Compare And Contrast Between The World And Me

Being Black and living in American is a task, many wish not to face. You always have to look all around you, and make sure you are safe. You live everyday with fear in your heart, knowing that every breath that you take is a blessing. Living in this country is a dangerous place not only to Blacks, but also to the whites, due to the Dream they live by. The dream is believing America is the best country in the world, and that America has no problems, and it will never come across any. These same dreamers, the whites, live by this dream and have power that lies within their hands. This power allows them to take bodies away with little to no punishment within their name. Ta – Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, believes if the dreamers
Fear of being able to go outside and hang out with friends, fear of attending school, even fear of being inside your own house. Coates states “when I was your age the only people I knew were black, all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. I had seen this fear all my young life, though I had not always recognized it as such” (Coates 14). Throughout Coates childhood he witnessed fear coming from Blacks. They were afraid of living life; they did not know if they were ever going to make it to see another day. Their lives, or as Coates says, bodies were being taken away from them by people in power, the dreamers. Being in the comfort of one’s home made you feel fear. “My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal, me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us” (Coates 16). Beats were a sign of discipline according to Coates. This was a teaching not to do such things as a Black for it may cost him or her their life. The beatings coming from parents was only a sign of fear of losing their child to either the streets, or the people who have
This dream of believing history does not exist, that what happened to African Americans never existed is diminishing the Earth. Dreamers are living this life as if the grass that they walk on, is a bright green with no weeds. They walk around with a strong mindset of they are in control, they have the power, and not bad is happening in the world. Coates, believing the longer the dreamers live in this dream, the quicker the earth will die. Dreamers refuse to wake up from this dream “because to remember [to remember slavery, segregation, and wars] would tumble them out of the beautiful Dream and force them to live down here with us, down here in the world” (Coates 143). If the dreamers were to wake and actually see reality, it was cause discomfort to them, they would actually have to live their life style similar to those of African American. They would also have to associate themselves with African Americans. But because dreamers will not wake up from the Dream, it is causing them [to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky” (Coates 150). This Dream is causing danger to the Earth we live on, physically, and is destroying every life upon it, and sooner or later the Earth will have its revenge and wipe mankind clean of itself. Life will no longer exist