I still believe in the American Dream. But I know why so many others don’t.
Fear? It was an emotion reserved for mall theater screenings of “Jaws” or “The Shining.”
But panic seized my body halfway through my fourth decade, as a doctor whispered to my newborn son: “Breathe, boy. Breathe.” Jack soon complied and was quickly whisked away to the neonatal intensive-care unit. His two-pound body was hurriedly wrapped in cellophane, his frail frame covered with a gaggle of wires. Fifteen minutes later, still dazed, I stared down at my child inside a glass bubble. A doctor walked up and looked at his tiny patient.
“You want to know when you can stop worrying about him?” he asked. “Maybe when he walks down the aisle with a bride at his side . . . maybe.” He left without offering a smile.
Other babies in that NICU would die over the next month, but Jack improved steadily until we could finally bring him home. But the aura of invincibility that I had soaked in since childhood was gone; any remaining illusions would be dashed over the next decade with the death of my parents, a second divorce, the loss of friends to cancer and the fears faced by any father of four. I now spend my days praying for those children, nervously crossing myself when I speak of good things and knocking on wood whenever the surface is within reach.
But I know I am blessed to have had the luxury of living fearlessly though the first four decades of my life. Unlike my Post colleague Eugene Robinson, I never had to warn my teenage boys how to behave when stopped by a police officer. And unlike the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, I did not know the fear that arises from being born of “a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing.” As Coates told his son, “Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.”
The streets of West Baltimore do not allow a child to walk through life carrying a sense of invincibility. Instead, parents harbor an unremitting dread when their child does something as mundane as walking to school.
Fathers across the South Side of Chicago cannot assure their children that a faith in God, a love of country and a life filled with hard work will lead them to The Dream. For millions of Americans, that dream appears to be little more than a white man’s conjuring, designed to conceal a country’s sins and hold its citizens harmless for crimes committed against black humanity over the past 400 years.
President Trump understands better than most politicians the allure of cheap racial absolution. That is why he spent this week defending the Confederate flag and attacking a reporter who asked about the continued killing of black Americans. Just as he preached moral equivalence after Charlottesville, Trump suggested that we ignore the uncomfortable fact that a disproportionate number of black people are killed every year by law enforcement officers.
This retrograde approach to campaigning is, of course, nothing new. The president has spent weeks picking away at the scab of racial animus, apparently convinced that white resentment will distract voters from his disastrous response to a pandemic that has killed more than 130,000 Americans and wrecked the U.S. economy. Every recent poll shows that the president’s instincts on this are not just immoral; they are dead wrong.
This is not to say that our country is entering a great awakening. The defeat of Trump this fall will no more be the “end of history” than was the election of Barack Obama. But I still believe in The Dream. Why shouldn’t I, given my life’s journey? And why shouldn’t millions of Americans similarly blessed by the riches and opportunities of this great land?
This faith must be freighted by the knowledge that millions of other Americans cannot safely carry with them such aspirations; nor can they avert their eyes from the bitter reality that in 2020, a disproportionate number of black Americans are still killed by pandemics and police.
As Coates wrote in “Between the World and Me,” Americans should take their exceptionalism seriously and subject the country to an exceptional moral standard. The pursuit of that higher purpose was reignited after the killing of George Floyd. The journey can only end when every citizen is raised free of fear and filled with the same dream that so many of us take for granted.
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