I was in an orchard picking the reddest and ripest Honeycrisp apples I had ever seen. The acrid scent of fermenting apples in varying states of decomposition carpeted the ground and perfumed the air.
My mother and I would visit apple orchards during autumn when the leaves on the trees burst into a vivid symphony of color that arrested your eyes with delight when I was a child growing up in Minnesota. Apple orchards surrounded our town. It was a special treat for my mother and me to be able to enjoy this time together. Usually, we would be the only black people in the orchard on any brisk fall day. No one paid us any mind; we were just another voice in the chorus of happy families picking apples.
The crisp harvest air ushered in apple cider season, which would soon recede to hot cocoa season with marshmallows if your parents sprang for the more expensive Swiss Miss cocoa mix.
Remarkably, I found myself in a picturesque apple orchard. Boundless joy is the word that described how I felt to be a fully grown man picking apples in this charming grove. Shirks of joy from little kids plucking apples from the trees perforated the calm sky. Words of encouragement from parents and grandparents floated gently in the bracing air.
I lumbered around the orchard with a basket brimming with my bountiful haul. I wondered why I had so many apples. My wife does not eat apples, nor does my daughter. I hardly eat apples anymore since I was fed a steady diet of the ubiquitous misnomered Red Delicious apple as a child. Why did I have so many apples?
I surveyed the grove for any hint of my daughter or my wife. I hesitated to search for my mother due to her advanced age and lack of mobility. Yet, maybe one last visit to an apple orchard with her baby boy was one of her final requests before she transitioned to be with the Lord. I could not find anyone I knew in this labyrinth.
How did I get here?
Arizona might have apple orchards, but I do not know any. The air felt too invigorating for Arizona. The bite of the air was different than the cooler places of Arizona, like Flagstaff. I was in Minnesota, but how did I get here?
I became anxious as I worked back to the last thing I remembered, and then I realized…I was dreaming. I was asleep. For some unknown reason, I had decided to dream about picking apples in an idyllic orchard inhabited by enthusiastic moms, dads, and precocious children.
After this revelation, I became aware of my circumstances and woke up.
I woke from the Dream.
The Dream was created by the worst elements of our society. Powerful white men abducted the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King and replaced the fiery man with their own Manchurian Candidate: a docile, servile MLK who has been suppressed and repurposed for their nefarious goal: to lure the American population into the Dream.
The whitewashed version of Dr. Martin Luther King is all we are taught in our schools. White people have minimized him. They have twisted him into a caricature and have crafted a palatable version of him to be consumed by and weaponized against the American public. These white men have deleted the annuals of history. They have concealed the knowledge that the majority of Americans hated Dr. King.
He had a 75% disapproval rating when he died, which was unacceptable for the instrument they sought to forge into the blunt weapon they needed to wield against the American people constantly. They had to lionize this bastardized version of this towering giant in order to harvest one potent sentence from this man’s scathing speech, now known as the I Have A Dream Speech. A caustic speech that condemns America for all of its hypocrisies and intentional failures.
Their iteration of Dr. King has been created to bash us over the head with one stanza all Americans can quote: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
This passage is what the life’s work of one of the most prodigious thinkers and prolific writers has been reduced to: one aspirational sentence.
One sentence the most ardent bigots use to justify their evil ways. The worst figments of our society have armed themselves with the Dream in order to absolve themselves of their evil conduct.
We are taught this sentence has been achieved and is not a goal we should aspire to. The bigots have convinced a slumbering population we have achieved this color-blind utopia. Removed from our collective memory are the barbs he cast in his indictment of America.
Erased from our nation are lines like: Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.
Discarded from our teachers’ lesson plans was this rousing proclamation eloquently spoken during the same speech: There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
The I Have A Dream Speech has been nurtured and forgotten. Only this aspirational flourish remains intact.
All of the systemic oppression that has been manufactured by whiteness to support and maintain whiteness is not the perpetrators' fault but the fault of anyone who has failed to achieve a modicum of success. The Dream blames the individual but being woke allows people to ask how we got here.
That is why the Republicans hate woke culture because they know being woke encourages someone to interrogate who, what, where, when, and how our society works for the privileged few and not the many.
The burgeoning, overtly fascist political class on the right like to swing the word woke like a cudgel because if we are dreaming, then we cannot understand how our country arrived at this point in time. They are afraid of Americans asking proper questions because they know what the answers will reveal.
The Dream allows us to see black-on-black crime and use it to shame black folk but never causes us to investigate why black people fail to value other black lives. It obscures from us that white people commit over 90% of crimes against other white people. It banishes terms like white-on-white violence from our lexicon.
