An Exploration of Social Justice Themes in
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me(Spiegel & Grau,2015)
“In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body —it is heritage” (103)
“And you are here now, and you must live” (146)
Key Terms: plunder · the idea of “race” · The Dream· “those Americans who believe they are white” ·
The Struggle · Fear · the Black body · destruction
Related Terms: white supremacy · white privilege · racial violence
- TheNextJamesBaldwin? - Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2015); #1 New York Times bestseller; MacArthur “Genius” Grant Award recipient; Morrison bestows the highest praise on Coates’s Between the World and Me, and pronounces Coates the successor to Baldwin.
Back Cover Blurb – Toni Morrison
“I’ve been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates’s journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. And its examination of the hazards and hopes of black male life is as profound as it is revelatory. This is required reading.”
* Like Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) which the author addresses to his nephew, Coates similarly frames his work within the construct of a letter from father to his 15-year-old son, Samori.[audio clip]
*Other similarities to Baldwin: Coates moves to Paris; widely accepted as the preeminent voice of the contemporary Black experience in the America
*Negative Reviews: Randall Kennedy, “A Caricature of Black Reality” in The American Prospect; Michelle Alexander, “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me’” in The Sunday Book Review; Spencer Overton, “We Need Vision and Solutions: A Response to Ta-Nehisi Coates” in The Huffington Post; Melvin L. Rogers, “Between Pain and Despair: What Ta-Nehisi Is Missing” in Dissent; Cornel West’s Facebook postssummary of critiques: too pessimistic, fatalistic, negative, lack of agency, no vision or policy solutions?, a rejection of hope?
*Kennedy argues that Coates “sees no redemptive victory ahead.” Is there, then, as Morrison argues, a “beautifully redemptive” quality to Coates’s book? Is it necessary for us as reader to find redemption in this book?
*Note: Coates is an atheist; “We would not kneel before their God. And so I had no sense that any just God was on my side” (28).
- Epigraph - The first stanza from Richard Wright’s “Between the World and Me” 1935 poem which appeared in Partisan Review[complete poem attached with discussion questions]
- Embodied Blackness—Portrait of Life in America as a Black Person
“How do I live free in this Black body?” (12) / “What does it mean to lose one’s [Black] body?”
*Coates opens his book with his son, Samori’s reaction to the non-indictment of Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown (Ferguson, MO in 2014). [use the experiential: students could share their experiences as a spring board for discussion about social justice]
“The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include frisking, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible” (9).
*The haunting killing of Coates’s friend, Prince Carmen Jones, who died at the hands of the Prince George’s Country Police Department (part II, starting on p. 75); “The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear” (78); Interview with Dr. Jones (part III, starting on p. 134)
*What does it mean to encounter this deluge of murdered Black men and women, now streaming on Facebook Live and popping up on our Twitter feeds?
“You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold” (71)
*Rejection of respectability politics: “But the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined” (96, 113)
* Race as part of the mythology of America; history of this country and Western civilization fueled by violent conquest (32); Black body as “breakable,” “in constant jeopardy,” erasable, destroyable, plundered; needs to be shielded, protected, secured (18, 112); deprivation of Black childhood (25, 71); “Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made” (82);Recollection of white woman pushing then five-year old Samori on the escalator: “I could have you arrested!” Which is to say: “I could take your body” (94-95)
* “the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning” (69); “And still I urge you to struggle” (151)
“[t]he plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return” (111)
*The power of naming: “And I saw what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could even actually do” (120); power of the “personal language” and intimacy of the Black world in the exchange in the airport: “My bad” and “You straight.”
*Recollections of boyhood and adolescence in West Baltimore [video clip]
- “The Mecca”: A Love Letter to Howard University(37-71)
*Exploring Coates’ education as a vehicle to discuss students’ educational journeys; compare his schools in West Baltimore to the educational utopia of Howard; The Black Arts Movement (Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez); Compare the estrangement Coates experienced in his 7th grade French class (p. 26) to his later decision to study French (117, 122); Homecoming at HU (laughing, dancing, shouting; 147)
*Coates embarks on his self-designed independent study (43-44, 48-49); what distinction does Coates make between the library and the classroom? [could ask students to research one of the Black scholars, artists, or activists mentioned in this section and read one of their works]
*Ice Cube’s Death Certificate album (37) is instrumental in his coming-into-consciousness[ask students to share and present a “protest song” that transformed or greatly shaped their thinking]
Selected other works by Coates:
*The Beautiful Struggle – could use passages from his first memoir and description of his upbringing in West Baltimore as an example of Coates’s growth as a writer; this could also represent a way to explore the ways we are always revising our own life stories
*“The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic(June 2014)
Related texts:
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
Richard Wright, “Between the World and Me” (1935)
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
Between the World and Me(1935)
Richard Wright
And one morning while in the woods I stumbled
suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly
oaks and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting
themselves between the world and me....
There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly
upon a cushion of ashes.
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt
finger accusingly at the sky.
There were torn tree limbs, tiny veins of burnt leaves, and
a scorched coil of greasy hemp;
A vacant shoe, an empty tie, a ripped shirt, a lonely hat,
and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood.
And upon the trampled grass were buttons, dead matches,
butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a
drained gin-flask, and a whore's lipstick;
Scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the
lingering smell of gasoline.
And through the morning air the sun poured yellow
surprise into the eye sockets of the stony skull....
And while I stood my mind was frozen within cold pity
for the life that was gone.
The ground gripped my feet and my heart was circled by
icy walls of fear--
The sun died in the sky; a night wind muttered in the
grass and fumbled the leaves in the trees; the woods
poured forth the hungry yelping of hounds; the
darkness screamed with thirsty voices; and the witnesses rose and lived:
The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves
into my bones.
The grey ashes formed flesh firm and black, entering into
my flesh.
The gin-flask passed from mouth to mouth, cigars and
cigarettes glowed, the whore smeared lipstick red
upon her lips,
And a thousand faces swirled around me, clamoring that
my life be burned....
And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth
into my throat till I swallowed my own blood.
My voice was drowned in the roar of their voices, and my
black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as
they bound me to the sapling.
And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from
me in limp patches.
And the down and quills of the white feathers sank into
my raw flesh, and I moaned in my agony.
Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a
baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leaped to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs
Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot
sides of death.
Now I am dry bones and my face a stony skull staring in
yellow surprise at the sun....
Discussion Questions:
(1)What is “the thing” the narrator stumbles upon in the woods?
(2)What imagery does Wright include to set the terrifying scene?
(3)To what do the “sooty details of the scene” refer?
(4)What does it mean that this image “thrust” itself “between the world and me”?
(5)Why might Coates have chosen this line from this particular poem as the title for his book? [this could lead to a discussion of the Black body and the long history of vicious attacks against and exploitation of Black bodies in America]
Some additional sources that may be useful when introducing students to the horrific history of racial violence in the United States:
- James Allen, Hilton Als, John Lewis (Foreword), Leon F. Litwack, Without Sanctuary: Photographs and Postcards of Lynching in America (collection of over 80 photographs from the 19th and 20th century of lynchings in America; companion website with link provided above; there is photographic evidence of the lynching postcard phenomenon in this collection)
- Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Rankine includes the infamous photograph of the 1930 double lynching in Marion, Indiana, of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith; but she removes the bodies)
- Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940
- Emmett Till exhibit at the National Museum of African American History & Culture
1