Analysis Of Between The World And Me By Ta-Nehisi Coates

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Throughout his book, Between The World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates refrains from calling white people “white”. Rather, he refers to individuals who are not black as “dreamers” who “believe themselves white”. This deliberate phrasing sheds light on the notion that race, racism, and stereotypical racial identities are a social construct. While black Americans share a distinct historical, there is no biological or innate characteristic that constructs a person of a given race to act in accordance to the group they physically resemble. In this sense, the myth of the idealized “white” versus the image of the criminal, subordinated “black”, are fundamentally fictional constructs that were created with the motivation to insure hierarchal power and a …show more content…

As such, Coates states, “I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country…forgiving the killer of Prince Jones would have seemed irrelevant to me. The killer was the direct expression of all his country’s beliefs” (78-79). Moreover, Coates understands that there is an ideological and systematic racism that is so heavily engrained in American culture to the point where racial stereotypes become taken as fact. When all that is shown in television shows, movies, and on the news are images of black, subordinated criminals, it is not hard to believe that Americans adopt these depictions to be true. That being said, one must question: is a widespread adoption of racism to blame for the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Prince Jones? When discussing this question with my group, we used the lessons from the Allegory of the Cave to conclude that every person has a choice to live in ignorance or to seek truth. Moreover, police brutality cannot be justified by media representations or societal teachings in the same way that the shadows on the cave wall cannot be thought of as factual, simply because they are the images most prevalently shown. In this sense, police are not victims to epistemic racism – it takes courage and strength to step out of the cave and look past normalized realities, but doing so is both possible and enlightening. It is much easier to view the police killings of black teenagers with a hope that there is some justification for the murderous actions, especially when authorities and the media tell us to believe such. Though, just because one blindly accepts what they are taught and shown by the media, does not mean that their actions can be justified. Living in a global village leaves individuals with

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