Themes Of Between The World And Me

The nonfiction book, Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, published in 2015, is about the struggles of a black man living in America. Written as a letter to Coates’ son, Samori, he describes his life growing up in the ghettos of Baltimore, Maryland. He discusses his experiences and struggles as a black man in a country built on slavery and segregation between black and white people. The main focus of this literary work is to inform the reader how people of color face daily challenges just because of the color of their skin. The book’s main themes are race, the destruction of the Black Body, and the American Dream. To begin, Coates, throughout his book, talks about racial discrimination and violence. In the novel, Coates writes,

Many people, mainly people of color, suffer from police brutality. Coates asserts, “And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect” (9). This shows that although the victim was a child, the police still killed him. 26-year-old Timothy Loehmann killed Tamir Rice because he carried a replica toy gun. Police brutality is still a significant problem in the United States. Recently, Tyre Nichols was brutally beaten by Memphis police and died of his injuries. Another example of police brutality occurred in 2020 when George Floyd was pinned to the ground by Minneapolis police and killed. This demonstrates that some police officers take advantage of their power and destroy

Many are easy to judge and do not get to know one's true character. Coates conveys, “We were black beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior” (43-44). In his letter, Coates writes that as a black person, he will never get the respect a white person would. Compared to those in the West, his body is “uncivilized.” In this country, no one valued or accepted people of color. They were seen as outcasts. Coates notes, “Perhaps being named “black” was just someone’s name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah” (55). In his letter, Coates wrote to his son that throughout his life, he always encountered a barrier separating him from those around