To Coates anyone could review history and see the way in which the United States has been built entirely on a violent hierarchy that has left black people worse off than white people. He depicts to his son a recent interview he was involved in, and within this interview profoundly states that the answer to why he believes that the United States is built on violence, noting that the reasoning is simplistic, and rather common sense. In Coates’s message to his son, he reminisces a claim made by Malcolm X, in which the Civil Rights leader stated, “If you’re black, you were born in jail.” Coates makes it clear that he shares this view, explaining that to be black in the United States, is to have lack of protection over your own body.įirst off, Coates makes note of this fear and violence, having been ignited by the slavery of Africans, when he starts off his message.
Coates exhibits these points to his son throughout his book, providing examples in which he has been made aware of this fear-induced violence throughout his life.Īs we explore his message to his son, we will textually exhibit the ways in which Coates alludes to this violence and fear, and ultimately how he advises his son (and presumably related readers) to exist in this world that blindly hates him. African Americans, out of fear of losing their own selves, have exhibited violence and aggression, threatening and fighting, through different communal and familial areas of their own population. This other fear is weighted on the backs of African Americans, and similarly causes violence within its own population. In turn, these acts have, since the presence of African slaves and their mistreatment, brought forth an additional fear.
With this violence against innocent African Americans, white America’s presumed safety is kept active its safety against the fear that power ensued by a false hierarchy could be vanquished. This present reliance is the violence, brutality and murders of African Americans by national security. Violence is America’s legs, its back and support.Ĭoates supports that America, or more precisely, white America, built on the work of African slaves, is a proven product of man labor, and is still reliant on mistreatment of man in another form. From the violence ensued on the slaves of America’s beginning days, to the police brutality and injustice that persists presently, Coates evokes the message to his son, and the reader, that violence is the core cause of America’s upbringing, and even more so its sole existence. The violence he observes in his memoir relates to acts of aggression within the black community throughout the history of the United States, yet even more so the violence ensued on African Americans throughout the country’s lifespan.
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