The keystone facet to Coates’s description of the black American’s reality is his separation of black Americans from so-called Dreamers-i.e., those who can and do follow the American Dream, which purports that the ultimate goal of life is a nuclear family, white and suburban with two-point-five children. This switch, however, is not offered as a solution to racism rather, Between the World and Me serves as a call-out to the largely white media on their perpetuation of a quintessentially racist ideal, regardless of whether or not Coates explicitly intended for it to do so. Despite its epistolary form, Between the World and Me caters to an ambiguous audience Coates himself claims that he “didn’t set out to accumulate a mass of white fans” (León 1), but his surprisingly extensive white readership raises the question: What message would Between the World and Me, a letter from a black man to a black teenager, carry for a white reader? One answer is Coates’s implicit suggestion that white people, and by extension the American media, should learn to discuss black life via black struggle instead of the inherently racist American Dream. Written as a letter to his fifteen-year-old son, Coates uses his own adolescence and young adulthood as a means to communicate the reality of existing as a black man in America, thus creating what appears to be a how-to guide for the young black American. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay Between the World and Me is at once a cautionary tale, a bildungsroman, and an analysis of contemporary American society.
And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream.
The abuses that have followed from these policies-the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects-are the product of democratic will. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. “You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras.
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