It’s also worth making this distinction because for many white Americans the word race simply translates to not us, an invitation to defensive disavowal and aggrievement. “Race is the child of racism, not the father,” he writes-while race is a fiction of power, racism is power itself, and very real. This distinction might sound glib but is worth making, not least of all because Coates repeatedly informs us that he isn’t much interested in “race” as a subject of reflection in itself. The richness of this tradition is a formidable thing, and its duration and continuing urgency do not speak well of this country.Ĭoates is frequently lauded as one of America’s most important writers on the subject of race today, but this in fact undersells him: Coates is one of America’s most important writers on the subject of America today. As such, it joins a tradition that stretches back at least as far as Frederick Douglass and runs up through Barack Obama’s Charleston eulogy just two weeks ago. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.” The Dream is wrought from a legacy of white supremacy so entrenched it nearly conceals itself, and Coates’ book is a call to awakening. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. … The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake.
Taken as a whole the book is Coates’ attempt to sever America’s ongoing romance with its own unexamined platitudes of innocence and equality, a romance that, in the writer’s telling, “persists by warring with the known world.” In Between the World and Me this collective delusion is known as “The Dream.” The Dream, writes Coates, “is perfect houses with nice lawns. Between the World and Me is a love letter written in a moral emergency, one that Coates exposes with the precision of an autopsy and the force of an exorcism.
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