Now, he no longer defines himself as opposite from what he knew about whiteness, and begins to solidify his identity as a black man through reading works about African history and by black authors. He states: “The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe that they are white” (42). This was when he was first able to meet black people with different backgrounds than him, which taught him all kinds of new things about himself and black people as a group. Later, Coates talks about finding his identity through his experience as a student at Howard, a historically black university.
It’s clear that he often felt a sense of injustice, even in moments where it doesn’t seem like anything really “happened.” This disparity between white and black life in the US could definitely be examined as a One/Other relationship, even though Coates’s experiences are entirely separate from white people until his college years. This seemed worlds away from him, and despite not fully understanding at the time, felt like “a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty” (21). Much of the opening section talks about Coates’s childhood, which he compares to the white childhoods he saw depicted on TV while he was constantly alert, learning the language of the streets and having a gun pulled on him in sixth grade by another boy, “here were little white boys with complete collections of football cards, and their only want was a popular girlfriend and their only worry was poison oak” (20). It could be argued that the entire book is about identity, power, and injustice – these ideas recur throughout and change as Coates refines his thoughts over time. These ideas are explored through various experiences in Coates’s life and related to his son with both historical and personal references, all with the purpose of discussing “the question of how one should live in a black body, within a country lost in the Dream” (12).
It attacks the idea of race as a whole and describes how whiteness defines itself opposite blackness and through denying black people “the right to secure and govern own bodies” (8). Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates is a letter to his teenage son that details his lived (and learned) experience as a black man in the United States.
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