Letter to my Son
by Taytana Massaline
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In Letter to my Son by Ta-Nehisi Coates, he writes a letter to his son about his personal experiences as a black male in America, but he also intends to reach a wider audience--the American people. Coates warns his son and the American people about the destructive nature of racism in America by acknowledging the constant oppression that blacks face from the laws due to their pigmentation. Oppression against black people has instilled fear within the black community, which causes them to feel uncomfortable living in their own skin in America. Coates reveals a pessimistic tone in his letter towards any improvement in race relations in America because blacks are consistently threatened by whites and imposed to live with boundaries. These acts of racism influence Coates to encourage blacks to find a way to cope with racism in America instead because he thinks racism will never end. Coates asserts that the degradation of black bodies is recognized as a tradition in America. Coates shows this tradition by talking about police brutality.
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In the introduction of Letter to My Son, an interviewer asks Coates, how does it feel to lose the black body. Coates clarifies that the interviewer was asking how did white people advance their status in America. Coates responds by saying, “America’s history,” which reveals how American history is linked with the existence of certain contemporary events shown in the media today, such as police brutality. Coates recalls his son’s fifteenth year with news stories of police officers who targeted areas that are predominantly black. Coates brings up examples of blacks who were murdered by white police officers, such as Eric Garner who was shot for selling cigarettes, to show how these casualties derive from racism. The mistreatment of blacks influences Coates to refuse seeing police officers as those who are protecting society from harm, but rather as the “destroyers,” of black bodies (Coates 5). The “destroyers” are known as White Americans who fear black bodies because they perceive them as threatening whites’ high positions in the economic, social, and political sphere of society. The “destroyers” are determined to enforce “the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy,” (Coates 5). What Coates means is the “destroyers” are ensuring that there will be no competition between white and black bodies by reasserting their power over black bodies. The “destroyers” compel black bodies to acknowledge their authority by detaining, searching, and humiliating them. If any black bodies question the authority of the “destroyers,” the “destroyers” are permitted to perpetrate violence on black bodies in order to protect white privilege. Since blacks have lived in a white-supremacist society in which whites created the U.S constitution, instituted slavery, and passed laws that promoted racial segregation and discrimination to own black bodies, Coates reminds his audience how whites believe they deserve to be favored in society while blacks deserve to be put down because history presents them as inferior to whites.
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Although Coates brings up a valid point that racism is a problem in policing, Coates misses how racism is seen as a problem in a larger scope. Racism is merely seen as a systematic problem because it is embedded in the whole criminal justice system. The criminal justice system primarily targets black people, which shows how race determines who receives a penalty for their crimes. The United States’ population is sixty-four percent whites and thirteen percent blacks, but the incarceration population is thirty-eight percent white and forty percent black (Professor Peaks: Sociological Imagination). The data shows that black people are often prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned more than white people in state and federal prisons because statistics show a disproportionate percentage of blacks in prisons compared to whites. On top of that, African Americans receive more of a harsh sentencing compared to whites. When considering black on white crime and white on black crime, blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death compared to whites. Twenty-percent of blacks who kill whites are sentenced to death while three percent of whites who kill blacks are sentenced to death (DPIC 5). The data shows that the criminal justice system values whites more than black people. Most importantly, the prosecutors who choose whether a prisoner deserves the death penalty are exclusively white men. Some of these decision makers have racial prejudices towards blacks, which explains the racial disparities for the death penalty. There is even a huge racial disparity in the plea bargaining for whites and blacks for misdemeanor charges. For example, a study of Wisconsin criminal cases shows that white defendants are seventy-five percent more likely to either have their charges dropped or reduced to less serious charges compared to black defendants (Stevenson 2). Black defendants were more likely to be offered a plea bargaining deal instead, (Stevenson 2). Overall, the criminal justice system is a simple reminder of the Jim Crow Era. The system is regarded as a way to keep American citizens safe, but really it is a legal way to control free African Americans. The criminal justice system robs blacks of their human dignity and civil rights, so white interests’ can be protected instead. In this letter, Coates fails to mention racism is permeated throughout the whole criminal justice system. While it is important to focus on police brutality, I think it is also important to focus on the system as a whole.
