Albina Imanbekova

Ms. Rosario and Ms. Sterner

AP LANG & Comp

December 1, 2017

“Between the World and Me”

Ta - Nehisi Coates in the letter, Between the World and Me (2015) suggest that the

people who was treatment of African American in the U.S.A. he wrote a letter to his fifteen year

old son,

Samori. ​It was written shortly after his son learned that Michael Brown’s killers would go to

free-same year that Tamir Rice and Eric Garner were killed by a American police officers in

2014. ​The author writes in a serious and formal tone for African people. Coates supports his

claims by explaining to his son what means to be a black man in America. The author’s purpose

is to show the treatment of African American, we can see the real life of that time. Coates relates

his personal experiences as a black man in a country built on the oppression of black people. He

wrote this letter with feelings, ​wholeheartedly. He used pathos. What is the pathos? The ​Pathos is

a quality of an experience in life or a work of art that stirs up emotions of pity, sympathy and

sorrow. Pathos can be expressed through words, pictures or even with gestures of the body.

Pathos is an important tool of persuasion in arguments. Pathos is a method of convincing people

with an argument drawn out through an emotional response. He conveyed his feelings.
 It was very difficult to be black because you could be killed or beaten to death. Coates

said that just walking the streets was dangerous because many people had weapons, knifes. They

had the drugs, guns. The boys on the street used the guns to scare the people or to be like a cool

or for be safe. The black people were like a slaves because they did not have a rights, the white

people did not like the black people. At that time there were racism. It says in the letter​ “

Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world.

Racism- the need to ascribe one-deep to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy

them-inevitably follows from this inalterable condition”.​ It means that Americans really

separated the people by their color.

Coates grew up in the streets of Baltimore in the 1980s​. He never fit in with the hard, violent youths who stood on the

corners playing music, peddling drugs, and beating passersby in order to prove their dominance. He couldn't speak their violent

language, couldn't interpret their movements fast enough to defend himself. Most of the time, he avoided those kids. ​"To be black

in the Baltimore of my youth," he writes, "was to be naked before the elements of the world."​ Once, when Coates was in sixth

grade, a boy pulled a gun on him, then put it in his pocket, then pulled it back out again. This moment stuck with Coates forever.

This story is very important to him because he personally went through all this. He wanted his son to know about it all.

Coates did not know that this story would spread and therefore he wrote to his son. He wrote really important things which

happened in the past. He wanted that the all people stop separating the white and black and start living peacefully, so that there

are no murders, fights and racism. He just wanted no such as slaves.