Identity In Coates's Between The World And Me

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Moving forward, both Citizen and Between the World and Me analyze what life is like as a black citizen versus a white citizen. In Between the World and Me, Coates mentions The Dream. Coates mentions that “The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is an enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing” (50). The Dream is a metaphor of white supremacy, because it is the foundation of what makes up a stereotype in America. Coates also separates the body from the personality in his book, in order to intensify the struggle African American have to be judged by their character and not by their skin. Additionally, in Citizen, Claudia Rankine expresses the difference it is to live with a black body versus a white body. For example, “The man at the cash register wants to know if you think your card will work. If this is his routine, he didn’t use it on the friend that went before you” (Rankine 54). In this previous example, the man at the cash register immediately saw the skin color of the person checking out. Instead of using automatically swiping the card, as he did the person before, he had to question because he judged the color of skin. …show more content…
All in all, this is everyday life for many races that are not Caucasian and examples like this are what draws the line between being a white citizen versus a black citizen, or a citizen of any ethnic culture other than
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