Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 epistolary novel Between The World and Me is a text that absolutely captures the contemporary moment but is also foregrounded in the historicity of the issues central to the text: racial violence and injustice in the USA. To first contextualise why the text is so important in the current moment, the US is at a watershed moment in racial justice with the recent conviction of Derek Chauvin for the brutal murder of George Floyd a landmark case in accountability for police brutality, the lack of which is a strong theme in the text. Likewise, the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement has gained increasing prominence in the five years subsequent to the publication of Between The World and Me and there is now a President in the White House who both takes its ambitions seriously and is wants to implement change rather than one who was actively hostile and would weaponise thinly disguised ‘dog whistle’ racist rhetoric to mobilise support against it.
In answering the question of how Coates ‘writes’ the black body, this essay will explore the relationship between his descriptions of the contemporary, bodily lived experience of black Americans and the historic treatment of the black body that continues to have contemporary resonance. It will do so through two comparative close readings of significant passages in the text; two that describe a particular time or event that has happened in the author’s life and two that are more abstract meditations, paying particular attention to the specific words and rhetorical devices Coates uses. In its analysis, it will link these four extracts to other relevant themes from throughout the text and explore how they relate to the overall framework of the text, which is the epistolary address from father to son. Finally, it will engage with and contextualise the readings of the text from three secondary sources and how their arguments relate to the chosen extracts.
The first of these sources and the one that will be given prominence throughout this essay is Simon Abramowitsch’s article ‘Addressing Blackness, Dreaming Whiteness: Negotiating 21st- Century Race and Readership in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.’ In the section of his article entitled ‘The body of blackness’ Abramowitsch opens with the statement ‘It is virtually impossible for any reader of Between the World to miss the stress upon “the black body” in both literal and textual terms’ (463). What does Abramowitsch mean by the stress in both ‘literal and textual terms’ here? Stress has the meaning of both discomfort, distress, pressure but also in terms of the emphasis placed on a specific thing, in this case the black body. The two terms are of course closely interrelated as the constant sense of mental stress and the literal stresses inflicted on the black body is why Coates places such stress on it in textual terms throughout the book. To turn to the first passage in Between The World and Me for close analysis:
…when I was about your age, each day, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not – all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body. I do not long for those days. I have no desire to make you “tough” or “street because” any “toughness” I garnered came reluctantly. (24)
This extract captures the remarkable stresses and strains on a young boy needing multiple strategies to cope with what should be simple and routine experiences, such as walking from home to school. Instead, it is like a nightmare labyrinth of potential conflict and violence at any moment, requiring constant calculations and evaluations of threats and risks as well as the protective nature of group safety. It vividly depicts a body in a state of heightened anxiety and acute self-awareness, where the wrong number of smiles or ‘the manner’ of a walk can provoke danger. The assertion that this process took up ‘one third of my brain’ each day reveals just how draining and exhausting this must have been and there is a heart-breaking reflection when Coates says later in the same passage that he knew he should have ‘…been concerned with more beautiful things’ (24). All of this is necessary to ‘secure the body’ and the sense of the black body as being under constant threat is a theme throughout the book.
The extract is also important as whilst it captures the hyper-masculine violence of ‘the culture of the streets’ it also rejects that culture and seeks to make a break with it. Coates describes his own father trying to teach him life-lessons through beatings: ‘not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body’ (28). In his address to his son though, he acknowledges this approach just perpetuates further violence and the use of inverted commas around the word “tough” suggest that it a false, reluctant toughness born out of a lack of choice. This is a striking central message in the book, that there are many ways in which autonomy is taken away from black bodies, but Coates will do all he can to empower his son more autonomy than he had. This is where a second theorist can be introduced; Lisa Guerrero who writes in her article ‘New Native Sons: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kiese Laymon and The Phenomenology of Blackness in the Post-Racial Age’:
The space that black trauma occupies in his life and in his thinking about black subject formation—especially that of his own and that of his son—he appears intent on escaping it to allow his son to cultivate a familiarity with trauma that empowers him to navigate the havoc of it, not trap him in the vortex of it. (418)
Focusing on two specific words here ‘navigate’ and ‘space’ and linking them together, the very experience of navigating physical spaces as explored in the extract from page 24 of the text, is in itself a highly traumatic experience for Coates, taking up so much of his mental capacity, as explored. The word ‘trap’ is important here too with its connotations of being trapped in cycles of violence that Coates is trying to break the link between his own father and his son. This internalisation of violence from black bodies towards other black bodies is not just restricted to ‘street’ culture. Equally it is engendered within institutional racism as manifested in Coates detailed telling of the murder of university student, Prince Jones by a black policeman. The message being to his son, no matter what you do in life, ‘escaping’ violence is never guaranteed and this is strongly linked to the conditions created by white America, a theme this essay will explore in greater detail further on.