The Dream makes us impotent to observe black-on-black crime only started to happen after the Great Migration was completed and the age of Mass Incarceration began. The Dream does not beckon us to explore the official government policy of the United States of America was to erect ghettos to trap black folk in and deny us of the opportunities others take for granted.
If we are in the Dream, we acknowledge black poverty but affix superficial and racist theories of why it exists and persists. We lament the erosion of the nuclear black family. We admonish black folk for not getting the education or vocational training to secure well-paying careers or vocations. The Dream instructs Americans to ignore who created the barriers and structures that hinder the accumulation of black wealth. The Dream allows the lie to prosper that black people are just lazy instead of interrogating how a people who just became fully enfranchised a mere five years earlier have been saddled with communities built on toxic waste dumps, choked by noxious air, and provided with contaminated water.
When you are woke, you are compelled to determine how we arrived at this particular moment in time. It eschews specious explanations for the nuanced and complicated problems that afflict our society.
When you confine people in areas with little economic opportunity, crippling rates of poverty, and plagued with environmental hazards, violence is a natural by-product. Wokeness recognizes that poverty is violence. Through evil laws passed by wicked white men, such as redlining, Black Codes, Jim Crow, racially restrictive covenants, and you deprive black soldiers of accessing GI Benefits, exclude black farmers and domestics from accessing Social Security, and when you forbid a group of people from exercising their Constitutional right to vote and elect people to represent them in all forms of government…you have sowed fertile ground with the seeds of violence.
The sponsors of the Dream do not want us to learn the truth about the complex history we share. Our country committed genocide against the indigenous people. We know a sanitized version of the Trail of Tears, but they don’t teach us how our government paid roving bands of bloodthirsty mercenaries who slaughtered and raped indigenous people. We forced them into squalid parcels of land via treaties that we fail to respect and honor.
Wokeness asks why did we round up loyal Japanese-American citizens who were not returning to Japan to fight against America like some Germans and interned them in desolate camps in California and the Southwest. There was actually a German word for Germans to return to the fatherland or pledge their allegiance to Germany: Rueckwanderer. Despite all of the time we dedicate to World War II in our K-12 education system, this might be the first time you have encountered this word.
To be woke is to ask why weren't German-Americans interned but Japanese-Americans were. It requires you to search for the answer to why German-Amercians' treachery was ignored and subsequently not taught in our history classrooms or mentioned in our textbooks.
The Dream hobbles our ability to question why it is God’s will for women to be forced to carry a pregnancy to term and not have access to medical care if they wish to terminate the pregnancy, but male impotency is not God’s will. At last count, the American military spends over $84 million dollars a year on medicine for erectile dysfunction meds. If unwanted pregnancy is the will of the Lord, so is a flaccid penis.
The people who have the actual authority and tools to banish assault rifles and decelerate the frequency of mass murders in this country blithely offer thoughts and prayers instead of actions and legislation. Those who are woke recall when then-Governor Reagan banned assault rifles with the complete blessing and cooperation of the NRA because black people were open-carrying in California.
Those who are woke know it is possible for Republicans to ban assault weapons: both Reagan and Bush have done so.
I love America, but when our democracy places a higher value on assault rifles than the lives of children, our nation is broken.
Wokeness attempts to understand why things are the way they are and what can be done to change things. Being woke means recognizing two people of the same sex or gender getting married does not diminish the value of your marriage to someone of a different gender. Wokeism recognizes that less than 0.005% of the population over the age of 13 identifies as trans. Wokeness innoculates you from any of the insipid narratives and red-herring fallacies fascists vigorously try to hurl at the American people about the trans indoctrination plot. We see it as the iniquitous lie and distraction it is.
When I struggled to ascertain how I ended up in this serene apple orchard, I woke from my dream. A powerful segment of the world who decry the virus of wokeism like Elon Musk. This Scion doesn’t want us to realize his family fortune was garnered in an emerald mine located in the bowels of Apartheid South Africa. That he lulled the original founders of Tesla into a false sense of security before he completed his hostile takeover of their company, kicked them out, and expunged their involvement from common knowledge. It allowed him to perpetuate a myth that he is a self-made billionaire genius — a real-life Tony Stark.
The Dream does not challenge the pernicious narratives that form the American mythos of the rugged individual or the doctrine of manifest destiny. To be woke is a rejection of the myths America tells about itself.
I am no longer dreaming of apple orchards or black-on-black violence. I am now asking why I am picking apples I do not want and how corrosive American policies have created the ghettos that trapped my people.
I am woke and proud not to be dreaming any longer because this evil must be confronted and explained.