Ta-Nehisi Coates and Toni Morrison

Discussion 2
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Discussion 2
Question 1
Ta-Nehisi Coates perceived the poem “Between the World and Me” by Richard Wright as the best choice for his book’s title. The book is dedicated to his teenage son and portrays the historical, intellectual, and personal challenges that black people undergo in the United States of America (USA).
1. The speaker in the poem “Between the World and Me” is a black person who stumbled on a dead body in a grassy land surrounded by elms and oaks (Wright, n.d.). Although the individual is alive at the beginning of the poem, he dies in the end.
2. The “sooty details” of the scene refers to the description of the place in the forest where the speaker found a dead person. They include white bones, torn tree limbs, a scorched coil, burning tiny veins leaves, a pair of trousers stained with black blood, a tie, a vacant shoe, a hat, and a ripped shirt (Wright, n.d.).
3. The speaker took at most an hour from when the person inhabits the woods to when the individual stumbles upon a dead body. The person is shocked and fearful since it is clear that racism can lead to premature death due to increased hatred.
4. The “sooty details” of the past “thrust” themselves between the speaker and the world instantly. That is the reason why the author uses the word “stumbles” since the speaker comes across the dead body unexpectedly.
5. The speaker is transformed at the end of the poem due to the realization that black people in the USA must encounter various challenges emanating from white supremacy. For this reason, these individuals ought to be tough to survive the harsh treatment or discrimination by their white counterparts.
Question 2
Toni Morrison was a renowned African American writer who won the Nobel Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her fiction story called Beloved (Gilbert, 2019). The novel was about an individual who was enslaved and haunted ...