100 pages • 3 hours read
Jennifer LathamDreamland Burning
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
Intersections of Privilege
Dreamland Burning explores the concept of privilege and how different types of privilege can intersect and sometimes mitigate or exacerbate the effects of privilege or oppression. Rowan, for instance, is a mixed-race black teen from a wealthy family. She experiences financial privilege, but not racial or gender privilege. In some ways, Rowan’s financial privilege has shielded her from racialized violence and certain types of discrimination. Her family’s wealth also places her in circles with other financially privileged people, most of whom are white. This means that Rowan has grown up feeling like a racial outsider. She has a budding self-hatred that stems from feeling different. Rowan doesn’t understand racial privilege until Arvin’s funeral, when she suddenly realizes what it means to fit in.
Will has privilege because he is white-passing, but he isn’t quite white enough for Vernon and the Klan. However, his privilege as a white-passing man from a wealthy family gives Will the power to move through the riot without harm, even using his privilege to help others. The novel shows that different types of privilege are inherent in the social fabric of society and have been for centuries. However, a person with privilege has the responsibility to either forfeit that privilege when possible or use that privilege to help others. Dr. Woods, for example, could use her educational privilege to gain financial privilege, but she uses it to work at the clinic. Similarly, Isis uses her educational and financial privilege as a public defender. At the end of Rowan’s story, her privilege gives her a platform to speak out and bring Arvin’s murderer to justice.
Racialized Violence
Racialized violence in the United States began when the first European colonists arrived and waged a war over land with the native people, a violence that is illustrated by the relationship between Will’s parents. Kathryn Tillman is entitled to money because she is an Osage Indian; however, she is required to either obtain a “certificate of competency” or find a white guardian to manage her money. Allowing white people to legally seize and control Native American financial assets is violence, and as James discovers, the loss of financial freedom opened these women up to physical domestic violence. Racism and racialized violence may seem to improve with the progression of time, but most often they evolve and adapt within new legal systems.
Dreamland Burning comments on this evolution of racial violence over time. The horrors of the 1921 riots seem much worse than anything in the present day, suggesting a clear trajectory of progress. As Rowan discovers when Arvin is killed, the core of the issue is the legal system’s regular failure to punish perpetrators of racial violence. After the 1921 riots, none of the white people involved faced charges for the brutal violence they inflicted upon the citizens of Greenwood. A century later, Rowan witnesses a racist hate crime and yet her statement is ignored and Randall faces no consequences. In the end, Rowan and her parents are prepared to fight back, but there is no resolution as to whether they will be successful.
By paralleling the two narratives, Dreamland Burning shows how racism is a continuum that shifts and evolves but is ever-present throughout US history. James has a conversation with Rowan where he lists several unarmed black men who were killed by police or whose murders were excused as “self-defense.” Later in the novel, this reverberates when Will describes the blockade of informally-deputized white supremacists and Klansmen who are now looting and killing under their new authority as police officers. The novel suggests that the way to fight this violence is for the privileged to stand up, speak out, and protect the oppressed.
The Telling of History
One of the particularly notable aspects of the 1921 Tulsa riots is the fact that the event was deliberately erased from the records of history, despite the widespread destruction and the high death toll. When the slate was wiped clean, those who perpetrated brutal acts of violence were never held accountable. The lack of historical evidence creates an unreliable narrative. It opens the subject up for debate as to whether the event was a riot or a massacre. A knowledge of racial history in the United States would seem to make it clear that the African American people were the victims of white-led riots. As Rowan’s mother comments, the word “riot” is used in this context to describe a black uprising. Now, 100 years later, historians and anthropologists are still trying to reconstruct a narrative of that night.
The skeleton under the floor represents the blankness of uninterpreted archival evidence and the susceptibility of such evidence to historiographical bias. Geneva discovers that the bones belonged to a murdered black man. Without context, Vernon would be remembered as a casualty of the massacre rather than the malevolent perpetrator that he was. The stories of those involved, passed down through oral tradition, and Will’s personal recorded narrative give the evidence context. These stories are only deemed reliable because they are first presented to the reader as earnest accounts from characters who seem trustworthy. The narrative from Vernon Fish’s perspective would likely elicit a different response.
In the case of the Tulsa massacre, the question of reliability matters. The purposeful erasure of the event means that much of the scant remaining evidence is biased toward the white people who were both more powerful and more numerous than the black citizens of Greenwood. When Will talks about his memories of Greenwood at the end of the last chapter, he remembers the district as something real and tangible. The community built there was the destroyed evidence of black progress. Dreamland Burning imagines a fiction to stand in for lost narratives so we can still learn from this violent history.
