Analysis Of Between The World And Me

In Between the World and Me, last year’s celebrated epistolary memoir, Ta-Nehisi Coates centers the bodies of black folk and their struggle against the grain of America’s racial cosmology. Written in a posture of intimacy, Coates reflects on the hypervisibility of his raced body: “by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request.” Beneath his own struggle, Coates questions what the inheritance and heritage of an anti-black world means for his son—a world everywhere determined against his body, marking it as vulnerable and exploitable: “what matters is our condition, what matters is the system that makes your body breakable.” The affective intimacy of the father-son
Spence insists that Coates sees white supremacy as created and maintained in institutions, but that these realities are yet changeable. If Coates draws on natural metaphors to talk about white supremacy, which might be suggestive of ontology or immutability, the metaphors are actually used rhetorically to evoke the visceral toll of racism on the body. It is not that dangerous memories and an accounting of racial vulnerability foreclose the possibility of other futures; instead, it is rather that such memories and institutional racism make change difficult. There is ground for hope, but such hope must reckon with the racial longue durée. “We can’t predict the future, but we do know change doesn’t occur without struggle.” According to Spence’s reading of Coates, black institutions, like Howard University, compliment the struggle of individuals and are the crucial counter to the power wielded by the enduring legacy of white supremacist institutions. Evoking the many valences of struggle in Between the World and Me, Spence writes, “[s]truggle provides Coates profound insight and joy. His realism also enables him to see the wonders of black