Compare And Contrast Between The World And Me

Partishtha Goyal - 301544505
Dr. David Chariandy
Engl112W – D112
March 8, 2023

Disembodiment in the Presence of the American Dream

“Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in his novel, Between the World and Me. In this letter, addressed to his son, he expresses the realities of being black in America and the constant fear that he has lived through and how it has distorted his life. Most importantly, he informs his son on the beautiful struggle of his life. In giving his son this truth, he hopes to guide him through the physical detachment that comes with being a black man in America for him to be able to live with struggle. The destruction of the black body by

He feels that his “eyes [are] blindfolded by fear” (Coates 126). Everyday experiences are clouded by the knowledge that his body is not his. That in America, the black body at any time can be taken and destroyed at will. A bigger terror being that this pillaging of the body will be received as a mere reality, as a natural instance in this country. The spaces deemed to be safe for all American citizens exist solely to fuel this fear. The people meant to protect only reflect America “in all of its will and fear” (Coates 78). He speaks to this way of living, at a constant risk of losing one’s body. For his son, he wants him to know all the truths that he has found, the brutal history in all its expansiveness. This is the only way to not fall into the delusion that the Dream represents, the false narrative dependent on the dehumanization of black

He remains wary of the fear that he feels has been limiting his son, passing down the uneasiness that he has been carrying since childhood onto him. While fears are very rational and were born in correspondence with the country that he grew up in, he feels that his son should have his “own life, apart from fear—even apart from [him]” (Coates 125). The trouble being that his son is going to grow in a new world, one that Coates wants him to embrace. Although they can never change who they are, that struggle will never disappear, he hopes for his son to have something that he found so late in life. To be outside of America and its Dream. To not be directly part of a system that sees your body, your very spirit, as only a resource to exploit. This is what Coates finds in Paris and what leads him to believe that “[ones] very vulnerability brings [them] closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it” (107). Living in the real world, rejecting the Dream is perhaps the only way to gain some sense of freedom, however slight. Samori must attack life through the struggle of it. To forge through America’s disembodiment of his being as it is the only