Between The World And Me Summary

Between the World and Me Summary
In the book Between the World and Me written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Coates composes his book as a letter form to his fifteen year old son distilling the notion of what is is like to live in contemporary America as a black person. Ta-Nehisi Coates is unravelling his argument by incorporating personal experiences before and during fatherhood, also including his son’s experiences and young men such as Michael Brown whose death has brought awareness of the dangers of living in America as a black person. Coates is desperate to raise his son in a different manner than most black parents have been doing for the past years. He is not going to give his son false hope.
Coates is developing many arguments, such as the reality that “The Dream” is not

Coates states, “You stayed up until 11 P.M. … I came in five minutes after, and I didn’t hug you, and I didn’t comfort, because I thought it would be wrong to comfort you. I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that it is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question of how one should live within the black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself” (Coates 12). The significance of Coates not hugging his son is that Coates will not create the idea to his son that everything will be fine because he truly believes that being a black man in Contemporary America means you are truly infuriated to “the people” (7). Coates has experienced enough and is intelligent to not make the same mistake that other black parents have done when they try giving their children the talk. By talk I am referring to when black parents have to make their children aware of the brutal