Respone to Sadhana Week 6

Sadhana,

In your response to Wilkerson you note the connection between "the act of leaving and the act of creating newness." You discuss the way that migration and creating a new beginning can become. in and of themselves, acts of resistance. I am similarly fascinated with Wilkerson's preoccupation with these themes. For me, the most provocative argument in the book is Wilkerson's framing of the Great Migration in relation to the "classic" narratives of European immigration and pursuit of the American Dream. As she puts it in the final paragraph of the epilogue, "By their actions, they did not dream the American Dream, the willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts." Wilkerson's narratives intentionally resonate with European immigrants' American Dream stories. Why?
I think that the story that most deals in these exchanges with some kind of amorphous, archetypal "American Dream story" is Robert Foster's. Wilkerson comments on the idea of California in Robert Foster's story. California in the American imagination has been a place of absolute freedom, an open, a-historical space where people can remake themselves and dreams can be fulfilled. But the Californian dream space was built on exclusion and violence. Participation in that dream without acknowledgement of what happened to bring it about is, in some sense, to be complicit in it. In that way the Californian dream is like the American dream. In the mind of many today, any buy in to the American Dream is to buy into a notion that has been constructed on the horrific sacrifice of so many. As Ta-Nehisi Coates as so persuasively argued, the American Dream is a violent lie. But Wilkerson forces us to confront people like Robert Foster, who, for achingly human reasons led a life that in various ways self-consciously followed the arc of the classic California/American Dream. Wilkerson's stories and her framing in some ways complicate a purely "Coatesian" view of the American Dream. Can dreaming the American Dream be an act of resistance through migration or should we call it something else? 

Best,   
Patrick


 

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