Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a distinguished writer in residence at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is the author of the bestselling books The Beautiful Struggle, We Were Eight Years in Power, and Between The World And Me, which won the National Book Award in 2015. His first novel, The Water Dancer, was released in September 2019. Ta-Nehisi is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. He is also the current author of the Marvel comics The Black Panther and Captain America. Source
Excerpt from "Between The World And Me" 2
To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear.
Published:
2015
Length:
Shorty
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2021
Themes:
Doubt & Fear
Identity
Police Brutality
Racial Injustice
Literary Devices:
Anaphora
a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences
Anthimeria
the replacement of one part of speech for another, often referred to as a “functional shift.”
Asyndeton
the absence of a conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so…) between phrases and within a sentence
Idiom
a phrase or expression that typically presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase
Metaphor
a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic