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Personal Statement: The First Year Reading Experience

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I am a freshman at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and I am writing this letter to share a new program with you. Appropriately named, the First Year Reading Experience program was created to implement a life-long interest in active reading and impart a community or sense of belonging among incoming first-year students, staff, and faculty. This program is built around the concept of a common reading experience that will spark conversations, break boundaries, and help freshman students to become part of the larger university as a community. The First Year Reading Experience program has been implemented by several universities and was adopted by UTC just a few years ago. Since its inception, I myself, have seen and experienced the …show more content…

It follows the events and what happens while Coates is growing up and then the events of today in Samori’s life. I believe this quote from the book summarizes exactly how Coates sees racism in the world, he tells his son, “You are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people whom you shouldn’t. But the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or …show more content…

After all, Malcolm X became Coates’ favorite writer. The image of a young Malcolm dressed in a sharp business suit, tie hanging askew with one hand parting a window shade and the other holding a rifle, communicated everything that the he aspired to be: “controlled, intelligent, and beyond the fear.” The desire to overcome his sense of ever-present fear led the author to search for role models who appeared to have overcome theirs. Coates son, Samori, was so distraught when the killer of a young black man got off scot-free that he went to his room and cried. Trayvon Martin was killed by a white neighborhood watchman while walking home at night and looking suspicious. Coates let his son cry for a while before going in and explaining to him that he’s just going to have to learn to live with it because that’s how it is for blacks, he will always have to be careful and think twice. The essential question of Coates’ memoir is “How do I live free in this black body?” Coates believes that race is because of racism, and that no one is white they just believe that they are, which also means that no one is black, but they’re just told and shown that they are. He asks himself and other black people how they can live freely, without a constant presence of fear in America. On a deeper level, he also asks how he can transcend the fear and racism that he has

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As Coates departs from Dr. Jones house he thought over the loss of his dear friend. He thinks of the protesters and how perhaps their bodies was abused because they knew that it was not theirs, to begin with. Coates informs his son that it is unlikely that the dreamers will never come to their consciousness. It is clear that racial justice and the dream does not seem to be going away anytime soon, that the black will suffer from inequality and injustice for a very long time. Despite, our society having a former black American president, the media focusing on the protest against police killings Coates sees no prospect of much change.

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This altercation started when Coates became bored and disruptive in the class where it led to law enforcement being present to have more control of the situation (Coates 2008, pg. 141). Although Coates was a very bright intellectual, it is obvious to see that he was not present when in class but was very engaged with the world of books and music, outside of the classroom. Young Coates was not aware of the power of “knowledge” alone. He did not understand that without “conscious” of what is to be fought for. His mind was more focus on the lust for making his mark that he had not considered society’s view of a black male and where the origin of fear

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Coat’s perspective on the incident of the death of Trayvon Martin is explained in a sarcastic way, showing that Obama is avoiding the racial conflict. “Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability

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Even just by reading pages 5-12, I can tell that Ta-Nehisi Coates is a good writer because his essay is highly thoughtful and provocative, and the well-written narrative provides lots of powerful examples to depicts the racial struggle in the U.S. He told his son, “You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regression all land, with great violence, upon the body.” The concept of violence upon the body appears on every important point of my reading. This is more powerful than the examples of law enforcement and black Americans because it leads the reader to truly see the the fears provoked.

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Coates leaves little space to talk about slavery but instead talks about black reparations. He doesn’t really demonstrate this throughout the essay. He gives us a long list of slavery victims and their stories, but no overall

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“Coates goes for that audience’s throat. He wants them to feel the strangulation of struggle, to rob them of breath for one heartbeat longer than is comfortable.” (Two texts) Coates' rhetoric is overpowering. He evokes an emotional reaction from his readers by forcing them to look through his eyes and see the injustices against black people as a victim and not a third party observer.

