Ta-Nehisi Coates shows a starkly different opinion of the ‘great American dream’, as he refers to it as, “…the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos” (151). Americans strive to be the best to reach this dream, but this in itself implies that there is a group of people that is not as great. I think the American dream came to be out of a necessity for society to strive toward a common goal: to have it all and to be the best at what they do. The American dream can often be conjured up in to images of wealth, family, safety, white picketed fences, and to have no worries. The only way to find the truth is to extinguish all the layers of generalizations and ignorance that comes with the formation of a dream.
This truth may appear rotten, as Coates believes in the passage he writes, but the truth may also be as sweet as a letter to a son. Nevertheless, Coates breaks his Dream to find the reality of mankind. Coates does imply that all of humanity, not just the country, is terrible, perhaps rotten to the core. These dreams convey generalizations that try to mask one away from the very truth of humanity, however awful it may be.
Through his words, it becomes clear that the world contains many dreams. Eventually, with the continuation of his studies, Coates notes, “It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness” (52). He creates a trophy case of African American culture, just like the whole of America does with their own. To him, in his own Dream, African Americans do no wrong, they are only wronged by others. While Coates studies at Howard University, he realizes that he created his own Dream, one where all African Americans symbolize perfection. In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates notes the existence of other dreams, but these dreams are as warped in ignorance, generalizations, and the ideas of a “good life” as America’s common Dream.
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