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Matthew Miranda

Furuyama

English III

December 6, 2022

We’re All People Why Treat Them Differently?

If we’re all people, why do Black people in America not enjoy the same freedoms and

privileges as other racial groups do? According to Ta-Nehisi Coates, who claims this in his book

Between The World And Me. Coates explores Racism, Slavery, Destruction of the Black Body,

and White Supremacy to illustrate that America isn’t the Free country we’ve heard about.

Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses human racial features and how they are classified. But all of

our terminology, including "race relations," "racial chasm," "racial justice," "racial profiling,"

"white privilege," and "white supremacy," he claims in his book, "serves to disguise that racism

is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, tears muscle, pulls organs,

cracks bones, and breaks teeth" (10). Coates illustrates the psychological and physical effects of

race by analyzing this remark. Coates also says, “These images, cast in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, were contrasted with those created after enslavement, the Sambo

caricature I had always known” (55). He is arguing that it is American, or at least not something

that Europeans were doing at the time that people in the U.S. were, to represent underclasses

badly, which in this case includes Blacks and Irish people. Little Black Sambo is a book in which

the image of the main character gradually evolved into a racially tinged one as opinions shifted.

By making the young boy on the cover exceedingly dark, they racially profiled the skin tone of

African Americans. Because of the differences in their traits from other people, people of color
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are not treated equally, and when there are differences among people, it actually causes

discomfort.

Coates explains to his son how slavery shaped the African Americans into the people

they are today. In the book, Coates writes, "Slavery is this same woman born in a world that

loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its vital texts, a world in which

these same professors hold this woman a slave, holds her mother a slave, holds her father a slave,

holds her daughter a slave, and when this woman stares back into the generations all she sees is

the enslaved" (70). Every African American, according to Coates, is born into slavery. The

subsequent generations of slaves were also held as property by Americans, Looking back, the

slaves who are now free recognize how terribly they were and are still treated. He adds in his

book, "I knew that my sector of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved…." (20-21).

He describes how, in his mind, he realized that although the other people, who were White

people, were free, his people had been forcibly reduced to slavery. Due to slavery, Black people

had no freedom, whereas White people enjoyed considerably more freedom than Black people.

Racism against Black people is focused on violently removing the black person's physical

control of their body. In the book, Coates says, “I tell you now that the question of how one

should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life,

and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself” (12). When he claims

that America is lost in what it believes and how his question resolves itself, Coates is describing

how an African American should live in the black body. Coates also says, “ I knew that these

were theories, even in the mouths of black people, that justified the jails springing up around me,

that argued for ghettos and projects, that viewed the destruction of the black body as incidental to

the preservation of order” (84). According to Coates, Black people eventually learned to accept a
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system that kept them in squalor, prison, and slavery. The black body has many repercussions

when it shouldn't. African Americans are not given any freedom as a result of the degradation of

the black body, and they suffer abuse because of their skin tone.

Coates believes that white supremacy is an ontology rather than just a historical

American construct. In his book, he says, “ White America is a syndicate arrayed to protect its

exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching),

and sometimes it is insidious (redlining)” (42). In order to prevent African Americans from

obtaining the same success as whites, Coates shows how white people rule America.

Another piece of evidence from the book, “ Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? Bellow quipped.

Tolstoy was ‘white’ and so Tolstoy ‘mattered,’ like everything else that was white ‘mattered’

(43). According to Coates, it doesn't really matter to them if a person is a scholar from the Zulu

tribe. The way Coates makes this point is by reflecting how unconcerned White Americans are

with African Americans since to them, only White Americans and what they believe in are

important. He explains how White people are seen as superior to persons of color in American

society.

Between The World And Me develops a theme concerning racism by examining slavery,

human racial features, white dominance, and the desecration of the black body. He demonstrates

to the audience how prejudice prevents black Americans from enjoying the same advantages as

white Americans. Black Americans were denied freedom as a result of slavery. Human racial

traits led to racial profiling and white people's tendency to criticize African Americans based on

their skin tone. To show how white Americans matter more than African Americans and how

White Americans have more freedom than Black people, white supremacy is explained to the

audience in the play Between The World And Me. The erasure of the Black body illustrates how
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being Black or African American has repercussions, chief among them being perceived as

inferior to White Americans. African Americans should be treated equally in spite of their

differences from White Americans because they have already endured much worse hardships

than any other American.