I don't fully stand by everything I said when I wrote this years ago But I will stand by the hot take that I don't think "native-born" Americans will ever understand the "American Dream" the way many immigrants do Some things are only defined in negative space
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The American Dream is everything the American Reality isn't, after all By definition It's what Martin Luther King called an "uncashed check", the accounting discrepancy between what is owed and what has been paid, accruing interest through the generations
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And goddamn is that one hell of a yawning gap Maybe some of you are so used to hearing it as background noise it doesn't register anymore But those are some wild fucking promises to make people if you never intend to keep them There's consequences for doing that
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From the high-minded abstractions -- freedom, dignity, equality, opportunity -- to those saturated colorful images of the concrete life they're supposed to represent beamed onto everyone's TVs Those beautiful homes, those clean, safe streets
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A decent job with a fair wage for an honest day's work A new land and a fresh start where anyone can decide who they want to be and make themselves into it Forty acres and a goddamn mule A fucking chicken in every fucking pot
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And the conservative politicians look at our changing world full of resentment and conflict and anger and think that means "the American Dream is dead"? All that negativity is because the Dream *didn't die*
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That crimson rage is the Dream still pulsing hard beneath the skin of every radicalized "anti-American" It's having a vision of how life could be -- of how you were *promised* life *would* be if you put in your hours and took your lumps -- that *didn't* die
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No matter how many bland, polite men in business suits looked at you from across your desk and told you it was never yours to begin with Something they tried to bury but *would not die*
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That play about the desperate, possibly doomed struggle for a working-class Black family to get the damn house in the suburbs, A Raisin in the Sun, is named for a line from Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem", whose first line is "What happens to a dream deferred?"
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It's that whole galaxy-brain thing Foucauldian thing about how every seemingly subversive text has a reading where it upholds the status quo and yet also every conservative text invites a subversive reading
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The cheesy commercial propaganda they try to feed you to tell you everything is okay and no war needs to be fought refutes itself The contrast between the lie and the reality awakens a greater rage than before the lie was told
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The cheesy sitcoms that were intended (insofar as there was any coherent intention behind moneymaking media moguls pumping this shit out) to make good happy prolefed citizens awakened the Scarlet Witch
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You know what Langston Hughes said about what happens to dreams deferred, and all... "What is a revolution, if not a dream persevering?"
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