White denial is a known-and-repressed dream requiring constant effort to sustain

Evidence

As conservatives and liberals mirror one another, each claiming the mantle of truth and righteousness, this unreckoned-with history and present are a large part of whiteness’s shadow world, the truth that is simultaneously known and repressed. In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates calls white people’s denial of this shadow “the Dream,” an abbreviation of the American Dream that de-emphasizes the American part in favor of the reverie part. Crucially, the Dream knows it’s a dream, knows it’s not real, knows that reality is pounding at the door, threatening an awakening from slumber. And so huge efforts must be made to keep the curtains drawn so that the light does not stream in. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 834

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Coates’s concept of ‘the Dream’ as a self-aware, maintained denial rather than ignorance.
• XREF: Connects to Coates’s Between the World and Me and to the reader’s own work on how dominant groups sustain self-image against contradictory evidence.