on page 11 when he is talking about his dream he is saying in his dream “there is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The dream is treehouses and cub scouts….. when he is talking about the American dream he wants everyone to be happy and to be able to live together happily. Also from other places in the reading like on page 12 he says that this country is lost in the dream meaning that no one knows how to treat anyone right and also it is not good.
Coates says the destruction of black bodies on page 12 by saying ” I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life….” this quote shows that how hard it is to live in this world when everyone is hung up on the dream and wanting everything to be perfect.
When Coates says this he means that race is the reason why we have racism because it separates people into different groups so it causes people to form a dislike for other people due to there race. This is different from other readings because the other readings were looking at how racism would effect people and not how it corelates to race. He wants readers to understand this because kids and others would grow up hoping and wishing they could be white so that racism wouldn’t be a problem. Also that racism is not just based upon the color of your skin it can be for almost anything about a person.
In his childhood he had to worry about getting beat up or having to not get shot and try to fit in with everyone else so he wasn’t separated from everyone else. with the little white boy he had a gun in order to keep himself safe but he couldn’t pull the trigger due to his fear of getting in trouble. the logic was because he was really mad at the people and what they had said to him, he needed to control the anger he had in order to keep himself from getting in trouble.
some of the rules of the street are to not be separated from everyone you have to be a part of the gang or in a hood in order to keep yourself out of trouble. The toughness is that you need to keep yourself out of trouble but its to hard to do that with the gangs and violence. The American dream is that everyone gets along and has good houses with some cookouts and stuff but that’s not at all what they have.
his son’s may or may not experience what he went through because times have changed a little bit not so much to the point where there is no more gangs and violence but there may not be as much as there used to be. so the kids good experience it if they go into the bad parts of the city and if they stay away from the bad parts they’ll be perfectly fine.
