Between The World And Me: Effects Of Slavery And Racism On Modern America

Improved Essays
Between The World and Me
1. Te-Nehisi Coates summarizes the work of historians to demonstrate the lingering effects of slavery and racism on modern America. Did you find his use of history effective or persuasive? The use of history Te-Nehisi Coates used to demonstrate the effects of slavery and racism on modern America and was very effective. The way Coates illustrates the teaching of the past and throughout the changes made of racism and slavery does effect the history. Coates blames the country as being the major problem. For instance, he mentions the incident that happens with his five-year-old. They were coming back from the movie theater and there was a white lady that came in and
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Coates gives many great examples’ that justifies the issue of racism. Such as, one of the examples given by Coates was about the 911 incident he talks about how hyped up people were when the terror struck and terrorism was initiated. But for him this wasn’t the first terror attack. For him, terrorism started from the day slavery had started. The use of violence and brutality was happening before and right in front of everyone’s eyes which was being uncalled and unjustified for. People were not realizing that slavery itself was known as terrorism. Reading the book from a first person point of view showed so much information about racism that could had never been acknowledged. Knowing the perspective of Te-Nehisi Coates demonstrated the changes or the continued racism issue throughout the history of life. Many of the history Coates mentions in his book are history which was unfamiliar to the reader. Such as, the case of Sean Bell mentioned in page 96. This case, was a case that the reader like myself did not even recognize or ever heard of. Or some of the other cases such as the Michael Brown case mentioned in page 21 and the case of Trayvon Martin in page 105. The cases which he mentions goes deep and all of them are from the 21st century which shows and indicates the people are still not aware of what’s going on in the recent century in …show more content…
Whereas, in order to control the future, we must know and learn from the past. If we are not learning from the past how are we going to control what goes on the future. Learning the past of racism educates us as the people and makes us understand it better to prevent any of those conditions from happening over again. Even though we seem to think or as much we would like to think that racism has ended it still happens in this very day. With the history being left in the past is an insult to the people that had to go through with it. It’s symbolizing as if what the blacks went through never really existed at all. We learn from the past no matter how hard it is to accept the past of history, we try to get past it without having to do those certain things over again. Not many people know about the history of blacks and what they had to go through. As a young child you’re not supposed to really think about racism but for many African American’s you have to be raised up with the constant reminder that you are black and the society will see you differently while growing up. And not many people have to face that challenge in their life because there not seen differently as the blacks were. Coats mentions in page 50 that no matter how much he tried to be a “carbon copy of whites” he will always be seen as a black. And

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