Moving to the second extract allows us to contrast directly the stressful, hyper awareness of Coates’s experience of his black body as a child with the way white Americans and their children interact with physical space in a blissful, dreamlike state of innocence:
…I saw white parents pushing double wide-strollers down gentrifying Harlem Boulevards in T-shirts and jogging shirts. Or I saw them lost in conversation with each other, mother and father, while their sons commanded entire sidewalks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs. (89)
The phrase ‘gentrifying Harlem boulevards’ is worth unpacking as it contrasts one of the areas of New York most synonymous with black culture which has been historically referred to as a ‘ghetto’ with ‘gentrification’ and its connotations of an influx of a more upwardly mobile, moneyed class that is also white. It brings into the heart of the city the suburban world of ‘pot roasts, blueberry pies…small toy trucks’ where ‘children did not fear for their bodies’ (20) that Coates contrasts with his own childhood environment. This shows that feelings of safety in the physical environment are inextricably linked to race as much or arguably more than place, because gentrification is the very act of expanding unconscious white privilege. Another stark contrast between this extract and the one on page 24 is that in the former there is a total absence of parents, or adults; the child Coates and his peers are left to fend for themselves whereas here white children enjoy the protective presence of their parents watching over them. As Coates writes the ‘other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies’ (20) continues to exist in the moment he is observing, but this world is exclusionary along racial lines.
How though can the subtext of racial violence be linked to something as superficially innocent as parents watching their children play outside on their tricycles? Focusing in on two words here, ‘terror’ and ‘mastery’ there are powerful echoes of slavery resonating through history into this very moment in this street scene, the idea of the terror of the violence and subjugation of the black body and the white slave owners as master. The word ‘galaxy’ is also interesting as it suggests that even in the age of space travel and beyond, hundreds of years after slavery, not enough progress has been made to rebalance racial injustices, and whether it is the earth, the seas or the whole universe (metaphorically or otherwise) there will always be a sense of white ownership. This division is also captured by the pronoun ‘them’ and the possessive ‘ours’ to substitute for ‘white’ and ‘black’ which Coates does not actually say at any point in the excerpt, but it is very clear to which groups he is referring to. The word ‘sons’ differentiates the privileges these white sons enjoy from such a young age and the natural entitlement to ‘command’ the physical space of the pavement. This is by contrast to the terror experienced of Coates’s son and others, ‘our children’ which has shocking resonance later in the text when a white woman casually pushes his son as they descend an escalator asserting her primacy over his physical space. Coates has chosen to describe sons only and not sons and daughters (though mothers and fathers) in the overtly masculine nature of white violence to black bodies historically and as Abramowitsch says is ‘imparted’ from father to son to hold up a parallel to the lessons he wants to impart to his own son.
