Between the World and Me Themes

Black Bodies and Disembodiment

In the very first paragraph of his extended letter to his son, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates recalls that a newscaster recently asked him what it was like to lose his body. The question suggests the successful extent to which Coates has emphasized the Black body—its endangerment, protection, and confiscation—in his writings. All of American history, Coates asserts, has witnessed the “disembodiment” of Black people. The first phase, from 1619 to 1863, was defined by slavery. Slaves were literally deprived of control over their bodies. Their owners possessed them like property, or “chattel.” Black bodies were tortured, abused, raped and commodified.

In the second phase of disembodiment, from 1863 to the present, African Americans, although technically emancipated, had to confront a broad spectrum of dangers to their bodies. These threats ranged from the harsh cruelty of Jim Crow Laws in the later 19th century to the lynch mobs egged on by such hate groups as the Ku Klux Klan. In the modern era, Black people have been forced to remain continually alert to protecting their bodies. Coates illustrates this point with the cases of Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Prince Jones. All were young Black men who were fatally involved in violent incidents. Several of these incidents involved white police officers. The physical assaults on the victims’ bodies were prominent features in all these cases.

“The Dream”

Coates uses “the Dream” as a semi-ironic shorthand phrase for the stereotyped “American Dream.” In its classic form, this aspiration was materialistic and almost exclusively white. It comprised a wide-ranging set of hopes and goals, such as upward mobility, financial success, secure employment, life in suburbia, and home ownership. Coates points out that these aspirations usually involve the exploitation and exclusion of Black people. Readers will note that whenever Coates refers to “the Dream,” he uses quotation marks to imply that the concept is somehow artificial or mechanical. Coates also habitually omits the word “American”—reflecting that “the Dream” was exclusionary since it did not involve Black people and thus is not shared by all Americans. These nuances contribute a somewhat ironic tone to the expression.

Linked to Coates’ notion of “the Dream” is his repeated assertion that “whites” in America are really people who have painted or described themselves as white. Coates likely drew this concept from James Baldwin, whom he quotes in the epigraph to Chapter 3: “[They] have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion… because they think they are white.” As Coates points out early in Chapter 1, “The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish.” Like “the Dream,” then, the idea of “whiteness” involves substantial elements of illusion and evasion.

Education and Struggle

Coates looks back on his childhood and youth, describing both the streets and the schools as “shackles” that restrained and limited him. While the streets bred fear, the schools insisted on a stifling conformity. They were “arms of the same beast.” It is not until he enters Howard University that Coates begins to appreciate and profit from the benefits of education. At Howard, where his book-loving father formerly worked at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Coates plunges himself into an expanding world of knowledge and experience. He begins to love writing and journalism, an interest that began at age 4 when Coates’ mother taught him how to write as a means of investigation. He realizes that he was “made for the library, not the classroom.” His exuberance is such that he starts to describe Howard with the metaphor “the Mecca,” a term implying that the university, in all its diversity and broad horizons, is the crossroads of his world.

The concept of struggle is closely associated with the idea of education in the book. Neither education nor struggle has a tangible aim, but both are means to render life sane and honorable. Coates repeatedly points out to his son, Samori, that struggle is the destiny of Black people who wish to take back possession of their bodies and their future. Given systemic white racism in America, there is no guarantee that Black people can afford to surrender their alertness anytime soon. What can be argued, however, is that education and struggle maintain both the body and the mind of a Black person. In Chapter 2, Coates tells Samori that the struggle is all he has to offer him, “because it is the only portion of this world under your control.”