Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Insecurity of the Black Body

Abstract

The aim of this work is exploring questions of identity construction and the body in a context of insecurity, violence, and trauma, as presented by Ta-Nehisi Coates. In Between the World and Me (2015), winner of the National Book Award (non-fiction), Coates delivers an exploration of his personal history in an eloquent letter to his son, approaching the matter of the insecurity of the black body in the United States. The author states: “America understands itself as God’s handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men”, questioning the moral superiority of the American ideals and its exceptionalism, creating a deep analysis of blackness and americanness, connecting the feelings of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s with the experience of black life in our days. Coates is in deep conversation with James Baldwin, weaving an argument that demonstrates the ever-present linear path of violence inflicted upon the black body in the United States, from slavery to Reconstruction, the Civil Rights era and finally to the present state of police brutality and mass incarceration.