\u201cThey Made us into a Race. We Made Ourselves into a People\u201d: A Corpus Study of Contemporary Black American Group Identity in the Non-Fictional Writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates

Yulia Hathaway

doi:10.1007/s41701-021-00101-8

Abstract

This article examines representations of contemporary Black American identity in the non-fictional writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates. The dataset is a self-compiled specialized corpus of Coates’s non-fictional writings from 1996 until 2018 (350 texts; 468,899 words). The study utilizes an interdisciplinary approach combining corpus linguistics and corpus pragmatics. Frequencies of five identity-related terms in the corpus (African(–)Americans, blacks, black people, black America/Americans and black community/communities) are compared diachronically; then the pragmatic prosody of the terms is analyzed via the notion of control. The findings suggest that Coates’s representation of Black American group identity has shifted over time. Specifically, the terms African Americans and black America are replaced by the terms blacks and black people. The study’s empirical findings, considered through the theoretical framework on Black solidarity, suggest a shift in representation of group identity in Coates’s writings from an identity based on cultural and ethnic commonalities to an identity based on the shared experiences of anti-Black racism.

Highlights

In May 2020, Black Lives Matter protests erupted in the United States and around the world
Ta-Nehisi Coates is an African American writer and journalist who is regarded as one of the public intellectuals committed to raising the level of the discourse on race (Alim & Smitherman, 2012: xiii)
The purpose of this study was to examine the language of Ta-Nehisi Coates in his discourse on race in present-day America, patterns in his representation of Black American group identity

Summary

Introduction

In May 2020, Black Lives Matter protests erupted in the United States and around the world. The world has again encountered the realities of Black American experience as lived by many African Americans for. In twenty-first century America, one writer stands out as an articulator of Black American experience: Ta-Nehisi Coates. Ta-Nehisi Coates is an African American writer and journalist who is regarded as one of the public intellectuals committed to raising the level of the discourse on race (Alim & Smitherman, 2012: xiii). Coates’s writings reflect upon his personal experience growing up as a Black male in present-day America. Some scholars argue that his work should receive more scholarly engagement and that he should be recognized by the academic community as “a valuable interlocutor on many social and political issues, those that deal with racism in America” (Schultz, 2018: 2)

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