63 pages • 2 hours read
Ta-Nehisi CoatesA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Coates begins the book by emphasizing the power bestowed in US police forces to exterminate black bodies when they see fit. He uses recent police killings as examples, from Michael Brown, whose murderers were acquitted despite mounting evidence, to Renisha McBride, who was killed for knocking on someone’s door to ask for help. Coates’s goal in this book-length letter to his son Samori is to make his son aware of the power and legacy of racial violence in the United States so that Samori can survive. Coates cites Samori’s pained response to the acquittal of Michael Brown’s killers as a moment of reckoning—the first time that Coates sees his son contend with the precarity of his body.
Coates recalls contending with the fragility of his own body as a young boy in Baltimore. Coates describes how he is almost shot by a boy with a gun over a trivial incident. He remembers that the lived experience of needing to protect his body fuels his disillusionment with his schools; Coates begins to view schools as another form of control rather than a path to liberation. Though school systems understand the bodily harm that can befall black students at any moment, this fact goes unaddressed and ignored in their education.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Letter to My Son
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Beautiful Struggle
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Case for Reparations
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Message
Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Water Dancer
Ta-Nehisi Coates
We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
Ta-Nehisi Coates
A Black Lives Matter Reading List
View Collection
African American Literature
View Collection
Black History Month Reads
View Collection
Books on Justice & Injustice
View Collection
Contemporary Books on Social Justice
View Collection
Essays & Speeches
View Collection
Inspiring Biographies
View Collection
Memoir
View Collection
National Book Awards Winners & Finalists
View Collection
Politics & Government
View Collection