Final Project
Anika Grube


Idea: 

To re-create the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates from his book 'Between the World and Me'.


'Between the World and Me' About

Between the World and Me is a letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s fifteen-year-old son, Samori. He weaves his personal, historical, and intellectual development into his ruminations on how to live in a black body in America.

Execution: 

A motion graphic piece that explores the powerful statements and issues Coats talks about in the book.

Example: 

Quotes and Phrases from the book:

“The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing - race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy - serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, crack bones and breaks teeth.”  - pg 10

I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself. 

In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wish to live - specifically, how do I live free in this black body? 

It is a profound question because America understands itself as God’s handiwork but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. - pg 12

Growing up in Baltimore

Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice - “Either I can beat him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn't.

All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. - pg 17

To be black in Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape and disease. 

The nakedness is not an error, nor pathology. The nakedness is the correct and intended result of policy, the predictable upshot of people forced for centuries to live under fear. - pg 17

I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body. - pg 24