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458 CLA JOURNAL Addressing Blackness, Dreaming Whiteness: Negotiating 21st -Century Race and Readership in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me Simon Abramowitsch Though the first word of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2015 Between the World and Me is the direct address “Son,” and though he refers to “you,” “you and me,” and “our” a few times in the first several pages, it is not until the fifth page that his address becomes at all intimate: “I write you in your fifteenth year” (9). For a book framed as a letter from father to son—even used as a literary device, as a means to public address—this distance is notable. The space between address and intimacy foreshadows the general displacement of Coates’s son in the text as a whole. But what is more striking are the subjects of these introductory pages. What occupies the text between Coates’s initial salutation “Son” and “I write you”? Whiteness and the deeds of white supremacy are what interrupt; these are the specters that shape how Coates narrates this memoir to his son. The first moment of Between the World is an account of Coates’s attempt to explain the history, legacy, and persistence of anti-black racism to a television host and her American viewers. The “old and indistinct sadness” (6) that overcomes him, as he realizes, again, the apparent futility of his attempt to change white American minds, hearts, and, one supposes, policy leads Coates into a discussion of the hypocrisy of American democratic ideals, the centrality of racial hierarchy to the American project, and the fallacy of “whiteness” as an identity. It is the destructive power of whiteness that urgently shapes Coates’s address and informs how Coates writes of the world his son inhabits. Invoking James Baldwin immediately, Coates declares the constructed nature of whiteness: its adherents are “people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white” (7). He continues, These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in being white, was not achieved through wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction CLA JOURNAL 459 Race and Readership in Between the World and Me of families; the rape of mothers; the sale of children; and various other acts meant, first and foremost, to deny you and me the right to secure and govern our own bodies. (7-8) This denial of self-governance impedes Coates’s intimate address to his son, as if, in order to cross the great distance between black self and black son, he must hack his way through the whiteness that has made black life. This might seem like a curious way to begin a book that, by Coates’s own account, addresses his son as a way to write to black audiences. In an interview with Jennifer Schuessler of the New York Times following a release event in Baltimore, Coates explains, “It was very, very important, as far as I was concerned, that the book be launched in an African-American space… I wanted to be very clear about who the book was written for, how it was written, what it came out of.” Critics of Between the World have honed in on this question of audience, and while they interpret Coates’s approach to audience in various ways, they fundamentally agree that his audience is not limited to the black readership for which the son stands. Michelle Alexander accepts Coates’s claim regarding audience and appreciates how he avoids “the usual hedging and...

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