"reveling in a specious hope"

“reveling in a specious hope”

In his book, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates lays out for his son, the realities associated with being black in America. The bleak overtones coupled with the atheistic underlying feeling is in stark contrast with the popular Black, Christian narrative. Coates’ belief lay not in the hope of Christianity, but in the reality of power within social structures. Given the fact that Between the World and Me was inspired by a 2013 meeting with president Barack Obama, I think it’s is safe to say that Ta-Nehisi Coats does not share in the same sentiment of “hope” that many African-Americans and young people do today.

Coates has been critical of Obama during the president’s tenure on several occasions. One example is of Coates’ critique of Obama’s inability to address the racial disparities that exist within the community of racial minorities in terms of healthcare. Given the fact that Republican governors opted out of the federal expansion of Medicaid, Blacks and Hispanics would be disproportionately left out because of where they live. Coates wanted Obama to take action to counter this. He also criticized Obama for the president’s call for Black people to accept “more personal responsibility” which ignores the existence of structural-racism that exists within the African-American community. In a cover story written in the Atlantic magazine, a magazine dedicated to literary and cultural commentary, Coates wrote a piece titled, “The Case for Reparations”, in which he speaks to the above mentioned structural racism. In response to the killings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Walter Scott, Coates askes the question, “how, within an increasing progressive era, a country led by a black president could act with such racial brutality”. In his book , Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates uses the phrase “reveling in specious hope”. Through clever language, Coates takes aim at the metaphor that Obama is the embodiment of hope.