Between The World And Me

Between The World And Me helps us all fight prejudice and prepares young black men in the US for growing up by revealing Ta-Nehisi Coates’s reality of life as a black man dealing with racism in America.

Growing up in Maryland, Coates saw the grim realities of racism at a young age. As he puts it, “to be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world.”

He recalls how as a young boy, another kid he didn’t know called him over after school. He walked across the street and the boy brandished a gun, saying nothing, and then put it back.

This scary moment solidified what he had already come to notice. Just because he was black he was subject to having random and spontaneous violence directed at him.

Another significant experience came in college, where a police officer gunned down his acquaintance Prince Jones on his fiance’s front lawn in Virginia. He followed Jones across state lines and accused him of trying to run him over. The police officer was a known liar. After killing Jones the cop got off without punishment and went back to work.

Prince Jones had a bright future. He was doing well in college and getting ready to be a husband and father, but all that was taken away in an instant. This experience sealed in Coates‘s mind the fact that even if you lay low and work hard to succeed in life, it’s not enough to guarantee your safety as a black man.

Whites can never truly understand what it is to be black because they can never live it. So, whites live mostly blind to the differences in treatment.

Blacks can’t even walk into a down the street without fear of either the public or the police profiling them.

One of the most obvious differences in treatment is through police brutality. With the killing of the unarmed Michael Brown, among many others, finally, some attention is being brought to this tragic problem. But it’s still an ongoing issue.

Another difference in experience is in quality of life and rates of incarceration, which are tied together closely.

Because of a lack of resources and public programs in black communities, they also have higher rates of poverty and drugs, which drive crime. This is why we see an immensely disproportionate number of black men incarcerated compared to whites.

The American Dream is the belief that in America everybody has the chance to succeed. This might look like a positive thing, but if you look to the past you find that it depends on the subjugation of blacks. This happened first through slavery, where wealthy Southerners…