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Richard Wright starts his poem with the description of a scene in the woods. The adjectives that he used such as ‘grassy’, ‘scaly’, ‘sooty’, all help create a gloomy environment and give the audience a sense of ill omen. The introduction of the poem points out the existence of a ‘cut’, which detach the author from the scene, and I think this may relate to the reason why Coates used this poem as a start, as there are also some cuts that make Coates feel the difference between the world and him. Coates starts his book with ‘son’, so I assume that the first intention of him writing this book is probably not to publish or sell, but to give his son an impression of how the real world treats black people differently according to the color of their

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Coates knew he wasn’t in his hometown, so he wasn’t able to act violently. At this point Coates feels he’s being restricted and is experiencing the black vail. Coates also feels like he’s incapable of doing anything about the woman who was vigorously shouting at Samori. Although Samori and Coates experienced numerous encounter that has to deal with racism, they are not the only African Americans that have experienced such things. A female by name of Abigayle Reese has undergone racist remarks against her from white people.

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My 3D model is a box that represents the mental state of Trevor, the main character in “The Destructors”, and the box also connects Trevor with one of the main themes in the story, destruction and creation. Black is the main color on the outer side of the box, it represents the darkness inside Trevor, when he destroys the house, he also destroy the whole group’s collective innocence. The gang boys during wartime have developed destructive personality after witnessing deaths and violence. Trevor in particular is not only affected by the war, his family background creates further destruction to his mentality, “the fact that his father, a former architect and present clerk, had ‘come down in the world’ and that his mother considered

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Many people forget that African Americans in this country have been enslaved for longer than they have been free. Coates reminds his son to not forget their important history and that they will continuously struggle for freedom over their own bodies. They must learn to live within a black body. These struggles can be seen in the racial profiling and brutality among police officers in cases such as Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and countless of others. He goes on to describe his childhood and how fear was the root of black existence.

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He wrote this piece to express his important opinion about the effect of racism and how he’s viewed as a man of color. He talks about his first encounter of racism when he was young man in college and was assumed to be a mugger or killer just because of skin. “It was in echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into the ability to alter public space in ugly ways.” I feel that the author is trying to connect to his vast audience of people who don’t understand what it is like to a black man in society. Later he contemplated that he rejected or shunned by the white race collectively as a dangerous man.

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Coates talks about why their is so much crime in these ghettos which many would think is their own doing until you hear the backstory behind that. This also helps to put some context into police brutality against African-Americans. Another example of this is when he visits a Civil war memorial and is shocked that the people around him were focused on things like battle formations and tactics than the reasons they were there in the first place. This is also a connection to the very beginning of the problem which is people ignoring what happened in the past and the problems it is still causing in the

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787 Words | 4 Pages

The Life of a Black Body in America The novel Between The World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a compilation of letters written for his son analysing the life of african american people in the United States of America over the course of his lifetime. A main topic unraveled in the book is that of the “Black body” and how it is viewed through Coates’ perspective. Ta-Nehisi is explaining to his son Samori about how race is really just an arbitrary social construct as opposed to a natural biological fact. Coates further investigates how this ideology came to be and still continues to prosper today throughout the novel and finally finds answers to questions he had been asking himself his whole life.

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Although he believes that this question is unanswerable, Coates’ purpose is to express his deepest concerns for his son and to help him understand his personal experiences as a black man. He achieves his purpose by incorporating rhetorical skills such as ethos, pathos, and logos. Coates has been a successful journalist and writer for several years. He previously worked for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and O

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Early in the book Coates discuss his time growing up in a rough neighborhood, his need to adapt to the lingo and what gestures were appropriate when and where. Describing his time growing up in West Baltimore Coates stated “Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive and this could only mean a clash with the streets…you have some acquaintance with the old rules but they are not as essential to you as they were to me… a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body. ”(Coates pg. 21 & 24) In this quote it shows how the streets was molding who was, his identity; by adapting to the environment Coates compromises his identity for the safety of his body.

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