Online Response 5

Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning come from different cultural spaces, but they share a strikingly similar project: documenting what it means to inhabit a body that society has marked as vulnerable. Coates writes about Black embodiment in the United States as something constantly shaped by fear, surveillance, and the historical weight of racism. In Paris Is Burning, queer and trans performers of color make their own worlds in the Harlem ballroom scene, creating spaces where their bodies, styles, and identities can exist on their own terms. When the two works are placed side by side, it becomes clear that both are trying to articulate what marginalized communities must do to survive in a world that was not built with them in mind.

One of Coates’s main ideas is that the Black body is never allowed to be neutral. It is constantly interpreted, policed, or threatened by the outside world. Early in the book, he writes about realizing that he had to avoid danger not because of who he was, but because of how his body would be read by others. This idea maps directly onto the performers in Paris Is Burning, who understand that their identities, too, are judged the moment they step into public space. The ballroom functions as an environment where that judgment is suspended and people can deliberately reshape how they want to be seen. Coates argues that people build meaning within the limits of their circumstances, and the ballroom scene does exactly that by offering a cultural space where queer and trans Black and Latinx people can rewrite the rules.

A specific example from the film appears in the segments focusing on Venus Xtravaganza. Venus talks about wanting a “real” life with stability and acceptance, but she also acknowledges how dangerous the world becomes when she walks outside the ballroom as a trans woman. Her longing and her vulnerability parallel Coates’s reflections on how the outside world threatens bodies that fall outside dominant structures. Coates writes that racism is not just an attitude, but a physical danger pressed onto real lives. In Paris Is Burning, transphobia, homophobia, and racism work together in a similar way. Venus’s tragic death later in the film is a reminder of how these pressures operate violently on marginalized bodies.

At the same time, both works emphasize creativity and self-definition as acts of resistance. Coates describes learning to understand his identity through language, family, and history. The performers in Paris Is Burning use voguing, houses, and performance to craft identities that reject the limits imposed on them. Their creativity functions like what Coates calls “the struggle,” the ongoing process of making meaning despite systemic barriers. Both texts show that marginalized communities do not only survive oppression; they also generate new culture that speak back to it.

Together, Between the World and Me and Paris Is Burning highlight how Black and LGBTQIA+ voices articulate identity within pressured environments. Coates provides a vocabulary for understanding how oppression becomes embodied, while the film offers a visual and cultural example of people transforming that pressure into expressive power. The connection between them shows that storytelling, whether literary or cinematic, becomes a way to reclaim dignity and build community when the world refuses to offer either.