N°21_Vol.6_03

Introduction: Between the World and Me (2015) can be regarded as a testimony of the ongoing issues of race and racism in the United States of America. In fact, this book is a letter written by Coates to his son Samori about the precarity of being black in America. His narrative encapsulates how he has intimately endured racism and how he has coped with its consequences in West Baltimore. This letter is also centered around the pervasive physical and psychological effects of racial segregation. The author delves into his past to illustrate how skin color influences a person’s ability to live freely in his/her country. It would also be convenient to mention that when producing Between the World and Me, Coates drew inspiration from The Fire Next Time (1963) by James Baldwin, in which the latter examines racial relations from his personal experiences as a black man in one of his essays written as a form of letter to his nephew in a time of segregation.

Coates addresses the issue of police brutality that constitutes a widespread phenomenon in America. His letter exposes historical racism and violence of police force. It demonstrates the different mechanisms embedded to maintain racial power and white supremacism in America across different periods of American history. The continuum of violence and injustices inflicted on the black bodies did persist despite the abolition of slavery. It survived and evolved through different patterns of domination. In Between the World and Me, Coates illustrates that white supremacy still exists and appears across police brutality, black mass incarceration, white privilege and inequalities between Blacks and Whites. In that way, racism can be described as a modern representation of colonial power with the same perceptual structure of racial hierarchies, authorities and domination that took root from the colonial period. This is testified by Tatah Mentan when he argues that “In colonialism, the conquered polities or populations are not just ruled over by foreign conquerors but are configured as inferior to their occupiers—inferior in legal, administrative, social, and cultural terms”  (T. Mentan, 2017:6).Consequently, Coates’s personal experiences of racism operate as a postcolonial critique, describing how the colonial legacy is still visible throughout systemic racism in the political, economic and judicial system of the United States.

Historical racism can be perceived throughout a postcolonial reading. This latter perspective defines racism as an enduring relic of colonialism. As pointed out by Robert Ross in his book Racism and Colonialism, after colonial rule has ended, the ideology of racism may continue to remain through its power. (R. Ross, 1982). Similarly, outstanding works highpoint the postcolonial dimension within contemporary American society. Among these are Edward Said (Orientalism 1978), Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth 1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1967), Homi K. Bhabha (The Location of Culture 1994), and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (“Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture 1988) to explore the persistence of colonial power relations within contemporary American society. These authors refer to concepts such as colonial discourse, othering, racialized power, resistance and counter-discourse to demonstrate how systemic racism is presented as an embodiment of the lasting legacy of colonial domination.

Critical Race Theory emerged in the United States in the 1960s during the Civil Rights activism. Drawn from the works of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois or Antonio Gramsci, writers like Cornel West (1995) or Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) believe that contemporary racism can only comprehended within the framework of its structural forms embedded in the various institutional rules and laws.

Afrocentricity is a theoretical perspective and approach that advocates for black identity, black agency, and black memories. Advanced and coined by Molefi Kete Asante, the term “Afrocentricity” refers “to the conscious process by which a person locates or relocates African phenomena within the context of African subjects, agency, and action”. More importantly, it is about “location as opposed to dislocation and centeredness as opposed to marginality”. (J. Conyers, 2017:165)

The main issue raised by the topic is the question to know how the author taps into the very essence of blackness to prove the lingering existence of colorblind and structural racism in America through a counter-discourse that challenges colonial and mainstream narratives. Indeed, in an era marked by the proclamation of a post-racial American society, our main assumption is that the author posits that it is still a utopia and that there is still a world separating Whites from Blacks in America as a result of still existing practices embedded in American institutions that carry on the legacy of the plundering of the black body and the flouting of the black man’s dignity. This paper aims to demonstrate that these approaches draw complementary analytical tools to examine the ways in which the author denounces the enduring structures of racial domination and simultaneously extends on the affirmation of black pride, identity and historical black agency.

The present study is divided into three chapters. The first heading focuses on the vulnerable black body as a continuation of colonial power. It describes how the black body can be regarded as a site of colonial domination and how police brutality can be viewed as a lasting effect of colonial power.  The second heading expounds a critique of the American dream. It aims to deconstruct the Dream as a colonial narrative. The third and last one lays the emphasis on the black body as a site of identity and resistance. We will show that African legacy is restored through the use of African names, memory, writings and storytelling and how these elements function as cultural preservation and acts of Afrocentricity.