Whiteness is thinking that to Black people, the American Dream is starting life as a hostage, being eventually relased and having one of the few jobs open to you be one where you volunteer to be a caricature of your people so white folks can sell sugar water to other white folks. https://twitter.com/brooklynmutt/status/1275582279289581571

The American Dream is just a hazing ritual. Like in a frat.

The point of hazing is to subject new members to torture and humiliation in order to create artificial trauma bonds.

These trauma bonds ensure loyalty to the group in question.

If one plays the game properly and is the right kind of person, once they make it through the hazing ritual, they have an opportunity to rise in status in that group and become a person who inflicts that torture and humiliation on the next batch of people.

The American Dream

When Americans discuss their cultural mythology, they always talk of people pulling themselves up from the bottom.

What they don't discuss is why anyone actually needs to start there.

Because no one does.

But no hazing, no trauma bonding, no loyalty.

The American Dream oppresses poor white people but gives them just enough to feel like they got through hazing.

Then it tells them that it's their job to haze Black people.

But to rarely let them pass.

The American Dream is a system of hardship and struggle for the sake of hardship and struggle.

The American Dream insists that we accept the conditions that make struggle necessary in order to prove our worth by escaping it.

The American Dream was crafted by Jigsaw.

When you ask Americans why we can't be be better to people, the answer is generally in the form of:

"They didn't suffer for what they got like I did so they don't deserve what I have"

But nobody HAD to suffer. Including them.

But they feel they did. So everyone else must.

The other key effect of hazing is that it defines an in-group.

It's people who made it through hazing vs everyone who didn't.

That's literally the key component to membership.

So the suffering itself becomes a badge of honor.

And they will defend those who inflicted it.

The result of the hazing is that it flips accountability on its head.

Now the person upon whom the suffering was inflicted is in the wrong for exposing, naming or pushing back against the perpetuation of that suffering.

To do so is disloyalty.