My Journey Through Between the World and Me

As I have been reading this book, I have had a fairly easy time seeing things from Coates perspective and understanding his attack on American culture as a whole. He is good about blending his anecdotal evidence along with facts to make a literary concoction strong in emotion and logic. This was definitely the hardest reading for me personally, My father was a police officer and was a very good one. He believed that he was serving his community and was helping keep harmful people out of the lives of those not so dangerous. As Coates began his argument about the PG county officer simply being another cog in the wheel of the American Police State's grand scheme to destroy all change of African-American progress, I disagreed. It was at this point that I felt he generalized an issue far to broad, complex and geographically overarching. That officer was not a good officer. No, he should not have been able to go back to work. No, the police chief should not have received a raise. Yes, th...

In this reading of Between the World and Me, I found a new sense of discovery within Coates' writing. As he narrates his journey through social injustice revelations, he exposes his emotions in a beautiful descriptive manner. As I read through this section of the book, I could relate as the past few years have been a mine-opening journey through my perceptions of race and social injustice. Most of my journey has been shock and wonder at the severe injustices to which humans subject other humans. I have also learned more about myself and my prejudices than I ever thought possible. I connect with Coates when he begins to have his eyes opened to the blatant truth that the "black" race is not the only race or group of people to have their bodies taken from them. The world is a much different place than we perceive and it is hard for us to accurately and objectively understand the truth. However, when we are able to, it is powerful. The other striking section of this reading...