How Can I Live Free in This Black Body?

Perrye Rollins

Dr. Williams and Dr. Carr

Freshman Seminar 2015

24 November 2015

How Can I Live Free in this Black Body?

Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, was a very insightful book that publicizes many problems in America. Coates, a Howard alumni, speaks about his time at “The Mecca” and what it means to be black in America. The novel is actually an open letter to Coates’s 15 year old son and through the novel explains himself and his upbringing and also attempts to guide his son on how to exist freely in our society. He talks a lot about the historical aspect of racism and how it has affected us as people today. In his novel, Coates speaks about the inherent fear that black people have and the many ways they express it. He says, “The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T-shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.” Coates states that black people behave they way that they do because we are afraid of “disembodiment”. Some of us dress in gaudy clothes, physically fight with each other, and corporally punish our children out of fear.

It can also be said that we kill one another out of fear. Coates states “I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket.” Here Coates is addressing the fact that our own streets and communities are unsafe for us because of our place in society. Black people tend to live in low-income neighborhoods and these areas are often full of crime and poverty. Coates lived in a very rough neighborhood growing up and this unsafe environment caused him to come up...