Comparing James Baldwin's Between The World And Me

James Baldwin writes, “Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar, and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations” (progressive.org). Consider this quote and find one passage from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s, Between the World and Me that reflects this same theme. Your task for this assignment is to tell us 1. What is this quote telling us? 2. How is the idea within this quote reflected in Coates? Humans, for the most part, hate change. This is why my grandmother doesn’t have internet or a phone with caller identification. White people, throughout all

He felt the actual word black gave them a disadvantage from the beginning: “Perhaps being named “black” had nothing to do with any of this; perhaps being named “black” was just someone’s name for being at the bottom, human turned to object, object turned to human.” (Pg. 55). Although white people may pretend that they don’t treat black people as if they were on the bottom, they do, as shown by the guy from Texas I talked about earlier. After all, skin tone is just a color, the meaning behind the color is what makes the disparity that we see today

As James Baldwin wrote “Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality”. White America unfortunately isn’t able to handle the change and mutual understanding of the issues that African Americans are seeking. It uproots everything they have known: “To acknowledge these horrors means turning away from the brightly rendered version of your country as it has always declare itself and turning towards itself and turning towards something murkier and unknown. It is still too difficult for most Americans to do this” (Pg. 98-99).
This difficulty to see the issue that “attacks ones sense of reality” – the fear that the world may not be the same as it appears – is why progress is so slow. As African American people attempt to climb out of the pit whites forced them to dig hundreds of years ago, whites fail to see that they could use a ladder to get out. Baldwin and Coates’ views on white Americans ignorance to the problems clearly align, showing how they chose to ignore the problems because addressing them changes things, and they are afraid of