A Voicemail to the Black Body: Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ‘Between the World and Me’ is Our Lifeline

Abstract

Whiteness has an epiphany everyday. Black bodies receive sorrow from that epiphany everyday. What is that epiphany exactly? To continue to survive the ways in which they are slowly killing themselves or the black body is slowly killing itself. The system and symptoms of whiteness already live inside the black body, operating without being told to do so. That it lives inside the black body, as if to be as necessary as blood cells. But the disease is blamed on the body of which it is infecting. It could never be anything other than that body, therefore the black body is killing itself not the epiphanies that find new and old ways to reject blackness in the bodies it fills and fulfills. This is answered from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” that helps us dissect race by exteriorizing the black body, to find the common widespread ‘disease’ killing black life, whiteness. As his writing reminds us of the dangers of being hypercritical and uncritical of whiteness and its legacy. In this self-reflective and analytical essay, I will pathologize whiteness to typify a disease. This essay is a voicemail to the black community, please answer the call.