Rewriting Gatsby: What the Dream at 100 Reveals About Us

“Gatsby believed in the green light…” But one hundred years later, we must ask: What was that light really made of? And who was ever meant to reach it?

With this post, I conclude my April 2025 Inquiry Circle, where we explored The New American Dream through a radical rereading of The Great Gatsby.

Over one Zoom session and five published blogs, we didn’t just analyze a book—we unmasked a system. We asked not simply what Gatsby symbolizes, but what his silence, struggle, and survival teach us about race, exclusion, and American mythology.

SEE: The Mirage Behind the Myth

In my blogs, I showed how The Great Gatsby—long hailed as a critique of wealth—is also a tale of strategic performance and systemic betrayal. Gatsby didn’t fail because he dreamed too big. He failed because the game was rigged, the gate was guarded, and the green light was never his to touch.

Our reading is a reckoning of our lived experience under Private Equity State Capitalism (PESC).

FEEL: The Ache of Disinheritance

Each blog surfaced a deep emotional truth: the American Dream has always demanded performance from some and inheritance for others. Gatsby’s longing is familiar to those asked to earn what others are handed. In this reading, Blackness is not absent—it’s coded, camouflaged, and costumed for survival.

INVESTIGATE: Who Defines the Dream?

Throughout our Inquiry Circle, we interrogated the dream itself. Whose dreams are dignified? Whose are denied? In Recap: The Dream at 100, I pointed to the systems—economic, narrative, spatial—that elevate illusion and erase self-determination. While Gatsby chased entrance, Black Americans built entire ecosystems of meaning outside the gates—and were punished for it.

The dream doesn’t just exclude. It extracts.

MOVE: From Myth to Matrix

The takeaway is not resignation—it’s reclamation.

Meditativism reminds us to pause, see clearly, and act from stillness. AfricanAmericanism calls us to testify, unshackle, walk in power, and live beyond limits. Together, these frameworks reject inclusion as aspiration and reframe liberation as design.

We no longer chase the light.

We become the architects of radiance.

Closing Reflection

This concludes our April series, but it opens a much deeper portal. We now know: the old dream was a mirage. But our dreams—rooted in rhythm, resistance, and realignment—are blueprint and becoming.

Gatsby reached for a light that was never meant for him.

We now rise as light.