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Between The World And Me: A Shattered Dream

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A Shattered Dream In Coates’s novel, Between The World And Me, Coates mentions “The Dream” as an entity that looms over his life, that causes struggles and allows his body to be plundered, and yet is the utopic ideal that everyone wishes to flee to. This “Dream” that Coates refers to is not too far away from the “American Dream,” if not identical to it; where people are living regular lives with no struggles in a completely “free” society. The reason why Coates phrases this idealistic society as “The Dream” is because, like other dreams, it does not exist. In fact, The Dream is built on the foundation of ignorance and hypocrisy. Coates is a black man who lives in the ghettos where he faces the struggles of not being …show more content…
Even in Coates’s time, The Dream was and is meant for white people, and the only way to be a dreamer is to put a blindfold on reality and make yourself “white” and adopting the customs that make one “white.” When Coates refers to being “white,” he does not mean the skin color, rather the privileges, and ignorance that make anyone of any skin tone be “white.”

As Coates gets deeper into his story, he starts realizing that The Dream is not the heavenly world that, especially his kind, can escape to. In fact, it is the very reason he and others like him have been struggling to live in reality. Coates uncovers that “The lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream. Historians conjured the Dream. Hollywood fortified the Dream” (102). Coates discovers that the Dream that puts a blindfold on its dreamers by shielding them from the true inequalities in the so-called free country. Coates is not shielded from the Dream, rather the Dream has put the shield

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