Black American Identity and Experience The Black American experience is quite complicated. It takes many forms, but the oppressions Black people face all stem from similar roots. One of the most important points that Ta-Nehisi Coates makes in his book, Between the World and Me, is that white America depends on black oppression for its success and progress. We see ourselves as exceptional, the melting pot of the world, a diverse, post-racial society. However, none of this is actually true. Coates challenges our belief that we are exceptional. He describes what it's like to be black in America in an effort to convey to his son what his experiences have been and what he should expect. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay While Coates speaks to his son and America about his experiences, OJ Simpson had a quite different experience with race. He considered himself exempt from blackness because he had been embraced by white America and made into a star around the world. While on the surface OJ Simpson may seem like an exception to Coates' point, I would argue that he is not. His success spoke to the black community and for the black community. If he hadn't been twice as good as his white counterparts, he wouldn't have been half as successful. In America, we glorify Black athletes because they advance the same causes as us, while at the same time we abuse Black bodies and justify it because of our need to hold them back. to a higher moral standard. We can see how this plays out when we delve into what Coates says and how OJ attempted to separate himself from this. Ta-Nehisi Coates' book Between the World and Me was written to be a letter to his son about being black in America. . He reflects on his childhood, struggling to understand his identity through the context of the streets and school, neither of which he felt he truly belonged. “Unfit for schools, and to a good extent wanting to be unfit for them, and lacking the common sense I needed to master the streets, I felt there could be no escape for me, or, honestly, for anyone else” (27) . He coined the term dreamers for people in America who believe they are white. Dreamers are the people who always seem to find justification for the forced policing of Black bodies. They justify the treatment of black bodies by considering that black people have a higher moral need to be nonviolent and peaceful, even in the midst of violence perpetrated against them (32). Black identity is not something that Black people have had the opportunity to define, because it was defined before they were born. “To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked to the elements of the world, to all the guns and fists and knives and crack and rape and disease” (17). Coates is trying to convey to his son how he navigated this system that defined him from birth and how he found himself within it. His world changed when he met people of color from all over the world. It meant that what they were told, in the schools and on the streets, wasn't all there was for black people. He learned new meanings of love. He learned that his own oppression did not mean that he and other blacks were incapable of oppressing others. His worldview, therefore, has changed and now he wants his son to know everything that is possible for him as a black boy in the diversity of the world. “I wasn't so much tied to a biological 'race' as [I was] to a group of people” (119). Black people were not bound by the skin and physical characteristics they had, butfrom the culture they shared, including shared oppressions. Living in America, your child will still be exposed to schools and streets. Even though the world is vast, he still has to be especially careful in how he deals with the police, because they will not see him as a bright, worldly, open-minded guy, but simply as a black guy in America, who, for the most part, For the most part, it is the same identity that Coates claims America created for blacks. He found that while the world was vast and black men and women should not feel limited, the world, especially the white world, had relied on their oppression for centuries. “'The two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but the white and the black,' said the great senator of South Carolina, John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, both the poor and the rich, belong to the upper class and are respected and treated as equals.” And here it is: the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality” (104). Racism is no longer what it was in the past, it is more subtle, less evident, but it is there. And it will remain as long as white people depend on black oppression. While Coates is giving voice to the majority of the black community at a time when they cannot yet rely on society to respect and protect them, OJ has a very different, though not totally separate, experience with identity, particularly for regarding what it means to be black in America. OJ believed he was exempt from the black experience in America. He was even pleased when a white woman referred to the blacks around him as "niggers", yet saw him as superior to them (00:36). He lived in a reality completely separate from other blacks. He attended an affluent white school and was surrounded by whites who praised him for his athletic ability. They didn't see him as black (inferior), because he was so good on the field. He embraced this idea, saying "I'm not black, I'm OJ." Later, he devoted himself to advertising for Chevrolet and Hertz. He thought this spoke to his ability to transcend race. Little did he know that it was actually being used as a way to get sales from black buyers, without losing sales from white people since they embraced it. Although he seemed separate from black America, his presence on television was a milestone for the black community. He was fighting for their cause whether he wanted to or not (1:09). Even though he said in college that pressure didn't affect him, we found out that it did. It broke. The attention went to his head and he abused his wives. He eventually killed his second wife and her lover and was acquitted. He also wrote the book If I Did It. He was later convicted of a separate crime and now resides in prison for robbery and is up for parole in October 2017 (Cleary). Our society is one where we abuse Black bodies, glorifying Black athletes and celebrities from whom we benefit. Coates recalls Prince Jones' mother telling a story from her youth in which she sat at a football game hearing her peers praise their team's black running back, while shouting "Kill that nigger!" with her sitting right next to them (Coates 139). We can easily see the parallel between this and OJ's experience. It supposedly transcended race, which is why it was so successful. This gave him justification to ignore the violence his black comrades were experiencing. He lived in a completely different world, or so he thought. But I would say he didn't. The only reason it transcended race was because it benefited white American football. He thrived on the attention he received from white America. To further this, he was so successful just because he was.