This history of the destruction of the black body, which Coates avers is this country’s heritage, is not just rooted in slavery but in the battles of the Civil War, the demoralizing Jim Crow laws, police brutality and racial profiling, and the creation and promotion of the Dream. It was not even just the individual officer who killed Prince, Coates asserts, because that officer was a direct expression of America’s beliefs. He saw clearly how black bodies lacked value in America and could be destroyed at random even coming from a privileged background could not save a person. Prince’s death made Coates feel intensely angry, disillusioned, and resentful. Prince was a handsome, charismatic, and well-to-do black man who was killed by police in a situation reminiscent of those that Coates brings up in the beginning of his work: Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and others. While he was a student at Howard, he heard of the death of one of his classmates, Prince Jones. He began to write and eventually became a journalist. There he met his future wife and many lifelong friends. He learned about his own people and confronted his imperfect understanding of this history.
There he underwent an intellectual awakening, marveling at the diversity of black people at Howard and undertaking studies of black writers and black history. The swagger and loudness of the men on the corners was their way to protect themselves and to announce their presence as human beings.Īs a young man school (and religion) seemed useless to Coates, but he pursued his studies in order to attend Howard University. To grow up black in Baltimore was usually to grow up poor, marginalized, and desperate to assert one’s humanity. His father was hard on him, but Coates now sees that black parents often are so they do not lose their children. He weaves his personal, historical, and intellectual development into his ruminations on how to live in a black body in America.Ĭoates writes of his upbringing in the ghettos of Baltimore in which he learned the codes of the street in order to survive but never fully embraced them. Between the World and Meis a letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s fifteen-year-old son, Samori.
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