Between The World And Me Summary

Words: 687
Pages: 3

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between The World and Me is a powerful framework “for understanding our nation’s history” and the issues that this nation has been faced with in recent years. Coates challenges that idea of “race” that Americans have used as a foundation to build an empire since the beginning of this nation’s history. He takes this opportunity to not necessarily tackle the discussion of race that has been had many times in the past, but to bring light to the damages bestowed upon the bodies of black men and women. Between The World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to tell it like it is, all while trying to answer questions about race in this nation as he writes this as a letter to his teenage son.
As a powerful framework, Between The World
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In relation to generational messages, Coates talks about how “comforting it was to believe that the fate of [his] body and the bodies of [his] family were under [his] powers.” He then brings up two things that he was told all his life, one being, “You will have to man up” and the other being, “Anyone can make a baby but it takes a man to be a father.” It sparked in me what my family is always telling me, especially the women in my family: “You have to work twice as hard or maybe more because you are a black woman.” Like Coates said, it is the language of survival. The second takeaway from Coates was this idea of unanswered questions. In this letter to his son, Coates attempts to answer the “big” questions of race and of being black in America, but they ultimately weren’t. I took away that Coates wanted his readers to tackle and wrestle with these questions themselves. Just like his attitude of “Telling it how I see it,” there were no handouts in this book. The final takeaway from Coates was not sugarcoating the truth. I feel that sometimes we like to soften or distort the truth to our liking because we personally don’t fully understand the situation at hand or we can’t handle the truth