Letter To My Son Analysis

Racial politics in America have developed around the “American Dream,” a concept which has polarized racial discussions as White versus Black, as a juxtaposition between the haves and have-nots. In “Letter to My Son,” an excerpt from Between the World and Me published in Atlantic Monthly on July 4, 2015, Black activist and educator Te-Nehisi Coates warns his son of the complexity of being Black in America, and illustrates the purposeful inaccessibility of the “Dream” to Black Americans by imparting anecdotal wisdom, summarizing historical context, and referencing current events. While Coates is addressing his son, publishing the letter to a wider audience allows others, especially White Americans, to observe an intimate conversation that many

Coates uses a quote from the late James Baldwin, a 20th century Black American author and social critic, to attribute the historical violence and colonization of the world to White people. Coates uses the language of this quote throughout the letter; he asserts infants are raised to believe they are White, families walk with the belief they are White, and entire groups of people live under the belief that they are White, with no real understanding of what Whiteness means as a social construction (Coates, “Letter”, para. 2, 22, 25, 33, 34, 45, 46). Coates asserts that the “political term people” did not include Black Americans when Lincoln used it in 1863. Rather, it referred to those people who believed themselves to be White, who actualized their Whiteness through the “pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land” (3). Coates subverts the narrative of White Saviorism which American media espouses continually. In this letter, those who believe themselves to be White are not the unquestioned superior acting out of moral obligation to bring others up to par; instead, Coates subjects them to the same scrutiny and ridicule as those labeled as Black

Coates mentions briefly the use of corporal punishment by his father and other parent’s in his childhood community, but neglects to expand on its meaning as it pervades the Black community from generation to generation (10). Coates focuses narrowly on Black men in his discussion of racism, and ignores the opportunity to address misogynoir—a word coined by Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey to describe the racialized sexism Black women face (Trudy, “Misogynoir”)—when he references Black women in his letter. He perpetuates misogynoir by mentioning Black women as an afterthought, only to accompany the narrative of the suffering Black man, and characterizing slavery as a woman; he offers no insight into the struggle of the Black woman, nor does he acknowledge the severity of the issues faced by Black women, either at the hands of White people or Black men, in any meaningful way (Coates, 9-10, 37). Further, Coates presents a narrow, one-sided depiction of “street life” (9-16) and romanticizes Howard University in stereotypical exoticism of Blackness—characterizing Howard as a racially religious center and appropriating the language of Islam by calling it “Mecca”—which fuels the respectability politics that Black Americans grapple with continuously; the poor urban Black community is to be left behind in search of a more meaningful, superior,