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Thus, a critical part of Coates’ letter to his son that I want to criticize is when he reminds his son of the vulnerability of black bodies in America. The vulnerability of black bodies inhibits Coates from ever giving his son any hope of racial reconciliation in America. This is seen in the beginning of the letter when Coates’ son found out that Michael Brown’s killer would be freed from trial on the news. Coates found his son crying in his room about the verdict. Coates reacted by explicitly stating in his letter to his son, “I did not tell you that it would be okay because I have never believed it would be okay,” (Coates 4). Coates’ reaction shows that blacks will never live in peace in America because whites refuse to confess to their fallibility. Instead, Coates reminds his son that whites will always have a problem with blacks because of America’s racial past. With this belief in mind, Coates sees that it is inescapable for whites to ever deviate from racism and its constraints because whites want to restore a white supremacist society that they used to have up until the twentieth century. For Coates, the reality is that whites want to impede black bodies from experiencing the same treatment as them. Instead, Coates tells his son “that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within all of it,” (Coates 4). Coates advises his son to accept the racial injustices that black bodies are faced with and figure out how to inhabit the black body. He suggests this is the only solution towards handling the existence of racism because whites will continuously target black bodies. Therefore, the only form of control that black bodies have is how they choose to struggle.
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I disagree with Coates’ point about accepting racism in America because there are ways we can address racism to create a society that lives in racial harmony. We can first increase our knowledge and awareness about the ugliness of America’s racial past by participating in honest and open discussions in schools, colleges, and other organizations about how complex the issue of racism is in America. In these discussions, we should include a range of diverse racial and ethnic identities to address and understand institutional and individual sources of racial prejudice and discrimination together. We should read more black authors, such as W.E.B Dubois, to recognize the difficulties that blacks have faced by listening to what they have to say. We can find strategies to reveal how those racial prejudices about a certain race are myths, this will help us to improve intergroup relations between blacks and whites.
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Coates warns his son that black bodies are constantly abused by forms of policing. But racism is a problem in the criminal justice system by incarcerating a mass number of black bodies and giving them severe sentencing. Furthermore, I noticed Coates leaves his son with the message: there is no possibility of any change in race relations in America. However, I disagree with Coates’ viewpoint because we, as a black community, can challenge racism by spreading awareness and knowledge about racism and its severe impact on our community to show our society there must be an end towards this issue. We should encourage racial harmony because it is vital feature to move forward in society. Even though there are limits in his letter, it is a strong piece because he makes us aware that police brutality stems from racism.
Author’s note:
For my piece of writing, my targeted audience is blacks and whites. I want both races to understand America’s ugly racist past to see how its past influences some whites to hold racist attitudes towards blacks. This hatred towards blacks eventually triggers whites to intimidate and terrorize black bodies. But I want the black and white community to see from the examples provided that racism cannot be tolerated in a country who is supposed to stand by their democratic values of liberty, equality, and justice for all. The purpose of my paper is to reveal how black bodies will remain targeted in America unless we step forward and challenge racism by creating a world full of racial harmony.
I started my essay with a brief summary of Letter to My Son by Ta-Nehisi Coates’. The summary discusses racism and its severe impact on black communities in America. I emphasize his main argument is why black bodies are subjected to be oppressed in America, which is America’s history. I support this claim by bringing up how America’s history was known as a time where whites controlled blacks through political, economic, and social means. But ever since blacks were granted with freedom and equal opportunities through many laws from presidents and congress, whites have tried to reassert their power through legal means. Although Coates acknowledges racism is a problem in policing, he does not mention how racism is a problem in the criminal justice system. I talk about the mass incarceration and harsh sentencing of blacks to depict how the criminal justice system needs to be reformed because they use many discriminatory acts towards blacks. I do believe that Coates’ letter is a powerful piece because he discusses the impact of racism on black bodies; however, he is very negative throughout his entire letter to his son. He does not provide hope for his son that there could possibly be change in society where all hatred towards blacks could end, and there could be racial harmony instead. I criticize that aspect in his letter, and I provide methods on ways we can eliminate racism in America today.