This links to the first of the two extracts this essay will explore that are more general meditations on the black body in contemporary America, whilst continuing to explore the epistolary structure of the text with the direct address from Coates to his son. Early on in the text Coates writes:
I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death forselling cigarettes….Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. (9)
The opening ‘I am writing you because’ is Coates bearing witness to a shocking event, that is sadly one of so many that must be recorded and not forgotten, what Abramowitsch calls ‘snapshots of violence that point to the innumerable stories of racial violence’ (464), that is representative of the contemporary moment, ‘this was the year’. By using the second person ‘you’ rather than ‘I’ before ‘saw’ Coates is framing the narration around what it must have been like for a young boy to see this happen and his anger can palpably be felt through the pages at the impact this must have. It is important that Eric Garner’s name is spoken to give a human face and individual identity to what Abramowitsch calls the ‘spectacle of black suffering’ (463) so that we as readers are forced to confront how fragile black lives are and how disposably they are treated for the most minor infringements. By contrast, the perpetrators of the violence are anonymised to ‘the people’ and ‘the destroyers’ so that there is no mistaking these acts as a result of individual extremity but part of a systemic, collective power structure, that is ‘rarely held accountable.’ As Guerrero writes ‘their (Coates and Laymon’s) literary interventions are made at a moment the precariousness of black death increasingly defines the possibilities in black life’ (417). Eric Garner’s possibilities were reduced to selling cigarettes without authority and for doing what he could to stay alive, he lost his life. The brutality of this moment is captured in the word ‘destroyed’ repeated thrice in three staccato sentences, and each time collocated with ‘your body’ the use of which is powerfully both second person plural and singular. In other words, in his address to his son Coates is making it very clear that he should have no doubt that this is something that could easily happen to him. This message is conveyed in even bleaker terms later in the text when Coates writes: ‘Here is what I would like for you to know: In America it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.’(104). The contrast of the gentle tone, the tender, protective father to son discourse ‘what I would like you to know’ makes the assertion that follows even more impactful; that the very idea of America is built on racial violence from its inception. The ‘heritage’ of America is a litany of violence against black bodies, part of a long ‘tradition’ from slavery, segregation, civil rights to shootings and chokings in the moment of which Coates is writing.
This thread that Coates weaves from the collective, historical experience through to contemporary individual experiences of violence against the black body and from American heritage to modern day America can be further explored in the next extract:
“White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes the power is direct (lynching) and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white and without it “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons. (42).
The use of inverted commas around “White America” presents it as an ideological construct, the reality is of course a melting pot nation of people originating from across the world, but a primary divide has emerged in the construct of ‘whiteness’, which as Coates says later on the page is not even exclusively defined by physical appearance as straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black” (42). This recalls strongly James Baldwin’s description of the ‘American curtain’ with its ideological associations in The White Man’s Guilt which divides what he calls ‘White America’ and ‘Black America’ and is a ‘curtain of lies behind which white Americans hide’ (40). As Guerrero writes ‘his (Baldwin’s) writing begins at an epistemological point of how his understanding of himself as black is ineluctably linked to white America’s understanding of his own blackness.’ (419). This extract links the first two extracts discussed in terms of Coates understanding of his own black body from a very young age and how his own son and children of white parents experience their bodies in physical space very differently. This relates to the use of the word ‘syndicate’ which with its connotations of criminality, connects the historical criminal acts of violence towards the black body like lynching to contemporary ones like the choking Eric Garner. The title of Between the World and Me is taken from Richard Wright’s poem of the same name describing a lynched body, which returns to Guerrero’s notions of collective trauma which ‘persists as a locus from which black subjectivity emerges.’ (419). The word ‘power’ is repeated three times which has rhetorical echoes of the repetition of ‘destroy’ in the previous extract and places in uncomfortable juxtaposition for the reader the concepts of “White America” and ‘white power’ with its associations of acts of violence to the black body both directly and indirectly through ‘redlining’ which is using economic power to remove autonomy from specific groups. ‘Dominate’ and ‘domination’ is another repeated concept and the associative leap made in the last sentence is made more clearly explicit with the assertion that the domination and ‘exclusion’ is central to ‘white America/white power.’
This power though, Coates writes, is based on ‘belief’ which again alludes to race as an ideological construct, a belief system that has created a hierarchy with “white people” (again noting the use of inverted commas). This makes “white America” synonymous with what it means to be just “American” in “America”, to have the power to deny others their autonomy without accountability. The final line that ‘without it (this power) “white people” would cease to exist|’ (42) allows us to introduce the concept of ‘the dream’ which Coates uses throughout the text as a metaphor to contrast the carefree, disembodied ‘dream like’ experience of white Americans as captured so vividly in his descriptions of wholesome suburbia and Harlem gentrification with the visceral, hyper-awareness of inhabiting a black body.
