gives a person more self-perceived power over those of other racial identities. The reason that Coates does not refers to Caucasians as actually White, and only as those that “believe” themselves White, is because being White is not a real thing. Race is just a social construct born out of racism and the need to subjugate others. Caucasians are not white, but, to justify an unjust social hierarchy, they believe that they are.
Throughout the book, the author makes constant reference to an idea that he calls the “American Dream.” The first mention of the “Dream” comes on page 11, when the author, in the midst of describing the perfect dream of life, says, “The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake” before then confessing that he had wanted to escape into the Dream for a long time. Coates writes, “Fear ruled everything around me...this fear was connected to the Dream out there, to the unworried boys, to pie and pot roasts” and that a “very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream...Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved . . . .” (29). He says that “‘[g]ood intention’ is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream” (29) and that this “hall pass” has been used for centuries by White people performing acts of injustice. The Dream most clearly refers to the American Dream of a perfect country where all are free and where there is no stains in the spotless, White history of the country. The Dream encompasses the lives that all Americans want to live, and for that Dream to sustain itself, the White people must forget all the evil they do to others. “The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream,” (143), and for those acts that they cannot simply ignore and forget they convince themselves that they act with “good intentions” so that all that America had done in its past and present only is out of goodness. This Dream works in conjunction with fear as well, as the author states, explaining how the Dream imposes fear into all those that the Dream does not want to include, and scares them out of the Dream to a place where the White people can forget about them and continue living their Dream. However, White people live their Dream with a cost. Coates explains that “the Dreamers...would rather live white than live free” (143) and proclaims that those Dreamers are not living their lives free but rather in the prison of their own ignorance. The Dreamers forget about all the bad they do, and they continue to perform awful acts and proceed to forget about those same acts because “to remember would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world” (143). To remain heroes to their country, to maintain the image that they are a just society and a shining example of goodness on earth, the Dreamers forget. To sustain their Dream, they give up a full view of the world and their place in it, and being woken up would “reveal that they are an empire of humans,” which would be “a stain on their nobility” (143) causing them to give up their perfect Dream. By living in this closed-off world, the Dreamer “thrives . . . on limiting the number of possible questions ...The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing,” (50), and through their Dream, Dreamers confine how much of the world they allow themselves to see. They would rather live White and pretend that they are spotless than open their eyes and accept that their spotless record is tarnished several times over.
Within the book, Coates pulls no punches when it comes to shaming the White people for what they have always have done throughout history. At a point he declares that, “They were not human to me,” (87) and there doesn’t seem to be a moment in which he lets up on them and decrees them to be less bad than they were previously. However, as he mentions whites that he thinks kindly of, such as his friend from Paris, Coates is not directly shaming all light skinned people; rather, he is singling in on the Caucasians that he cites as having started the idea of “White” people and instituting racism in the first place. The author grew up under constant racism and persecution by these Caucasians, and as a child he says that “one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with...the manner of our walk...who or what I smiled at,” (24), showing his constant fear of White people that stuck with him throughout his life. It appears fair that he shames White people as a whole instead of letting some White people off the hook, as he discusses the topic of race all throughout the book and the fact that Black people were all treated as if they were the same race, despite being different in culture and hailing as the author describes on page 42 when he first arrives at the Mecca: “And some of them were from places I had never heard of. But all of them were hot and incredible, exotic even, though we hailed from the same tribe.” Tragically, these diverse populations were all treated with the same horrible cruelty, as is captured by Coates on page 132 when he writes, “Black life is cheap,” referring to how White people have treated him all his life. He was not treated as an individual by Caucasians, and so he treats them similarly in his book, discussing them as just a race rather than a group of individual people and holding them all responsible in some way for the prevalence of race and racism in society.
Within the book there is a theme of disembodiment that echoes throughout, with a constant reiteration and reference towards the black “body”. This theme works to hammer the point in that race is just a social construct, and the constant mention of the black body reminds the reader that race is just based on a person’s skin tone and is not anything deeper. Coates appears to advocate for disembodiment in the sense that bodies confine the black people and restrict their freedom, as such when he states, “How do I live free in this black body?” (12), referring to the fact that society is ruled by whites who deplore the blacks and that there were countless rules and procedures that he had to learn in order to stay safe and alive in the white world while he was growing up. He writes that he “memorized a list of prohibited blocks” and “learned the smell and feel of fighting weather...I recall learning my colors and shapes, because these laws were essential to the security of my body” (24), reflecting the feelings of other black people and showing that even with his own race he felt a fear for himself. “I felt the old fear,” (152) Coates states in reference to driving through a neighborhood much like the one he had grown up in, all of this showing how black people can’t truly live with a black body and are confined to the rules that society force them to live under. Disembodying themselves would allow them to be people, to be the same as everyone else and remove race from the equation entirely since the concept of race at the core is based around the body. Black people must always be protective of their body, as Coates has stated, because their body was the subject of their persecution throughout history. “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body-it is heritage” (103), he writes, lending to the credit of the black body being the point of enslavement for African Americans, and that disembodiment is the only they would be able to fully leave behind the persecution so many of them face. “If you’re black, you were born in jail” (36), their own bodies being the vessels by which they are unfairly chosen to be subjugated.
Closing the final pages of the book, the reader will find that all of the questions that Coates brings up for discussion have not been truly answered over the course of the book. All of the problems that are talked about and brought to the forefront of the reader’s attention are put up for thought but are not answered by the author himself, and the reader leaves the book with more questions than he/she had when he/she began reading.This is a realistic way to approach the ideas that are brought up because the scope and importance of the questions at hand do not have concrete answers or easy solutions that can fix or deal with the problems that exist in society as a result of race and racism. The answers are ours to find on our own, and the author leaves it to us to think and reflect on the ideas he has given to us, allowing us to come to our own conclusions. While it may be bleak to think that there is no definitive answer for what to do regarding the problems of race and racism, it is meaningful that it is left for us to find the answers on our own, as it is us and only us that are capable of tackling the problems ourselves, using the answers that we come up with to combat the very real, very present problems that Coates has brought to our attention.
The idea of a dominant group is present with the constant iteration of the “White” person and their Dream; the idea that White people are superior and dominant when compared to the inferior black people. Prejudice and discrimination is exhibited throughout as Coates talks about things he faced growing up, namely on an individual basis such as when the boy on page 19, “reached into his ski jacket and pulled out a gun,” depicting singular people being racist against others. The concept of white privilege is also brought about in the way that Coates says that black children are raised, with the rule that they must, “‘be twice as good,’ which is to say ‘accept half as much,’” (91) because black children must be extra good comparative to white children, for the fact that there is such discrimination against them in the world and that authorities are just waiting for them to fail or slip up in some way and be punished. The book delves into racism at its core and shows it as a highly interpersonal level, showcasing the basis of everything we are learning about and gives us a new medium in which to realize it for ourselves, helping to fully actualize what racism does to people and why it is such a societal flaw.
By the end of the book, Coates has discussed several ideas stemming from the singular theme of racism in America, from the origins of racism being birthed from race and White people’s need to be superior, to the concept of the White person’s “Dream” and the impact it has had on racism and race through history, to how one lives in a black body. Coates goes over all of these topics with great concern and worry for his son in the future, hoping that he understands not only that it is up to the White people to change their own ways but also that the struggle that African Americans have gone through and the strides they have made thus far to gain full freedom. “They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people,” Coates declares on page 149, and even if he grew up in fear of the ghettos and the neighborhoods he lived in with other black people, he proclaims pride with his race and the society they have made despite the centuries of cruelty and discrimination they faced from the Whites.
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