Between The World And Me Essay

Between the World and Me is an autobiography by Ta-Nehisi Coates written in the form of a letter from Coates to his fifteen-year-old son. In this book, Coates tackles major issues that plague black people, particularly black men, in modern day America. This book covers a wide range of topics, including race relations, “whiteness”, “blackness”, self-identity, and manhood.
One of the most powerful messages from the book is that black people can be anything. The world is quick to put us in a box, and portray us all as one standard thing, when we’re not. In the book, Coates stresses the opinion that race, as we know it, is a manmade concept. He mentions how there’s no such thing as white people; the invention of being white was first started when prejudice against black people began. White people used to be identified by their cultural background before anything else. The people used to be Italians, French, British, and Irish, now they’re all just ‘white’. This new found whiteness was created by a shared love of oppression against blacks. They were the ones to make things black or white, when everything, or everyone, is really grey.
Coates additionally explains how the concept of race is used to
He first is shown how different blackness can be by the first woman he falls in love with at Howard university. She’s half black, half Indian and a Californian, someone so different from anything he ever saw growing up in the city of Baltimore. Then he meets and falls in love with a bisexual girl who lives with a bisexual couple with an open relationship. This shows me how different black people can be and how we have to be open to all different forms of blackness. Additionally Coates is a living embodiment of how blacks can break the stereotype, as he is a college dropout who grew up in the slums of Baltimore and is now a writer who is able to pen works as powerful as Between the World and