How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community

by Mia Birdsong

The American Dream’s focus on getting ahead is a race to win so you don’t lose. It plays into our well-developed fear instincts, creating a real and imagined scarcity of resources, time, and money. This fear-based sense of scarcity pits us against one another. It also leaves us with a poorly developed sense of “enough,” both of the material and of love and care.

I want to be clear here that when you benefit from the work others have done, especially when you—by nature of your identity or access to resources—hold more power and privilege than they do, you have a responsibility to show up for them. That’s the rule. It’s not one I can enforce, but I can tell you about it and make clear that I think you’re an asshole if you reject the idea of following it.

The American Dream is a clusterfuck of intersecting oppressions that function systemically and infect us individually. Capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy (all of which create offshoots like ableism, transphobia, ageism, and others) are embedded in the systems and institutions we all interact with—everything from housing to health care to media to jobs to education.1 But they are also embedded in each of us.

The American Dream is white supremacy culture bound up with capitalism and patriarchy. In addition to espousing a belief that white people are superior to people of color, white supremacy is also a culture of rigidity, efficiency, more-is-better, ignorance-is-bliss, scarcity hoarding, binaries, and toxic individualism.

“Real security is not locking up more and more people,” scholar and activist Ruthie Wilson Gilmore told us. “Real security is knowing that you will have shelter, that you will have food, that you will have beauty in your life. That you have a future, that your family has a future.”