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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME: AN ANALYSIS OF FEAR
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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME: AN ANALYSIS OF FEAR
The paper analyzes the theme of fear from Ta-Nehisi Coates book, "Between the World and Me," that was published in 2015. The book is written in a letter diction, that is addressed to the narrator's teenage son. Throughout the content, the author pivots the idea of feelings, metaphors, and cruel realities, which are inevitably interconnected with the Blacks living in the United States. The narrator elaborates the racial anarchy in the context of Baltimore, where he spent his childhood and grew up as an underprivileged, vulnerable, and easily destructible individual, just because of his skin color. The fragile and defenseless state of Blacks in Baltimore nurtured the ultimate sense of fear in the author. He says, "To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease" (Coates, 2015).
The subject fear takes a whole new and more substantial form when the author encounters an incident, where his death was almost assured. It was a regular day, and author as a boy was admiring the fashion sense of a few white boys in a parking lot, and the white boys were playing a game to select someone to shoot for fun. The author felt flabbergasted when the light skinned boy raised the gun on the author. However it was not actual shooting and the boy did not intend to murder in real. But the author says that through this notion, the boy with a gun "affirmed my place in the order of things, he had let me know how easily I could be selected" (Coates, 2015) to be killed. The realization and insecurity of that moment strengthen the fears of the author, and he became suspicious regarding the reality of the entire world. In due course, he also highlights the murder of Eric Garner. Consequently, as a grownup, the author denied the notions of hope and merely believed in the struggle to save their black bodies from real-life antagonists America, dreamers, and racists.
Reference
Coates, T., & Amann, K. (2017). Between the world and me. Ditzingen: Reclam, Philipp.
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