![]() ![]() 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. 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. ![]()
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