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

Ta-Nehisi Coates, born in West Baltimore, now residing in Brooklyn, is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. There, he writes about culture, politics, and social issues, which he also discusses in his recent novel Between the World and Me, released in 2015. Fear dominated the first thirty pages of the book as it does people’s lives. The fear could be found in the language of the streets, the school system, and in the concept and pressure of the American Dream.
First of all, Coates depicted fear as prey prowling on the streets through body and language; it was shown through rage. Walking around the neighborhood behaving loudly and rudely gave the boys with puffy jackets and swinging medallions a sense of security and power; control. Violent …show more content…
Coates witnessed this behavior and said, “To survive the neighborhoods and shield my body, I learned another language consisting of basic head nods and handshakes” (23). Coates always felt the need to be on guard in order to protect his body. One-third of Coates brain was focused on the vibe he gave off, the people he associated with, and little things that shouldn’t necessarily be on the mind just for a walk to school. Despite being so careful, he encountered a common enemy to black people today, a gun. This scene opened Coates eyes because he knew guns took lives, however has never been in the position of being the target. The threat of someone taking away his body must have been horrific, he had simply been admiring the clothing of some older students in a 7-Eleven when the boy the older student’s were yelling at pulled a gun out. Coates was at the tender age of eleven when this happened, making it one of the turning points of his life, changing him forever. The owner of the gun was affirming Coates order of life; it was a horrific lesson to get a point across to the younger Coates. A black person’s body is always at risk. And it’s sad that despite knowing this, Coates wrote that even if he …show more content…
Part of Coates’ brain may have been focused on the street, but he needed to save some for school as well. Coates states, “If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left” (25). Coates is saying that school was as much of a problem as the streets were. Failing school is like failing the system of life. If one fails to grasp school while young, they won’t succeed in the future and all opportunities for a decent life will slip away. However, school didn’t work in the favor of black youth in an education sense. Coates speaks about sitting in a French class when French was another world to him; he didn’t even know a single French speaker. School wasn’t representing an education but a means of escape from drugs and jail from being on the streets. School was just keeping them in check, and perhaps in their parents’ eyes, it was keeping them safe and alive. Although they may have been physically safe in the school, the school system itself was dangerous to their mentality. Dangerous in the sense that it doesn’t show the whole picture, doesn’t teach all of American history, therefore withholding intellectual information that could motivate the students. In class, students were taught about how great America is because of the white men in history and how swell life was. Textbooks didn’t reveal the darker side of America, how black people were treated as if they weren’t human, as if their body wasn’t the same