Parenting & Family Quote by Lorraine Hansberry

God is cast here less as a comfort than as an alibi for a rigged world. Hansberry’s line lands because it mimics the cadence of plain talk while smuggling in an indictment: if Black people are “given” only dreams, then the country has arranged reality to be withheld. The phrasing “don’t see fit” drips with bitter politeness, the kind you adopt when you’re forced to speak about injustice in a language that won’t get you dismissed as “too angry.” It’s theology as social critique: not a sermon, but a diagnosis of how oppression gets normalized as fate.

The turn on “but” is the knife. Children arrive as both consolation and complication. They’re proof of life continuing under scarcity, and they’re the reason scarcity can’t be tolerated. Hansberry recognizes a cruel arithmetic: dreams can survive as private fantasies, but children make them public obligations. Once a child exists, “making it” stops being self-improvement and becomes survival, legacy, protection. That’s why the dreams “seem worthwhile” not because parenthood magically erases injustice, but because it supplies stakes that the system can’t wave away.

Context matters: Hansberry, writing in the mid-century crucible that produced A Raisin in the Sun, is dramatizing the gap between American promise and Black access to it. The line doesn’t romanticize suffering; it exposes how hope gets conscripted as a coping mechanism. The subtext is blunt: if God’s gifts are only dreams, then the real theft is happening on earth, by people, enforced by policy, habit, and law.