Between the World and Me

The concept of the Dream and its dangers are first introduced to the reader via a news interview that Coates participates in. In the interview, the news anchor presses Coates on the importance of hope in the face of racial violence. Coates writes that in this moment he knows that he has failed, and that in asking this question the anchor is asking him to “awaken her from the most gorgeous dream” (13). He views this goal for hope as an attempt to uphold the fallacy of American idealism and moral goodness, which he characterizes as the Dream.

Coates admits his own struggle wanting to believe the Dream. But he emphasizes that to succumb to the Dream is to dive headfirst into ignorance. He believes the Dream is not an option for black people, who carry the scars of the Dream. Coates writes that the Dream’s bedding was “made from our bodies” (13), referring to the $4 billion slave industry that transformed the United States into a world power. Early on, Coates characterizes the Dream as in direct opposition to the acknowledgement of black suffering and abuse.

Coates states that “how to live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life” (14). Which is to say, Coates wrestles with how to live as a black American in an America that refuses to acknowledge black suffering.

Coates outlines how the Dream is perpetuated by institutions such as schools and the police. Coates maintains that the only interest schools take in black students is teaching them complacency. As a child, he wrestles with the contradiction of having to protect his body in the streets while learning French at school. He wonders at the value that classes like French have for students like him, who must worry about existential threat every day. He notes that schools do not feed his curiosity but stunt it. His interest in investigating the greater questions of life and the world is only met by his parents, who present learning as a form of self-discovery. However, this form of learning directly contrasts with the Dream, which, via schools, portrays only exceptional and nonviolent black people. Coates describes the Dream as a “hall pass through history, a sleeping pills that ensures the Dream” (35). To portray black people in dissent and self-empowerment would require schools to teach students about the conditions against which black activists rebel, such as the terrors of slavery, generational poverty, and unjust legal and economic policies like redlining. In contrast, Coates’s father gives him books on black revolutionaries such as the Black Panthers and Malcolm X.

Coates thinks he has begun to uncover the Dream of the black race when he begins his study of African and African American history in his late teens. However, his professors at Howard University prompt him to question this form of idealization, pointing out that even ancient African societies dealt with questions of hierarchy, exploitation, and slavery. Coates writes of his realization that “[b]eing black did not immunize us from history’s logic or the lure of the Dream. The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation” (55). At the same time as this realization, Coates hones in on the major aim of his writing, which is partly to upend the Dream, which he calls “the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing” (51).

At Howard University, Coates learns that the Dream does not exist solely in whiteness but also in the assumed superiority and privilege of being male. Through meeting women from different places who express different modes of loving, Coates opens his eyes to how the Dream of his maleness and heterosexuality has kept him from appreciating and respecting various modes of love, worldviews, and female struggles.

Coates characterizes racial violence as the Dream exercising its power. He points to how assumptions of white American moral superiority and goodwill allow police officers and citizens who murder black people to walk free, while black people must not only assume higher accountability of their bodies but also shoulder the burden of the actions of all black people. In other words, the Dream affords white Americans countless chances on the assumption of goodwill, while black criminality is presumed by American society and law. Coates cites how black murder is justified by error on the part of the victim: Eric Gardner illegally sold single cigarettes, John Crawford touched a rifle for sale in a department store, Renisha McBride knocked on a stranger’s door late at night to ask for help. Coates cites the presence of the Dream in the way the Civil War is depicted as an act of Christian benevolence rather than a struggle to uphold exploitative labor practices on the part of the Confederacy.

Coates ends the book by stating to his son that though he must be forever mindful of how the Dream is at work within the United States, it is not his responsibility to dispel it. The Dream will only be dismantled through collective action, once the “Dreamers […] understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all” (148). Coates asserts that the ignorance that fuels the Dream is the same one that endangers the planet and overpopulates prisons with black people.