Something prevalent in both Between the World and Me and Paris is Burning is the murder of someone because of their identity.

    In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates had a friend at college who was shot and killed by a police officer because he was black. In Paris is Burning one of the queens in the house Xtravaganza was strangled to death by a man after he found out that she was a transgender woman.

    These devastating and harrowing realities for these real people can help illustrate to us that black people and trans people have incredibly unfair disadvantages poised against them at all times due to the way that American society’s culture has evolved. Coates talks about how his friend was doing everything right. He was at a really good college and was trying to make the right steps to be able to succeed in the world and achieve the American dream. But even when he did everything right, he still wasn’t allowed to have this experience because he had his life stripped away from him due to the color of his skin. These things are bad.

    These two pieces of media are also about underrepresented cultures or countercultures in the country. They connect in this way because they bring to light some of the truths of both the lives of black people and the lives of gay and/or trans people. They also both help bring compassion to these groups of people from people outside of these groups. They also both give both of these groups of people more spaces to feel heard and understood, and they both bring to light some serious issues that both have to face on a day to day basis which helps people outside of their groups to understand problems that they may be causing onto these groups and will hopefully help them to learn to stop making these issues have to occur.

    So these two stories are important because they remind everyone that they exist and deserve to be treated as human as everyone else.