Black Body (if you have a better idea of a different topic please change it as your best thinking)

Essay Three: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me

This essay will require you to revisit James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and analyze Ta-Nehisi Coates’s open letter to his son, Between the World and Me. Both of these texts wrestle with the question of what it means to be black in America, and each has much to say about American history, race, white moderates, the American dream, and what Coates refers to as the traditional destruction of the black body.
This essay will examine one or more of the major themes common to both authors in order to consider how Coates’s essay updates the views of Baldwin for the 21st century. You may choose to focus on similarities or significant differences between our authors. As with all of our essays, you should infer an argument from your analysis of these texts.

In this essay, your main focus is on the themes of “black body” and “race” basing the arguments of both books.

1. Coates’s concept of the “black body”
As we’ve discussed, Coates sees the self in a purely materialistic way. He rejects the concept of the soul, for example. It is worth asking what he intends to argue on the basis of this conception. This topic should draw heavily from examples such as 35-36, 69-70, and 81-82 which illustrate this concept.
(Pages where you can find great quotes to use 5-6, 12, 19, 35, 52*, 58, 61, 62, 66, 79*, 81, 82, 90, 94-5, 103*, 104, 111, 114)

2. Coates’s views on race
Like Baldwin, Coates sees “race” as a “political reality” and rejects it as a “defined, indubitable feature of the natural world” (7). This topic may focus on why Coates rejects the concept of race. Some of you may want to discuss what Coates would replace the concept of race with. Pages 119-120 and 149 should help you with this.
(Pages where you can find great quotes to use: 7, 97, 115)

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