Between the World and Me di Ta-Nehisi Coates e il Civil Rights Movement

This thesis analyses the book Between the World and Me written by Ta-Nehisi Coates in 2015, in the context of the struggle for civil rights by African-Americans in the United States, present and past. After having introduced the history of African-Americans from the slave trade up until the situation of recent years in the United States, I focus my attention, with the aim of examining the current attitude of white people towards black people, on the analysis of the book Between the World and Me, in which the writer explains to his son what it means to be black nowadays in American society. I try to address the following questions: after the end of the Civil Rights Movement and the achievement of important rights, has the situation of black people really changed for better? Analysing the personal experience of Ta-Nehisi Coates, can we still consider racism as ¿a thing of the past¿? In order to answer these questions, in the first chapter I retrace the most important steps of the history of African-Americans in the United States. The sources, on which this chapter is based, are The Civil Rights Movement written by Paul Newman in 2004 and Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement by Jack Bloom (1987). I also include some testimonies of people who lived during the period of the Civil Rights Movement from the award winning PBS television documentary ¿Eyes on the Prize¿. I also trace the origins of Coates' literary effort in the context of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963). At the end of the chapter I use two speeches by Barack Obama: his ¿Inaugural Address¿ pronounced in 2008 and the ¿Remarks at the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches¿ (2015), arguing that Obama's attitude on the issues of race changes drastically over the course of his presidency, from optimism to deep pessimism. President Obama stresses that complete integration is still distant. In the second chapter I focus my attention on the analysis of the book Between the World and Me. After outlining its structure, my dissertation explores the main themes of the book, discussing the problems that black people encounter today. I try to address differences between racism of the past and racism of the present with the help of other documents, especially studies on racism towards black and its consequences on people, carried out by sociologists and experts such as D.T. Goldberg (¿Racisms without Racism¿ 2008), S. Okazaky (¿Impact of Racism on Ethnic Minority Mental Health¿ 2009) and M. M. Zamudio and F. Rios (¿From Traditional to Liberal Racism: Living Racism in the Everyday¿ 2006). These studies seem to corroborate my hypothesis that racism cannot be considered to be an extinct problem but is a real and still present issue. I conclude that the major difference between past and present racism is that the former was favored by the law, while the latter, even if it is outlawed, is still practised in a more implicit way but with the same or even worse consequences than in the past.