"The American Dream"

                 
“The American Dream” 

    In the novel, “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the “American dream”, “American legacy” or mostly referenced as “The Dream” is a huge theme throughout the book.  Coates tackles broad questions such as how “our country is lost in the dream” and what social injustices are the american people asleep to? Depending on where you live geographically and what class you are (rich, middle, or poor) will impact your knowledge on what’s going on in the world and if it should mean anything to you.  When Coates says american’s are living in a dream, he means a bubble. usually the richer class does not care to look outside their bubble of acquired wealth and status and see the huge economic struggles and social injustices African Americans experience daily. 

    One of these social injustices that Coates directly experiences himself as a child is when “the boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket and pulled out a gun.” (P19) The boy never shot at Coates but it was pointed towards him for none other than the reason he was African American.  Later in the book, Coates comes back to this and says, “to live in fear was a great injustice.”(P28) To live in fear takes from one's quality of life. Even in modern society, African Americans are in great fear of their lives, even if it isn't always obvious. A fear white upper class and even middle class people have never had to experience or worry about whenever they step outside. People who live in “good” neighborhoods, which is really code for high income low crime neighborhoods.  This is the bubble and “The Dream” Coates has continually referenced. Majority of the people who live in this bubble don’t feel the need to be concerned with what's happening to those who may be stuck living in “bad neighborhoods” such as low income high crime neighborhoods. They aren’t concerned because it doesn’t affect them or their lives, so it’s easier to ignore what’s happening to those who live outside the bubble. Coates observed how those around him had to adjust and become something to survive, he remembers “the crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude..”(P22) He noticed the personas that African Americans put on so they could feel a sense of security and power where they felt none.  Not only that there were rules to the streets to survive, and certain ways to address others if you didn’t want to start a fight. There was constant fear of losing ones body for being too weak or too strong. To live in fear the way African Americans have had to and still do might be the biggest injustice most ignore.

    How is the dream sustained though and who sustains it? Who even built it to be what it is? “This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream. Historians conjured the Dream.  Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories…”(P102) “The Dream” was truly built off the backs of African Americans who were viciously thrown into slavery.  America wouldn’t be as successful as a country if it weren't for the slaves who picked sugar cane, tobacco and cotton in fields all day. To ignore the injustices that African Americans still face without trying to help is what the bubble and “dream” is all about.  To ignore gun violence and the death of thousands of African americans preserves the “dream” that somehow everybody is equal in modern society. But it’s obvious everyone still isn’t equal, predominantly shown through the eyes of the police. Coates speaks to his son but really all african americans when he says, “All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disappropriate number of them will be black.”(P103) This is a huge injustice that contributes greatly to the fear that African Americans feel daily and why they should feel that way.   African Americans seem to be walking targets even when they haven't done anything wrong. This is echoed in hundreds of news articles and current events where they've been shot and killed every time.  Majority never had weapons or acted as threats, it was because of their race and skin color.  Not everyone can be equal when racism still exists and when there are many who still live in a “dream” state where it doesn’t exist or doesn't concern them.