Racism In Ta-Nehisi Coates Between The World And Me

Lock Haven University takes part in a common reading program for incoming freshman students. The objective of a common reading for incoming freshman students on campus is to brings students closer together as a community by creating common ground for discussion. The faculty/administrators who take part in choosing the freshman common reading emphasis on building a community that makes common reading especially appealing to freshman college students. Assigning a book during the summer gives incoming freshman students, who often come from very different backgrounds, a shared experience with a discussion topic to cover. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ novel, “Between the World and Me” was a well thought through choice for the freshman common reading this

Ta-Nehisi Coates explains racism as being the need to assign bone-deep features to people, particularly those of color, and then humiliate, diminish, and destroy them (Coates 7). Coates expresses here how degrading racism can be to those who are not considered white. Coates also states what racism means to African Americans, which he further discusses later on in his novel. Coates continues in his novel to talk about race. He states that race is the actually the child of racism, not the father (Coates 7). In this statement, Coates is expressing that race did not cause racism to occur, but in fact the other has occurred, being that racism has brought on the idea to differentiate people based on personal features that they cannot control. Coates embraces this idea more in his novel when he states that the white made the blacks into a race and the blacks then made themselves into “a people” (Coates 149). Through evaluating Coates statement of race is racism, one can further understand how racism arose in society and understand how it affects present day society. This also explains why “Between the World and Me” was chosen to be the freshman common