Our third meditation in our New American Dream series moves from aspiration to refusal—from the shimmer of the green light to the grounded work of redesign. Black women’s sovereign strategies are at the center, where stillness becomes protest and silence holds generational power.
In The Great Gatsby (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald introduced Jay Gatsby: a man who built a life of spectacle in pursuit of love, legacy, and acceptance. A century later, Gatsby still stares across the water—chasing a dream never meant to hold him.
But what if the American Dream was never about Gatsby?
What if the true story belongs to those who saw through the illusion—and quietly chose not to chase it?
What if the narrative worth following isn’t Gatsby’s desperate reach, but the quiet refusal of those who stepped beyond the frame and began designing in the dark?
In April 2025, journalist Errin Haines asked, “Where are the 92 percent?” Her question—posed in the aftermath of the 2024 elections—disrupted a narrative too quick to label Black women as absent.
But Haines, through the voices of Janai Nelson, Fatima Goss Graves, Melanie Campbell, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, revealed the deeper pattern: Black women are not missing. They are moving. Not away from democracy—but beyond its performative scaffolding.
They’ve exited the frame—not from fatigue, but from foresight.
An exit; not an escape. It is a reorientation.
Where Gatsby clung to spectacle, hoping performance would earn him belonging, Black women are stepping out of the performance economy entirely. They are no longer just chasing access, which is important. They are building alternatives—networks, policies, pedagogies—that don’t require the green light’s permission.
What the media misreads as disengagement is actually design. Quiet. Coordinated. Liberatory. The shift is not from engagement to apathy—it’s from spectacle to sovereignty.
Black women are not waiting at the water’s edge for the gate to open—they are building new ground where no gate is needed.
Across five levels, this movement unfolds as an embodied refusal to be used, performed, or extracted:
- Micro-Resistance: Rest and boundaries as sacred defiance.
- Meso-Resistance: Mutual aid and education over algorithms and applause.
- Macro-Resistance: Policy and litigation as instruments of collective will.
- Transcendent Resistance: Joy as encryption. Refusal as a ritual. Silence as survival.
- Sovereign Resistance: Narrative control, dual power. A dream not revised—but rewritten.
Gatsby never saw the trap. But Black women have—and stepped off the stage before the curtain dropped.
They never left the dream. Economic opportunity and empowerment remain important goals. They left the illusion. They are not the footnotes to someone else’s narrative. They are the footbridge—and the future.
Where have you been performing for a system that would never let you in?
What would it look like to stop seeking access—and start building alignment?
What dream can you let dissolve to begin designing your own?
Readings
“Where Are the 92 Percent?” – Errin Haines
https://19thnews.org/2025/04/black-women-resistance-strategy
The Mirage of Wealth: What Gatsby at 100 Still Teaches Us About America (April 17, 2025)
Recap: The Dream at 100: Gatsby, Exclusion, and the Future We Design (April 10, 2025)