Dreams I’ll Send You | Essay 6

A birthday month practice

“Belonging: Who Gets to Be An American? ”Taken in 2022 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” exhibit.

For the month of February 2025, I’ve decided to publish a micro essay once a day. I described the why and what here.

Belonging. I keep thinking about that word, and who now gets to define what it means in the cultural and political realms.

Over the past few years, commentators and academics have been talking about a “crisis of belonging” particularly in the US, in which people, disillusioned by civic life and with their attention pulled and fractured by their phones, feel lonely and isolated. I don’t doubt it. But this crisis of belonging often is attributed to certain white men, who it’s reported don’t know their place in the world any longer since people who aren’t white men have stepped up to power, influence, and expertise.

At a time when words like “inclusion,” “status,” and “women” are being scrubbed from national vocabularies, what about these people who stepped up, but who now confront a landscape that is rapidly turning hostile? Where is our crisis of belonging?

When the international order of treaties and tariffs is somersaulting, leading to predictions of fragmentation and decoupling, which certainties do we hold onto?

And when the world seems to be folding in on itself to greater national isolation, with members of the…