Letter To My Son Analysis

“Letter to My Son,” written by Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2015, was in all essentiality advice. The article begins with the author describing his own sadness at the distance between a country built on a dream, and the sobering reality he saw. He continues on to talk about how his body, his son’s body, and the bodies of many of their peers around them, are very often going to be at the mercy of people around them. Coates then speaks of escaping the danger of having his own body at the mercy of another, and his desire to rescue himself through “a clash with the streets.” Cue a change of tone in the letter as it moves on to speak of the author’s “Mecca”. Which in this case means a holy city, or a place of light and perfection. For Coates, this place
is Howard University, in Washington D.C.. After a brief exposition, detailing the different walks of life he saw from others simply by walking down the street, Coates moves onto describing his realization of a need for a “trophy case,” in which to stock a number of achievements attained by blacks. This need was, according to him, borne of a fear that skin color really did dictate your role in history, and life in general. After that comes a lengthy discussion of Coates’ belief that a grand revolution to bring equality will never come, and then a section telling his son to continue to struggle. “Perhaps struggle is all we have,” Coates says, and those words alone are summary enough for the next couple of paragraphs. The conclusion of the lengthy letter begins Coates apologizing, and ends with him asking his son to understand the main purpose with which this letter was written: to have the son be aware of his situation in a “terrible and beautiful world.”