Juneteenth and the Broken Promise of The American Dream

As we get ready to commemorate Juneteenth, the day 160 years ago that enslaved Africans in Galveston, Texas got the news that they were free, a whole two years after the rest of the nation, I’m grappling with how others are seeing their dignity being stripped by the same colonial forces our ancestors faced only a few generations ago.

It’s been a heavy month in the nation and particularly in L.A. and Inglewood. ICE has been ordained by the president to terrorize undocumented immigrants, going so far as to profile Latino and Black presenting people, without a warrant and without actually verifying their citizenship status. Even if they aren’t a citizen, any undocumented affairs requires due process and they have a right to have a judge hear their case before a decision is made about renewing a visa, validating a green card or requiring a return to their homeland.

The United States still seems allergic to evolving its ethos as we approach its 250th anniversary. To be fair, 250 years is a baby in terms of being a nation. It doesn’t hold a candle to the eons old countries of Greece, Italy, Great Britain or China. Still, America believes it is what it says it is. A delusion of grandeur but also selectively true.

America is both the place where you can come and carve your own path and a discriminatory dealer of cards.  There is no legal caste system. Your father may have been a dentist and your mother a seamstress and you may be something else entirely like an artist or teacher. However,The American Dream as we know it today has been distorted from its original intent, exclaims Sarah Churchwell, a professor of American Literature and the public understanding of the humanities at the University of London. Churchwell, a Chicago Native, said in an interview with the Smithsonian Magazine that the American Dream concept pre-1950 was about the dream of a liberal democracy. One in which the nation ran completely different from the Monarchy of its past. But the American Dream devolved into a different character.

“The original “American Dream” was not a dream of individual wealth; it was a dream of equality, justice and democracy for the nation. The phrase was repurposed by each generation, until the Cold War, when it became an argument for a consumer capitalist version of democracy. In the Gilded Age when the robber barons are consolidating all this power, you [would] see people saying that a millionaire was a fundamentally un-American concept. It was seen as anti-democratic because it was seen as inherently unequal. [The phrase] was redefined in the 1950s. Today, it doesn’t occur to anybody that it could mean anything else,” Churchwell explains.

Today, The American Dream is the promise that anyone can go from rags to riches if they just work hard and stay persistent. That promise is just as true as it is false. America is the place where an intelligent Black kid from Hawaii and Chicago got to become our nation’s first African- American president. America is also the same place where nearly 9 million adults today have to work at least two jobs in order to have any kind of to maintain a decent livelihood and those numbers are only what’s been reported via survey to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Who knows what the true number is once you include people who didn;y indulge in that survey. 

The great American Dream also never took into account all of its citizens. After slavery was outlawed, the promise that enslaved Africans were to receive 40 acres of land and a mule for restitution and to give them a shot at upward mobility and wealth creation never happened. The American Dream says “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” which is already problematic because a.) not everyone comes to this country with “boots,” b.) slavery! And c.) if you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps to earn your way into financial security, an already impossible feat considering gravity will knock you back down, then who actually is the American dream for?

Earlier this month, I took a trip to New Orleans and 45 minutes outside of the city, I visited The Whitney Plantation. An actual former plantation turned museum that tells the true atrocities of slavery in the American South. I had the delight of discovering that African bodies were purchased for labor for the price of a bottle of rum! I learned that the Legislative Council of the time rewarded slave owners $300 for each enslaved revolutionary that dared to escape their captor and that Haitian revolutionaries were decapitated with their heads placed on pikes along the levee in front of the plantation as an omen to those who dared try to get free. They used Black people as taxidermy prizes to posture their colonial power. And then when we were freed, the new legal rights promised to them, the right to own property, marry and live a dignified life were often still denied to them by Southerners who refused to get over the loss of their human and financial capital. And somehow the stereotype of Black people being lazy was birthed by the same folks who themselves wouldn’t strap up and labor for their piece of the American pie – freedom, justice and liberty for all. 

As we sit with both the strides Black people have made to achieve success with every possible barrier in their way and the simultaneous reality that our communities are the least likely to achieve financial wealth with the median wealth gap between Black and White households sitting at a total difference of $240,120 (Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances), the American Dream has yet to ever be actualized for most of us.

Perhaps the American Dream can be reframed to basic levels of safety and being able to raise Black families in peace and meager means but even that dream will require our white neighbors to end the police state, get to know us instead of fear us and learn to stop calling  the “po’ po’” for every loud party or simply witnessing more than two Black people standing on the sidewalk together. 

One of America’s greatest Black success stories laments through song:

This house was built with blood and bone, 

and it crumbled, yes, it crumbled

The statues they made were beautiful,

But they were lies of stone, 

they were lies of stone.

Mercy on me, Mercy

Have mercy on me

I can see you hurtin’ 

see you hurtin’ badly

Say a prayer for what has been

“A pretty house that we never settled in.

You change your name but,

not the ways you play pretend

We’ll be the ones that purify our father’s sins

“American Requiem!

Those old ideas are buried here.

Amen.”

–Beyonce, “Amen/American Requiem”, Cowboy Carter.