The American Dream

 To be white now has no meaning divorced from “the machinery of criminal power.”
--Ta-Nehisi Coates.

To dream the dream that the dreamers dreamt. Dream on. We have our own dreams. As soon as I could walk I knew how to dream.

~

Blind spots. People don't like to talk about them much. The way men can't understand women; the way so-called religious people are contemptuous of non-religious people; the way in which racism-which exists everywhere-has been institutionalized by white people over the last two centuries.

Think: South Africa, Australia, America and the idea and practice of segregation, camps, ghettos. In some sense Israel is a continuation of this rather nasty dimension of European history. Think: colonialism and how it was deeply intertwined with notions of racial superiority. And, of course, Nazism. 

Foucault's apt formulation: Nazism = State Racism. (The bio-political pushed to its extreme).

As one might well ask if men have really got over their misogyny I think one can also ask: have Europe and America got over their intense race consciousness? 

The Red Man, the Black Man, ..ain't really man enough.

~

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms.
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me….

There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly upon a cushion of ashes.
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt finger accusingly at the sky...

Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a baptism of gasoline.
And in a blaze of red I leapt to the sky as pain rose like water, boiling my limbs...

a stony skull staring in yellow surprise at the sun.