The Black Male Experience in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and The Beautiful Struggle

Abstract

Since the publication of his autobiographical essay Between the World and Me, the African American writer and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates has garnered a wide readership as well as considerable recognition. Both in Between the World and Me (2015) and in his earlier memoir The Beautiful Struggle (2008), Coates traces his own experience as a black male growing up in a poor black neighborhood in West Baltimore. In his work, Coates tackles the major problems faced by black men in today’s America, especially poverty, mass incarceration, drug addiction and dealing, urban violence and police brutality. He contends that the present predicament of black people, and black men in particular, can only be understood in light of the continuous dehumanization, marginalization, and destruction of black bodies. The paper aims to examine Coates’ experience as a black male and to argue that despite his overt pessimism, Coates challenges hegemonic notions of black masculinity and subverts stereotypes about African American men by becoming a caring father and a conscious intellectual.