Dreams of Silver Spoons of ‘Normative Whiteness’ and Its Continuum of Racialized Collate
I had a dream last night.
More like a nightmare.
I was back at Dartmouth College, my undergrad alma mater that I attended with my twin brother in the mid 1990s.
Dartmouth College Green.
In the dream, my brother was walking across the college green and 3 white male students were yelling, ‘Nigger go home’ at him. It didn’t end well and they tried killing him with silver spoons and succeeded.
I had a vision of him in the ‘afterlife’ and his spirit was on the Dartmouth College green where he had been killed…but he didn’t realize he had been killed. He was in a fetal position, shaking in fear, holding a silver spoon in his hand; he was still wearing the clothes he had been killed in (a Dartmouth Green sweater and khaki pants). In the dream, I remember feeling incredibly distraught, sad, angry, and frightened because the students didn’t get into trouble for having killed him.
I am usually a lucid dreamer and know when I am dreaming. However, last night I did not know that this was a dream. I just remember being terrified and feeling hopeless that my brother had been murdered and that justice had not been served. Even more, nobody on campus seemed to care that he had been murdered by obvious racists. A weird phenomenon–an unknown virus– was spreading across campus that was affecting the memory of the witnesses that made them forget it had happened.
I don’t remember much else about the dream…only that I thought it was real.
This morning, I wondered, “Why ‘silver spoons’?”Could it be something around the theme of being born white and with a silver spoon in one’s mouth (i.e. dynastic white privilege which was the mainstream ruling demographic at Dartmouth College in the 1990s… and probably currently)?
But, why was my brother holding that silver spoon in the afterlife and in a fetal position?
Does anyone else out there have nightmares like these? That is, nightmares that reflect the reality that USA normalizes systemic racialized violence, anti-blackness, and white supremacy?
Because when I do have nightmares, it’s not the vampires, werewolves, or aliens that unsettle my sleep.
[Shit, it makes sense I’d have these nightmares, right? Sorry I’m late to the news about this, but Sandra Bland’s death is disturbing. She was driving to her new job and was pulled over for not using signal lights and found dead in a jail cell 2 days later.]
It seems to be the silver spoon of normative whiteness and a continuum of racialized collateral damage that has me waking up, gasping for air, and terrified at night.
Off to bed now and hoping my 30 minutes of Zazen and a strong cup of catnip and lemon balm tea will help me find a more pleasant’s night sleep tonight; a ‘Bandaid’ remedy I will put into my Recipes for Racial Tension Headaches book project that I’m currently working on for 2016.
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