However, Abramowitsch argues that ‘while Coates links the Dream to whiteness, he cannot, for reasons of audience, assert that the Dream is whiteness’ (470). This is perhaps because whilst individuals can transcend racial barriers to access the higher echelons of society including even the highest office like President Obama or to attend good universities like Prince Jones, they will still have their birth rights questioned by outlandish conspiracies or be killed by the very people meant to protect them. So whilst no longer exclusionary to every individual, systemic exclusion remains. When looking at the question of audience we can introduce a third theorist here, Dana Williams, who in her article ‘Everybody’s Protest Narrative: “Between the World and Me” and the Limits of Genre’ argues that ‘Even as the text is written as a letter to his son, the secondary audience is white people, consciously so or not’ (182). This poses one of the fundamental questions of the text, Coates writes with clarity and passion about the problem of endemic racial violence and injustice, but what are his solutions beyond his poignant hopes for the best possible life for his son to escape?
A provocative question that could be asked is does Coates’s focus on many of the privileges that his son could have if he has access to ‘the dream’ with its positive depictions of white suburban and city life reinforce that the black embodied experience is something to escape from and does this then partly absolve the white reader? In Williams’s article she paraphrases critics of the text who believe that Coates displays an ‘unwillingness to offer even the smallest meaningful insight into the interior lives of those Coates narrates as powerless and and disembodied’ (182). This links to her broader argument as to whether Coates’s text is a ‘protest narrative’ as black readers will already ‘know the horrors being narrated’ and therefore beyond the audience of his son, white readers are by default also the audience (182). The counter argument though from Abramowitsch is that ‘by directing his depiction of the black body in pain explicitly to black readers, Coates rejects the possibility of empathetic identification across racial lines’ (463). This is captured in the extract above with the third person plural pronoun ‘our’ bodies, clearly signifying Coates’s own body, his son’s and black bodies, demarcating the boundaries of ‘identification’. However, a troubling question remains which is without empathy from white readers and beyond, how can progress be achieved, does this reinforce Guerrero’s criticisms of Coates’s lack of solutions or instead reinforce his idea that notions of collective progress are naively impossible and therefore individual escape is the only possibility?
Coates uses a number of different literary and rhetorical devices to write the black body by looking at extracts that shift the viewpoint, narration and focus to explore different aspects of the individual and collective black bodily experience. In the first extract it is focalised on his visceral bodily childhood experiences, the anxieties of which he wants to protect his son from. It then focused in on the panoramic, city life scene of white parents and their children contrasting serenity with the subtle, subtext of power and violence. Finally, it took the narration outside of Coates’s own life to a meditation on an act of shocking individual violence towards Eric Garner and how this links to the collective historical violence of America and its shaping of white ideology in the final extract. Both of these are framed in a direct address to his son, using powerful imagery and repeated words of phrases for symbolic effect. It has also examined how each of the three theorists’ arguments relate to a different aspect of how Coates writes the black body. In reverse order to which they were introduced; Williams and the question of audience and if this can ever be inclusive of white readers, Guerrero and the notion of trauma in black subject formation and finally Abramowitsch and the centrality of the threat of overt and covert violence to the black body in the text. As the primary theorist used throughout the essay, it is pertinent to conclude with a final quote from Abramowitsch: ‘Coates’s reminder of the threat of racial violence done to the black body is not simply a part of the message he imparts to his son; it is his central argument.’ (465).
Works cited
Abramowitsch, Simon. “Addressing Blackness, Dreaming Whiteness: Negotiating 21St-Century Race and Readership in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.” CLA Journal, vol. 60, no. 4, 2017, pp. 458–478. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26557006.
Baldwin, James. “The White Man’s Guilt.” Dark Days, Penguin Books, 2018, p.40
Coates, Ta-Nehisi “Between The World and Me” The Text Publishing Company, 2015.
Guerrero, Lisa. “New Native Sons: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Kiese Laymon, and The Phenomenology of Blackness in the Post-Racial Age.” CLA Journal, vol. 60, no. 4, 2017, pp. 414–433. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26557003.
London to Norway 