Almost a century following the apparent freeing of slaves in the United States, institutionalized racism in our society has evolved into a whole different type of beast. It has become more concealed, blurring the lines that determined who is responsible for the hindrance of equality experienced by the black population. Instead of pointing towards the plantation owners and Jim Crow laws who had a direct, visible effect on black people’s lives, the oppressed are forced to attempt to point to biased prison system, unregulated police forces, distracting school curriculums, and rampant gun violence as factors in the melting pot of problems produced by the faceless bureaucracy that is our government. But for the average white person, the American experience is completely alien, and Ta-Nehisi Coates demonstrates how the black person and the white person truly are worlds apart in his novel, Between the World and Me.
The main dividing aspect of the black person in contrast to, as Coates coins them, “those who believe they are white” is their having been born into a black body.…