Politics & Power Quote by Joyce Carol Oates

Meritocracy is the bedtime story America tells itself, and Joyce Carol Oates knows exactly how seductive that story is. “Where we come from” is the classic American alibi: it explains away limitation as fate, inheritance, zip code. Oates flips it with a forward-leaning ethic: identity isn’t a birthright, it’s a project. The line is built like a mantra for mobility, the kind you can stitch onto a graduation banner, but it’s also quietly barbed. “No longer signifies” reads less like a celebration than a provocation, daring the listener to abandon nostalgia and grievance alike.

The subtext is distinctly Oates: the promise of self-invention comes with a price. If origins “no longer” matter, then the burden of meaning shifts onto choice, ambition, and performance. You’re liberated from the determinism of pedigree; you’re also exposed to the cruelty of judgment. When worth is measured by “where we go” and “what we do,” failure becomes personal, not structural. That’s the American bargain: possibility paired with relentless accountability.

Contextually, Oates has spent a career anatomizing class, violence, and aspiration in American life. Her fiction is crowded with people trying to outrun the scripts handed to them by family and circumstance, only to discover that the future is not a clean break from the past. The sentence works because it flatters the national myth while hinting at its dark twin: a culture that preaches reinvention can be brutally uninterested in what made reinvention necessary.