Standing at the intersection where history, pressure, and possibility collide. Most are pushed toward struggle, shaped by systems not built for us. A few break toward light, often at the cost of leaving something behind. This is the tension. This is the dissonance. This is the question we are still answering together.
I remember watching State of Black America around 2007 or 2008 and hearing the term cognitive dissonance in relation to Black life for the first time. It stuck with me. It gave me a new lens through which to view what I was witnessing.
Growing up with a mother who made poverty look like privilege, I didn’t understand what station or pedigree was until college. Attending an HBCU in Mississippi taught me so much about us. In Champaign, IL, where I’m from, Black people make up 15%-20% of the population, whereas in Jackson, Black people make up 90%, in the Blackest state, in the Blackest congressional district in the country. With this reality, the wealth gaps were present and disparaged amongst our modest student body. However, our sense of community and cultural connections placed us together.
Together, we witnessed the slow erosion, then the rapid erosion, of what was sold to us as the American Dream. We learned that the “dream” for us was reserved for a few, hand-selected ones, or for those willing to sacrifice community and culture to attain it. And then, as the façade vanished, we were left with a harsher truth: The American Dream was never our dream.
Now, I know some Black folks would say they believe in the American Dream. I’m not one of them. But I also recognize something similar to what non-union employees experience in a union shop. Even if you didn’t believe in it, you still benefited from its protections. In that same way, even without believing in the American Dream, I never took “freedom” for granted, nor do I forsake the tireless work of our ancestors, who toiled and fought so I could walk down the street with my head held high and look anyone in their eyes.
Today, the line between the haves and the have-nots feels like an intersection our community is collectively stuck at, as if we’re sitting in a kind of purgatory. The light cycles from red to yellow to green, over and over again, but we’re not really moving. The tension of that space is palpable. We see it spitting people out in one direction or the other, toward acceptance, generational wealth, and prosperity, or toward generational disparity, inequality, and poverty.
The image I get is of a horn, narrow at one end and wide at the other. Most of us are being pushed out of the wide end. And those who make it through the narrow opening often have to strip away everything that represents their Blackness. In some cases, even their very identity.
This might sound like passing, but it’s deeper than that. Yes, colorism and even skin bleaching still exist globally, but what I’m talking about is a broader phenomenon: the pressure to assimilate so thoroughly that one’s Blackness is minimized, obscured, or strategically distanced. That shedding doesn’t always look physical. It often looks cultural, linguistic, and relational.
And it’s at this intersection where the real violence occurs in our community. It’s where the painful process of shedding Blackness takes place. It’s where we begin to tear each other apart, sometimes in ways that feel almost sacrificial, in an attempt to appease whiteness. We become skilled at contorting ourselves into Americanisms that don’t fit us, in unnatural ways, almost like the no-longer-practiced Chinese cultural practice of foot binding.
It’s also in this space that we lose sight of one another.
As we are pushed in one direction or another, sometimes with our families, sometimes alone, we move further away from collective grounding. Where we once stood together under a shared condition, and I use “together” loosely, we’ve now been handed the myth of pulling ourselves up by our “bootstraps” (with no boots), and a doctrine of rugged individualism.
In our ongoing trail of tears, we are given a choice. If you want a decent life, even a modest one in their America, you can’t bring them niggas with you.
And yet, today, we need each other just as desperately as we needed to hear a familiar voice in our native tongues in the hulls of slave ships crossing the Atlantic.
At the same time, the limited progress we’ve made toward equality is being rolled back, as if those hard-fought gains were written into law in pencil. Across multiple fronts, voting rights, economic mobility, education, and labor protections, we see erosion happening in real time.
And as we stand in this intersection, gathered in mass, there is no clear consensus on a collective path forward.
The American ego, individualistic, extractive, self-preserving, has taken root in our spaces. And like its origin, it moves through us, seeking to divide, to consume, to elevate the few at the expense of the many. It co-opts light wherever it finds it, while casting shadows over the rest.
To me, this is cognitive dissonance.
It is the tension between who we know we are collectively, and what we are pressured to become individually. It is the contradiction of needing each other to survive, while being conditioned to separate in order to “make it.” It is the discomfort of holding truth in one hand and assimilation in the other.
And it is within that dissonance that divide-and-conquer continues to thrive.
Even as we grapple with the reality that the majority of the world’s population is non-white, roughly 85 percent globally, with people of African descent spanning continents, systems of power continue to operate as if our collective existence is something to be contained, managed, or diminished.
That contradiction, between numerical reality and lived power, is not accidental.
It is maintained.
And until we reconcile the dissonance within ourselves, between survival and solidarity, between individual success and collective liberation, we will remain in this intersection, cycling through the lights waiting for a movement that requires us to move together.
About the Author
Tyson is a seasoned economic justice organizer, strategist, and co-founder of Black With No Chaser. His work spans across grassroots organizing, labor, and digital strategy. He is passionate about building power, advancing the rights of Black people globally, and closing the digital divide in our communities. Originally from Champaign, Illinois, with deep roots in Mississippi, Tyson brings a lived and practiced perspective to the intersections of race, economics, and culture.
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