When one looks at the concept of racism and racial inequality among Americans, the idea can trouble many people and their viewpoints. America, crippled with racism ever since the European colonization in America in the seventeenth century. With a world dominated by white privilege in the early 1800's, the dangers of growing up a young black male in America have improved immensely, but remain present. Many cases exist with African Americans at the forefront of gunshots, unnecessary beatings, and treated harshly for what they have supposedly done. Ta-Nehisi Coates' novel Between the World and Me dives deep into his life as a young African American male growing up in America. Coates stresses the dangers he encounters while on the streets and questions…show more content… A majority of the people who settled in America in the early 1400's to 1700's included those of white decent from Europe. The power that white people bestowed on America proved as a dominant idea throughout the civil war containing levels of African American slavery. Though formally ending oppression in 1865, ruminants of the idea that with a certain race comes with a certain power still exist to this day. The theme of white supremacy secures Coates' real life examples to back up his analysis. As the novel begins Coates brings to attention, “But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming the people has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy” (7). The whole concept of the novel is summed up in this quote because it conveys the idea of racism as a principle, and the people who rule this principle depend on their status of power. Power must not stand as something genetically transmitted from earlier generations, but by how much power one establishes based on assertive stereotypes. Coates comments on the idea of stereotypes when comparing his life in Baltimore to a slave ship, “I was not in any slave ship. Or perhaps I was, because so much of what I'd felt in Baltimore, the sharp hatred, the immortal wish, and the timeless will, I saw in Hayden's work” (51). Coates describes the white police officers
