Keola's Response 3

Pairing Monster with Between the World and Me

            Identity is a major theme in Monster (1999) by Walter Dean Myers. The protagonist sitting on trial for felony murder is a young black American struggling with an existential crisis of who he is and, further, how he is viewed by the other characters in the courtroom, jail mates, the jury, and his family. What does it mean to be a sixteen-year-old African-American in the judicial system? Ta-Nehisi Coates in his autobiographical epistolary Between the World and Me (2015) discusses what it is to live in a black body and how that body is treated by different people in society—what it means to be a black body on the streets, at home, and in school. Race and Identity are central issues to both of these texts, and their speakers’ discussion of the struggle to understand themselves and how they are viewed and treated by society is the precise reason the two texts are an excellent pairing in the classroom.

            Between the World and Me is a powerful autobiographical story Coates writes to his fifteen-year-old son about what it means to grow up in West Baltimore as an African-American boy, and then to study at Howard University in Washington D.C. as a young adult discovering his Black American Heritage. Coates structures his informative narrative around the idea that to live in a black body means to live with the history of slavery and the current issues of racial profiling and hatred that inevitably and always is about destruction of that black body. In a teaching unit on race and identity I would introduce this text as a contemporary discussion on what it means to be a black young adult in inner-city America. I would then situate a discussion of identity in Monster within certain issues Coates raises in Between the World and Me.

            “Race is the child of racism, not the father” (Coates 7). Coates inverts the historical study of racism, which claims because there are differences in physical attributes oppression followed. Instead he instructs that racism gave birth to the identities of both black and white in America. This notion that race is bred from racism would introduce and guide my discussion on race and identity with both texts.

            In Monster, part of Steve’s existential crisis during his trial reflects this notion that racism, however subdued, exists before we see him as young black boy. During her opening statement, his defense attorney O’Brien addresses the jury and subtly calls to this predetermined judgment based on race: “If you consider him innocent now, and by law you must, if you have not prejudged him […]” (Myers 27). It is the criminal stereotype of the black man that he must wear on his body. Up to this point in the text, race has not been directly addressed in the narrative or the courtroom. Steve’s narrative so far has not brought up the issue of identity except for as monster. The criminal justice system has avoided the issue of race because legally they must, but O’Brien knows what we all know: in Harlem to be a young black man is to be a criminal first—to be a monster.

            Further into the trial Steve confides his issues with identity in the courtroom and as a monster. His identity as a human and as a young black male is secondary to his experience with his trial and with jail:

It’s funny, but when I’m sitting in the courtroom, I don’t feel like I’m involved in the case. It’s like the lawyers and the judge and everybody are doing a job that involves me, but I don’t have a role. It’s only when I go back to the cells that I know I’m involved. […] I like the last scene in the movie, the one between me and Jerry. It makes me seem like a real person. The man they call Sunset asked me if he could read the screenplay, and I let him. He liked it. Sunset said he liked the name of the screenplay. He said when he gets out, he will have the word Monster tattooed on his forehead. I feel like I already have it tattooed on mine. (Myers 59-61).

The first part of this quote speaks to the institution of the criminal justice system. Although it does not explicitly address institutionalized racism, it does call to the in-humanization of the individual on trial. Everyone that plays a role in that courtroom has got a job presenting or analyzing the identity of Steve in determining his guilt or innocence of this one action of his life, and he has no more power in his identification. He recalls a time in his childhood when his brother and him discuss becoming superheroes—hopes, dreams, and identity—that makes him seem like a real person. That time is gone. He now knows that before the verdict, he is seen as a monster—it is already there tattooed on his forehead metaphorically.

      In Monster Myers situates his young black protagonist in the position of being viewed and analyzed in the courtroom as something less than human. However, we as readers get to know him through his own struggle with identity. We get to grapple, as he does, with his humanity. Being black is secondary to the way Steve is presented in court and to his existence in jail—the inferiority, fear and powerlessness is exactly what Coates describes as the young black male existence in inner-city life. The fact that Monster does very little to directly address Steve’s race, and more importantly addresses his identity in this judicial system calls to the way society views these young Americans. These two texts complement each other well in a unit on race and identity in America for young black males.

Works Cited

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015. Print.

Myers, Walter Dean. Monster. New York: HarperCollins Children’s Books, 1999. Print.