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.
Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.
Short Answer
1. Where does the Black identity come from in America?
Teaching Suggestion: Between the World and Me positions Blackness as an outgrowth of the desire to assert whiteness as the dominant identity in America. Getting students to consider how race is both an actively-constructed concept and an identity marker with intense significance to the individual will help them grapple with Coates’ assertion the Blackness is an invention of the American imagination that grew to inform its reality.
2. What is whiteness?
Teaching Suggestion: Most conversations of race in America focus on Blackness, but Coates is much more concerned with critiquing the people who defined Blackness, not Black people themselves.
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