The Beautiful Struggle, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is a memoir that heavily reflects upon the personal experiences of a young boy that was growing up in West Baltimore. The author, Coates himself, uses his own personal experiences from his life to show the hardships that he had to endure through and preserve on in order to acquire social progress despite the ample number of historical obstacles that were present in his early life. The constant struggle to progress is social standing and striving to gain his parent’s approval and acceptance is the general theme that seems to come up throughout the memoir. In regard to impending social progress, Coates had to live through environmental and social racism along with familial behavioral changes
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.
Ta_Nehisi Coates book was about racism in America, how much grit does Coates have, the habit of mind he has, and what's his personality is like. Ta-Nehisi Coates was born in Baltimore in the 1980’s and his father was a Vietnam veteran and a member of the black panther. In the book Between the World
“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.
An author’s metaphors demonstrate how the clothes an individual wears are used to disguise the fears an individual carries. Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me, is a personal literacy that Coates writes for his nephew, Somari. This book was intended to discuss physical safety
Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates attempts to address the issues that have plagued him his entire life in the article titled "Letter to My Son," in which he writes a letter to his 15-year-old son Samori Toure. The letter explains what it means to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it in the United States. Coates recounts different times in his own life where his innocence was lost, his internal sense of terror was threatened, and a wall of rage was erected around him. Throughout the use of syntax, figurative language, ethos, and pathos, Coates with the initial reaction of any parent, to protect his son, educates his son on the hardships of being Black while in America. Most essential, why he, and other Black people he knew, seem to live
Rhetorical Analysis Author Ta-Nehisi Coates in his book Between the World and Me discusses impactful racial issues in American history and educates his son on the past and current realities of being a black American. At the beginning of the book, Coates imposes the question: “How do I live freely in this black body?” (Coates 12).
In the 21st century, during a period of racial injustice, political activist for African Americans, Ta-Nehisi Coates, presented “Letter to My Son” in which he outlines how America’s racist history has created a government system that oppresses and destroys the black community. In an attempt to support his claim, Coates compares Black bodies to vital aspects of slavery in an effort to remind the reader of ongoing, persistent, continuous exploitation of Black bodies. In fact, the misuse and abuse of African American bodies occurred so frequently, that it managed to become woven into the fabric of American heritage. Coates’s underlying purpose is to explain the innate cruelty the United States and its legacy of abusing bodies, especially black ones.
Between the World and Me, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a powerful book written as a letter from the author to his teenage son. This book outlines the race issue in America from a first hand perspective. The author explains his struggles and fears as he grew up and how those fears transformed into a new meaning as he reached adulthood. Through his personal story, the reader is offered insight into the lives of other African Americans and how they may experience racial injustice themselves.
In this writing, he explains his perspective and introduces his arguments and main points by first inserting epigraphs of negro spirituals because they are “haunting melodies from the only American music which welled up from black souls in the dark past.” (Du Bois 31) In the first chapter the author explains the concept of double consciousness as being the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” (Du Bois 34) Moreover, The black person in America is torn between two worlds and two identities, they are an African American and they are an American.
Kyndal Hampton @02841893 Team 3a Between The World And Me A Powerful and Relatable Story About Being Black in America Between The World And Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, is an impactful and very familiar account of a loving father telling his son about what it means to be a black man in America. Throughout this novel, Coates explores the history of decades of constant attack on the black body by society’s forces: decades of fear, mistreatment, and labeling are placed around black bodies in every setting. Observing these trends from Coates’s perspective caused me to reflect on my own life, sparking many personal takeaways. The most powerful message in this book was when Coates started analyzing the black body.
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.
In the novel, Between The World And Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates proves that Black Americans feel unsafe in the bodies they were given due to the social injustice in America. Between The World And Me is written from the point of view of Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing to his son Somori, describing his life as an African American living growing up in America. He writes about growing up in Baltimore and about learning how to survive as a child in the ghetto.
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
Double consciousness is a term coined by W.E.B. DuBois in his The Souls of Black Folk. He describes it as, “a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity”(2). The theory of double consciousness is the idea that the African American must navigate the voyages of life from within a form of “two-ness” (2), because he is both man, and black.
