Between the World and Me

On August 9th, 2014, an 18 year old named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer named Darren Wilson. Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson were walking on the street when Wilson confronted them to get out of the road. There was a confrontation in which Wilson grabbed Brown by the neck and tried to pull him into the car, and when Brown resisted, he was shot. There were 5 other shots fired, even when Brown had his hands up in surrender position. This young man had his life taken away from him because he was walking in the middle of the street. Ta-Nehisi Coates mentions the injustices in the killing of Michael Brown in his book Between The World and Me and explains that the murders will not stop unless people wake up from the dream. Dreamers are the people that think that racism is behind this country, that we are on an uphill slope to greatness and equality, when really we have not changed. They purposefully shield their eyes to the injustices that lay right before their eyes, like the killing of Michael Brown, and label these murders as isolated events, things that just happen and that they can’t do anything about.

America rests on the injustices that Michael Brown was killed by, however this relationship is kept quiet and the Dreamers are asleep from the truth in order to protect themselves. Michael Brown’s murder in the eyes of Coates’s son was an injustice in itself, yet what Coates is trying to tell him is that he cannot expect punishment for the killer because everyone is living in the Dream around them. Coates “did not tell [him] that it would be okay, because [he] never believed it would be okay,” instead, he questions, “how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream” (12). Now Samori has to figure out how to live his life knowing that “the country lost in the Dream” will most likely never understand that there is still racism in the world and that the injustice itself is that these killers are getting away with it. The dream is spread throughout America, not just one town or city. The injustice is that no one is fixing the problem of these murders stemmed from racism, and it gives these officers the thought that they can keep doing it. The police officers involved in these murders rarely receive prosecution and some believe that they geniunely had to murder young black boys because they were “in danger.”

The injustices stem from the creation of America, the history of racism and white supremacy that is somehow looked over in our world today. For example, slavery, the Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration and police brutality. The conversation involving the untold truths of America’s racism is almost never brought up because it makes people uncomfortable with the thought that it is in fact not the past. The Dreamers want to believe that the pure hatred happened before us and that the country has grown to be at least somewhat decent. However, Coates tells his son that he has to inform the Dreamers of their lost vision.

Thinking that racism is behind the country makes it worse because it allows people to turn a blind eye to the discrimmination that is happening right in front of them. On November 14th, just a few weeks ago, a grand jury decided that there was not enough evidence to charge two officers with shooting De’Von Bailey, a 19 year old black teenager, 4 times in the back. The investigation of this murder was given by a nearby police station, with officers who were friends with the officers involved. The biased evidence given to this grand jury completely eliminates the evidence of racism towards this young boy. Yet, this jury still did not charge the officers Alan Van’t Land and Blake Evenson because these Dreamers did not want to see the fact that this was a murder stemmed from racial hatred. The 2 officers “are back on duty after being on paid leave for three days following the incident.” The Dreamers are unfazed by this and continue to pay the 2 men that murdered a young boy. The Dreamers would rather forget about this “incident” and move on than face the obvious fact that these murders will not stop unless justice is served and Dreamers wake up.

Coates describes these murders as “sustained assaults launched in the name of the Dream,” and the officers are not prosecuted because, “current politics tell you that should you fall victim to an assault and loose your body, it somehow must be your fault” (130). These murders are “sustained,” they are constant and are going to continue unless people wake up from the Dream. The evidence used in favor of these officers claim that these black boys were dangerous, yet the Dreamers don't see that these boys are in constant danger from the Dream itself. If people cannot see the burdens put on black people in America, the way this country shoves them to the side and pretends like they don't, the Dream will never go away. And yet, somehow it is still Samori’s responsibility to because he “is surrounded by Dreamers,” the breach that is, “as intentional as policy, as intentional as the forgetting that follows” (138) These killings are being done intentionally to oppress a certain group, black people.This country tries to forget its past in order to feel better about the future, and Samori has the responsibility to try to convince the Dreamers that they are wrong. It is, what Coates describes as, intentional because the odds that the Dreamers will wake up is very slim. They are dreaming of a world in which they are not at fault for the killings of innocent black boys because they did nothing to stop the murderers. They allowed for police driven killings because of race to happen over and over because they didn't want to accept the fact that the discrimmination never really went away.