ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a seminal text of contemporary cultural analysis, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s evocative book in which he writes a letter to his teenage son. He tells him about the feeling, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in America. Using the father-son relationship and its empathic bond and providing a holding context that potentially nourishes the son’s sense of becoming, Coates’s conversation becomes part of the initiation his son will need in order to navigate the dehumanizing and invalidating contacts he will experience in the world around being Black. The remarkable implication of this type of interaction is that it involves a type of necessary communication and understanding that prepares his son to deal with the multiple verbal and nonverbal insults to his sense of himself as a human being. The chapter’s subtitle, “Where the Wild Things Live,” is a play on Maurice Sendak’s children’s book Where the Wild Things Are. This chapter asks readers to open their imagination to this place where the wild things live through examining the collective projection-making processes and enacting places in themselves and groups.
