![]() ![]() Coates’s different treatment of being black and “the belief in being white,” therefore, creates an apparent inconsistency. Instead, he does the opposite, making concrete the visceral violence that destructs “black bodies,” cataloging the ways in which racism “dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth” (5). The immediate self-correction serves as a rhetorical cue, drawing attention to Coates’s underlying project.Ĭareful scrutiny, however, reveals that Coates-although repeatedly invoking “the belief,” “the dream,” and “the religion” of being white-never once defines blackness as an abstract ideological concept. He posits that race is not a natural, biological grouping, arguing instead that it is a political mechanism built upon the “pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land” (3). By doing so, Coates creates a subtle distinction, differentiating “white” as a racial category from “white” as an acquired ideology of distinct groups. In articulating this claim, Coates speaks of “white America’s progress,” but he immediately refines the phrase with the qualification “or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white” (2). In his essay, “Letter to My Son,” Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects on the visceral, crippling nature of racism, arguing that the systemic abuse of black bodies is deeply entrenched in America’s history. ![]()
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