Taken together, his two capitalized terms refer to "the system" that he had referred to at one juncture. He sees people who believe they are white as buying into "the Dream." So they are "Dreamers." But African Americans may also buy into "the Dream" and thereby become "Dreamers." In Coates' view, the African American police officer from Prince George's County who shot and killed Prince Jones in Northern Virginia bought into "the Dream" and thereby became a "Dreamer."
In line with Jung's thought about sentimentality and brutality, we should think of "the Dream" and "Dreamers" as representing sentimentality, which can give way at times to brutality.
Coates says that gripping fear undergirds "the Dream" (page 34). This is his greatest insight in the book.
This means that the "Dreamer"- dominators are motivated by their own deep fear to instill fear in others.
This insight about fear in American culture strikes me as resembling in its sweep Virginia Woolf's critique of her own culture in her feminist and pacifist manifesto THREE GUINEAS (1938). By taking both a feminist and a pacifist stance, she was deliberately distancing herself from her native British culture. Briefly, in light of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in Germany, Woolf suggested that fascism has its roots in parental tyranny in raising children. She had a strong love-hate relationship with her father, so she associates parental tyranny mostly with her father -- and with other British fathers. Coates reports that it was mostly his own father who instilled fear in him at home. But Coates' critique of American culture is more penetrating because of his insight about how fear undergirds the dominant American culture.
In connection with Woolf's somewhat sweeping claim about parental tyranny, I should call attention to Alice Miller's book about Hitler and his mistreatment by his father, FOR YOUR OWN GOOD: HIDDEN CRUELTY IN CHILD-REARING AND THE ROOTS OF VIOLENCE, 3rd ed., translated by Hildegarde Hannum and Hunter Hannum (1990; orig. German ed., 1980).
Coates' account of his fear-inducing parental treatment at home is consistent with Miller's critique of certain parenting practices.
In connection with Hopkins and Ong, I should mention that Hopkins distanced himself from his native British culture when he converted to Roman Catholicism and that Ong (1912-2003) grew up as a Roman Catholic in the United States when anti-Catholicism was still common in what was referred to as white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. The anti-Catholic spirit of WASP culture was still alive and strong when Senator John F. Kennedy ran for president of the United States in 1960. To his credit, Coates does say that he took an American history survey course at Howard in which he learned about the treatment of Irish immigrants in American culture (page 55).
Now, Hopkins was educated at Oxford University, and Ong received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard University. Thus to a certain extent, each of them was acculturated in the prestige culture in his native country. Unfortunately, Coates gives little evidence in his book of having been acculturated in the prestige culture in his native country.
Now, at another juncture, Coates claims that "our bodies are our selves" (page 79).
In HOPKINS, THE SELF, AND GOD (1986), Ong discusses the view of the self in Hopkins' writings. Ong sums up his own view of the self as follows:
"When someone kicks my body, I do not say, 'Quit kicking my apparent self,' but, 'Quit kicking me.' Though I feel myself as somehow inside my body, so that my body is in some real way vaguely external, my body is still in another real way unmistakably an integral part of me, actually included in my consciousness of self. 'Part of this world of objects . . . is also part of the very self,' as Hopkins puts it in the passage just quoted [above in Ong's book]. My body is the frontier in which I am embedded and which is embedded in me: my body mediates between what is myself and everything else: it is both 'me' and otherness" (page 40).
In the book FIGHTING FOR LIFE: CONTEST, SEXUALITY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1981), the published version of Ong's 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University Press, Ong sets forth his thoughts about our being embodied:
"The duplex condition of human statement is hardly surprising. For humans, embodied consciousnesses, are essentially duplex beings. My body is both inside me ('Stop kicking me,' not 'Stop kicking my body') and outside me (I feel myself somehow inside my body, which is a frontier between the 'I' that I know and all other things in the world in the world, including even my body itself)" (page 32).
Coates' book title BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME appears to refer to his own sense of the duplex human condition.
In the book ORALITY AND LITERACY: THE TECHNOLOGIZING OF THE WORD (1982), Ong's most widely known and most widely translated book, Ong discusses our experiences of our own bodies:
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