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

Between the World and Me addresses Coates's 14-year-old son in a letter. This letter uses the feelings, mistreatment, and harsh realities associated with being an African American in the United States. Ta-Nehisi Coates relates to the history of violence against black people and the constant incarcerations of black youth. The tone of book is very serious while it’s open for interpretation. He touches on the physical, religious, and mental security of African Americans in their mistreatment in America. Ta-Nehisi Coates describes his background as physicality, chaos, and mentally abusive. He also puts emphasizes the daily religious concerns in the African American community within American. Ta-Nehisi Coates's believes that there is an absence

in the religious views where the "hope and dreams and faith and progress." Only the systems of white supremacy allows for progressive and movement in social status. The “American Dream” only favors those white or empowered. He’s disagrees with Martin Luther King Jr.'s ideas of integration will be saving America’s abuse toward African Americans. Coates also disagrees with Malcolm X's optimism towards nationalism.
Ta-Nehisi Coates strongly believes the association between white supremacy and American views to never change. Coates does not believe there is reason to be optimistic
because this will never change. Coates believes that even if there is the death of white supremacy, then this would only lead to the birth of a new peon class.

Coates gives a short autobiographical section discussing his youth in Baltimore.

He explains the fear he felt towards both the police and the streets where he must always be on guard and depend solely on himself because both groups threatened physical harm. He also feared the rules of code-switching to meet the clashing social norms of the streets, the authorities, and the professional world. Ta-Nehisi’s uses his experience here and he compares street life to suburban life. Coates calls suburban life "the Dream" in that it is “an exclusionary fantasy for white people enabled by and largely ignorant of their history of privilege and suppression.” (Part III Coates) To rethink and reconsider what white people gained from slavery, segregation, and voter suppression would shatter that Dream they “built”. At the end of Between the World and Me, there is a story of Mabel Jones, who worked hard in an effort to move social classes from the daughter of a sharecropper to give her children comfortable lives with private schools and European trips. Mabel’s son and Ta-Nehisi Coates' college friend, Prince Carmen Jones Jr., was mistakenly tracked and killed by a policeman. Coates uses this story to argue that race related attacks against African Americans affect black people of social classes as

well.