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The American Dream In Ta-Nehisi Coates Invisible Man

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The American Dream and its projected image, much like the American system, is damaged. Not only has the American Dream become a myth for most of the population, but it is rendered near impossible for black people. Ta-Nehisi Coates basically presents the Dream as a fallacy and plainly nonexistent in his letter to his son, while the protagonist in Ellison’s novel does actually carry and achieve the Dream in a beautiful and treasured way throughout the book. Nevertheless, the American Dream in Invisible Man would prove to be too fragile and break when in full contact with reality. Throughout his journey, the protagonist finds motivation in himself more than anywhere else, believing in a power yielded only by his own willpower and self-determination. …show more content…

Education, too, is a weapon. However, it is not hard to understand why going to school can be fearful for black children of this nation: they are three times more likely than their white peers to be suspended or expelled, according to U.S. Department of Education. Along with other institutions, education is discriminatory down to the system’s very roots. Ta-Nehisi Coates would most probably agree, having received “nothing short of fearful education he earned growing up in Baltimore” (Hagan 60). He explains that rather than learning to trust his education and educators, he, as a African American, “cannot say that [he] truly believed any of them” (Coates 26). Just as any establishment, education has been crafted and taught by the White Man, which is exactly why one simply cannot blame Coates or the Black Man for being skeptical. While the nature of education is white, so might be explanations given to children throughout adolescence. Coates and critics are particularly appalled at the blatant exoneration still taking place in schools today with “educators speaking of ‘personal responsibility’ in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility” (Daniels 3). Unfortunately, being an educator does not make one credible, actually quite the opposite. Although not explicitly, working in education does make one the inevitable embodiment of the system’s manifold values, both positive and negative, and in the eyes of those betrayed by it, someone hard to trust and believe. As critic Wang phrased it, “A black minister who gives a wonderful speech about the importance of education turns out to be blind” (Wang 1). In essence, the minister is in the wrong, regardless of his individual experience with education. It is an institution that cheats black people. Its educators are still predominantly white, it fuels the school-to-prison pipeline,

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