And the process of naming ‘the people’ has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy.
In fact, when President Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he didn’t have Coates’ grandfather in mind.Īccording to the laws of the time, Coates’ grandfather, simply and brutally put, wasn’t a person, wasn’t part of the people:īut race is the child of racism, not the father. Though Americans deify democracy almost as much as God, most of American history is extremely undemocratic. In other words, Coates says that the great country of America exists in large part due to the fact that part of its population was never given the chance to exist. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. “Specifically,” the author goes on, “the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. The letter is divided into three chapters, the first of which recounts Coates’ experiences as a young man, the second of which talks about his life after the birth of Samori, and the last one of which narrates the author’s visit of Mabel Jones, a grieving mother of a mistakenly murdered African-American friend of Coates.Īnd we have all of them covered in our summary! Chapter I Naming “the People”Ĭoates begins his letter to Samori by describing an event from the Sunday before: a host of a popular news show asking him what it means to lose his body. He is, however, most famous for his books: The Beautiful Struggle, Between the World and Me, Black Panther, We Were Eight Years of Power (a collection of essays), and The Water Dancer, his first novel.įind out more at “Between the World and Me PDF Summary”Įmulating the structure of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ poetic, touching and piercingly accurate analysis of “racist violence that has been woven into American culture” takes the form of a letter addressed from the author to his fifteen-year-old son, Samori. Ta-Nehisi Coates is an American journalist and writer.Ī national correspondent for “The Atlantic,” he has also worked for “Time” and “The Village Voice” and “Time” and has written text for numerous other publications.
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