Bring Me the American Dream

We are all the sum of our past leading up to today’s present. The sum of our ancestors and culture, and the incursions of other ancestors and cultures into ours. There is a weight we carry as a result, a long accretion which creates what it feels like to be us, in our skin, in our culture, in the greater world. This work is about that weight of the past upon us, a past that, as William Faulkner put it, “is never dead, it’s not even past.”

The weight of the white man, his sense of cultural obligation and anxiety in a changing world. His confusion as the scars of the past open into the wounds of today. The weight of the black mothers, who nurture and endure across generations, yet can seemingly never escape being casualties.

We are all one. Everyone has the same blood flowing through their veins. Why don’t we realize this until that blood has been spilled upon the earth. What will it take for us to escape our ancestors and make a new society.