My opinion on the podcast “Serial”

The Impact of Colonization   No matter how many times I stress the issue of colonization as a whole, it never feels like it will equate to any of the post-colonization problems that America and the world as a whole has to deal with. The problem of colonization doesn’t affect only people of colour, it extends to any race that was sacrificed in order to help build the pedestal on top of which rests the ‘Dream’ of America. Many races “suffered under the weight of the Dream, and they were bound by all the beautiful things, all the language and mannerisms, all the food and music, all the literature and philosophy, all the common language that they fashioned like diamonds"(80). Postcolonial theory is what gives us the best view of how much culture was really lost, how much pain was inflicted and also the effects of that on the people that have to live with that today. The Personal Cost of the Dream Between the World and Me does mostly touch upon the effects of discrimination and the Ame...

     Before They Took Everything      When we think about the scale of power before colonization, we often think of wealth and lineage, because those controlled who held power. The assets, family name, and riches a person carried dictated how they were treated and where they stood socially. If we look at the lives Black people in Africa lived around that time, they carried enormous value, from the wealth of their land to the richness of their lifestyles. When Race Replaced Class There were complex societies with diverse cultures, thriving economies, and deep-rooted traditions. All of this placed Black people at the higher end of the social spectrum if the division was strictly between the rich and the poor. But today, that balance shifted. As John C. Calhoun once said, “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black” (Coates 71). With the idea of race taking over, people are no longer judged based on their wealth, values,...

  The Hero     When analysing the second third of the book through an archetypal lens, I'm able to view things in a completely different light. When we think of archetypal theory, we usually picture a hero, the protagonist on a personal journey to reach a specific goal, and this is what I see throughout the author of the book, Ta-Nehisi Coates. In Between the World and Me , we see Coates trying to understand America, his identity and how to navigate it and help his son through the violent world ahead of him. He battles with the fear and reality of living in America, in contrast to the idea of the “American dream.” At one point, Coates reflects on how his need to prove himself wasn’t really about ambition but fear. He says, “this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that ‘they,’ the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity” (Coates, 40). That quote really hit m...

     Reading the first 35 pages of the book " Between the World and Me" was such an eye-opening moment. Seeing the way the author described and talked about things we normally overlook sparked my interest. It was like he took something so camouflaged, like race, and painted it in a completely different way, but one that makes so much sense. A quote that really stood out to me was when he said, “But race is the child of racism, not the father” (Coates 9). That one sentence flipped my thinking. Oftentimes, we subconsciously judge others based on the stereotypes we hear associated with someone’s race. While doing that doesn’t automatically make someone a racist, it contributes to the bigger issue of racism that’s been around for generations and still exists today. What hit me is that it’s not like racism came from race; it’s the other way around. Racism came first. People needed a reason to hate and to justify their power, so they made up race as a system to divide and degra...