“Between the world and me”
“Between the world and me” is an exquisite book which overflows with insights concerning the embodied state of blackness and the logic of white supremacy. The author’s prose is thus capable of challenging our knowledge of the United States as it captures individuals’ hearts. However, for the entire of the beauty as well as the power of the book, it is as well profoundly challenging or troubling. The book presents that the wound of racism is very fresh; meaning that the sharpness of the pain arrests the author’s senses and captures his imagination or attention, it is very sudden that if we also follow along, we are subject to be captured too. This book initially appears like it may reveal the illusion of the dream and then open up the likelihood for imagining the United States anew. However, Coates does not move along that direction; he rejects the American mythos even though also acknowledges the certainty of the white supremacy and its inescapable constraints. As far as the author is concerned, the white supremacy is not just a historically new feature of the United States; it is hence ontology. In other words, the white superiority is not in a position to structure reality, and it is instead reality.
However, there is a danger there. For instance, when an individual conceptualizes the white superiority at the degree of ontology, there is a decreased room for the person’s imagination to soar, and one’s sense of agency is inescapably troubled. An action is tied significantly to what people imagine is probably for us, although there might be no affirmative politics when race functions as a wounded attachment. The book criticizes what happened to the young men and women along the streets of New York, Ferguson, Charleston, and Chicago; the author’s response seems pivotal and tragic.
Coates states that it is always good to interrogate and struggle in the case of any physical laws that are not fair. He also suggests that people should understand themselves which make them know their country. The author proposes struggle as a primary tool which is the only fraction of the world under an individual’s control. The black people can control their place within the battle, however never with the likelihood which they, and in turn, a win to their country. The author encourages individuals to avoid accepting anything but instead they should consider interrogating and struggle for them to obtain what they are after. The black life within America is at once informed by, although not reducible to, the soreness exacted on people’s bodies by the country. This evades Coates. The lesion is so severe he is not able to direct his senses past the pain.
The book has therefore focused on the lives of black people in this country. After reading the book makes me comprehend how overwhelmingly susceptible one is growing up black in America. This is something that an individual that is white may not comprehend, and it is even something which someone that is black however not formerly from the United States struggles to recognize at a visceral level. The book ends up on a somehow hopeful note, where the author does not need his son to lose mess himself despite having much stacked against him. For instance, an actual ninja is one that endures no matter what gets thrown at him; there is just one aspect that matters when one is a ninja, and it is not the number of skills one has; what one needs is to avoid giving up. This is a spirit the author presents to the black people in the country.