Comparing James Baldwin's Between The World And Me

James Baldwin writes, “Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations” (progressive.org). Consider this quote and find one passage from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s, Between the World and Me that reflects this same theme. Your task for this assignment is to tell us 1. What is this quote telling us? 2. How is the idea within this quote reflected in Coates?
Humans, for the most part, hate change. This is why my grandmother doesn’t have internet or a phone with caller identification. White people, throughout all

of time, have been above the other races in America, and as African Americans are fighting back and trying to grow, whites are ignoring the issues and pretending they aren’t exist as it is easier for them. African Americans are having a hard time rising up against these stereotypes because white people have a hard time accepting they even exist. This difference is the reason why progress is so slow and why
A while ago, when I was touring a college, I was talking to a boy from Texas. I was explaining to him how diverse southern California was, and it took me aback when he said there were only white people and African Americans where he lived. It appalled me even more when he said “The whites live in their side of town, and the blacks live on theirs. It’s not like we don’t love each other. That’s just how it is.” Talking to him, I realized he didn’t understand that there was some sort of inequality going on that would cause this sort of segregation. I asked him if anyone of African American descent had ever moved into his neighborhood, and he said “No, that would just be weird, they stay on their side.” This is the immovable pillar James Baldwin writes of. There’s a barrier that many white people don’t see – something that’s keeping African Americans from truly being equal to others. The quote “the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star,” in this scenario, was literal. The whites quite literally did not want African Americans to move into the same homes they lived in. They preferred them to live in poverty where they always had.
Coates felt the same barrier that prevented African Americans from living the same way the whites did that made it hard to thrive as a black person.

He felt the actual word black gave them a disadvantage from the beginning: “Perhaps being named “black” had nothing to do with any of this; perhaps being named “black” was just someone’s name for being at the bottom, human turned to object, object turned to human.” (Pg. 55). Although white people may pretend that they don’t treat black people as if they were on the bottom, they do, as shown by the guy from Texas I talked about earlier. After all, skin tone is just a color, the meaning behind the color is what makes the disparity that we see today

real.
When African Americans attempt to defy the term black as Coates described, they have quite the struggle to move out of the stereotypes constructed for them by whites. This is why Coates says “I’d heard people tell their black boys and girls to be “twice as good” which is to say “accept half as much””. White people act like they want equality – they pretend it’s there – but when one challenges it, when black people attempt to rise up – they must work harder for the same opportunities as the whites. This is because it “attacks [their] sense of reality”. It’s been ingrained in white people's brains since birth, little by little, that they are the dominant race. Most CEO’s are white males, of the 45 presidents we’ve had, 44 of them have been white, all male. The world isn’t equal. Some people were born into more privileged lived than others.
It is hard for white Americans, for some reason, to understand that these disparities indeed exist.

As James Baldwin wrote “Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality”. White America unfortunately isn’t able to handle the change and mutual understanding of the issues that African Americans are seeking. It uproots everything they have known:
“To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declare itself and turning towards itself and turning towards something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this” (Pg. 98-99).
This difficulty to see the issue that “attacks ones sense of reality” – the fear that the world may not be the same as it appears – is why progress is so slow. As African American people attempt to climb out of the pit whites forced them to dig hundreds of years ago, whites fail to see that they could use a ladder to get out. Baldwin and Coates’ views on white Americans ignorance to the problems clearly align, showing how they chose to ignore the problems because addressing them changes things, and they are afraid of

that.