From Prison To Princeton.
What My Family's Story Says About the American Dream.
(Source: Getty Images.)
My father was only eleven years old when he first found himself sitting in a prison cell. He was coming of age in the haunting landscape of the Mississippi countryside — the second of ten children, constantly menaced by hunger, and a lack of material necessities.
As a child, my father learned early that survival demanded hard choices. Stealing became his way to fill the void poverty left behind, a desperate act in a world that gave him little mercy. His youth was marked by a revolving door of jail visits —freedom always brief, and confinement never far away.
And so, in his twenties, he found himself back in court. The judge told my father that he was going to give my father as much prison time as he legally and justifiably could.
And so it was. My father was not much older than I am now when he found himself, for the last time, imprisoned — enclosed in a 6 by 8 foot cell he would have to call his home for the next ten years.
Just before my 22nd birthday last April, as I was finishing my senior year at Amherst College, I opened an acceptance letter for a master’s program at Princeton Seminary. Along with the offer came the news that I had been awarded a scholarship covering my tuition and living expenses for the entirety of my graduate studies at Princeton. A door had swung open, promising opportunities that could shape the course of my life as both a scholar and an activist.
I called my father — now one of my greatest inspirations; a strong, loving, provider — later that night, and he was ecstatic. “You’re one of the first people in our whole family to go away to college,” he said, “let alone an Ivy League school.” It was not long before the good news made its way around. A friend and classmate of mine began referring to me, lovingly, as “Princeton,” and I was largely awash in compliments from peers and authority figures about the exceptional nature of my trajectory — especially, more than a few people made it a point to note, given the struggles of my background.
I had achieved the American Dream, or so I thought. But it was not long before I began to chafe at this peculiar kind of recognition — recognizing, perhaps, that there was something much more sinister underlying it. I found myself cast in a supporting role in this great American Drama — and I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember auditioning for it.
The feeling struck me not unlike that of a hapless bystander who realizes — perhaps too late — that they’ve unwittingly been made an accomplice to a great crime. I fell, tumbling out of the warm haze of triumph, and into the cold clarity of an investigative suspicion. Dreams, as the psychoanalysts remind us, are vivid and alluring expressions of subtler drives and desires — and I needed to know, precisely, what the American Dream said about myself and my countrymen.
Was it the case, as it was so often hinted, that my achievements were proof of my country’s benevolence? Did they, in effect, make up for the profound harm my country inflicted on its own native sons? Its daughters? Its children? I thought not. My story, surely, would never have been possible anywhere else on the globe — but, then again, neither was my father’s.
The American Dream, I began to realize, felt less like a promise and more like a story — one that only made sense if you didn’t read it too closely. Still, I kept wondering: why do so many of us hold onto it so tightly? Why does this dream, even in an age of staggering inequality, still manage to seduce us?
The answer begins with this: you can only keep fooling someone who’s truly eager to be fooled — and far too many of my countrymen seem desperate to believe that everything is basically alright here. They do not dare to discover on any real level that thousands of black & brown men just like my father continue to perish in our nation’s prison cells. They do not dare ask why these men are driven to criminality — if, indeed, they ever committed any crimes to begin with. For to know is to be involved, and to be involved is to be responsible.
The trouble with a lie, however, is that it can not be crafted so masterfully as to make the liar believe they are not lying to themselves. They will always know the truth — and so they remain menaced by an unnameable guilt, a conscience wracked by the knowledge of the unspeakable suffering that underwrites their comfort and privilege. The fabled ‘American Dream’ endures because it quiets this guilt — a byproduct of my countrymen’s frantic effort to believe, in spite of all they know, that they are still good people; that this country is still benevolent; and that, if one only works hard enough, they can claw their way out of whatever ghetto or grave they were unlucky enough to be born into.
And so they raise up people like me — the black man who, in a single generation, rose from prison to Princeton — as proof of concept. But there’s a strange irony in celebrating exceptional cases without striving to eliminate the conditions that made them so rare. Upward mobility, grateful as I am for it, is in no way penance for centuries of exploitation and plunder. It is not justice — and it will never replace the work of genuine structural change.
My journey — from Amherst to Princeton Seminary, from the pain of my father’s past to the possibility of a different future — should not be seen as a testament to the generosity of the American dream, but a challenge to it. It demands that we stop celebrating rare exceptions as proof of justice and start confronting the deep-rooted inequities that make those exceptions so exceptional. True progress will come not from individual success stories alone, but from dismantling the systems that limit so many before they even begin. Only then can the dream be made concrete — a reality shared by all, not just the fortunate few.
Excellent!!!
Well done Zane