A widely believed concept known as the “American dream” has led a number of U.S. citizens to believe that everyone has an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination and initiative.
However, considering the fact that America was built on systemic racism and White supremacist capitalism, is it possible that the so-called American dream is more authentic to certain groups than it is to others?
More specifically, the American dream is an ideal based upon the notion – or assumed principle – that equality exists among the racial and ethnic groups in America, which could not be farther from the historical truth.
Some may suppose that because slavery was abolished more than 150 years ago the so-called American Dream is now a reality for Black America. Or, perhaps, one may presume that since there a few wealthy Blacks, a few brothers and sisters with PhDs, or a fractional amount of the Black community with property and economic infrastructure, that we live in a post-racial era. This conjecture, too, could not be farther from the truth – evidenced by frighteningly high poverty and unemployment rates, mass incarceration, the stark racial wealth gap, senseless Black murders at the hands of White terrorists, and a wide range of other ignominious issues that adversely affect Black Americans.
Historically, the U.S. government has systematically locked Black men in particular out of attaining the American Dream – from the Black Codes, to Jim Crow laws, to modern policies designed to obstruct the less fortunate Black man from reaching any viable opportunity of having something to live for.
In addition, newly freed slaves were granted a promise that was never fulfilled while every other marginalized or immigrant group was given some form of economic leverage to yield sustainable amounts of wealth.
Martin Luther King Jr. skillfully particularized the economic realities of systematic racism and structural causes of inequality for Black Americans in a 1967 interview with NBC.
“What is it about the Negro? Every other group that came as an immigrant somehow, not easily, but somehow got around it. Is it just the fact that Negroes are Black?” asked the NBC reporter to open the discussion on race, reparations and the American dream.
“White America must see that no other ethnic group has been a slave on American soil. That is one thing that other immigrant groups haven’t had to face,” responded King with grace and poise.
“The other thing is that the ‘color’ became a stigma. American society made the Negroes’ color a stigma. America freed the slaves in 1863 through the Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln but gave the slaves no land or nothing in reality [as a matter of fact] to get started on. At the same time, America was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant there was a willingness to give the White peasants from Europe an economic base.
“And yet [America] refused to give its Black peasants from Africa who came here involuntarily, in chains, and had worked free for 244 years any kind of economic base. And so emancipation for the Negro was really freedom to hunger. It was freedom to the winds and rains of heaven. It was freedom without food to eat or land to cultivate and therefore it was freedom and famine at the same time.”
Detractors of King’s philosophy on the American dream theory are typically those who lack social awareness, color-blind and racially ignorant, misinformed, or are devoid of understanding in regards to American history.
“And when White Americans tell the Negro to lift himself by his own bootstraps, they don’t look over the legacy of slavery and segregation,” King said, nullifying any misconceptions concerning Black Americans having equal opportunities to prosper as others.
“I believe we ought to do all we can and seek to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps but it’s a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by himself by his own bootstraps. And many Negroes, by the thousands and millions, have been left bootless as a result of all of these years of oppression and as a result of a society that deliberately made his color a stigma and something worthless and degrading.”
Interestingly, Malcom X expressed comparable views in a speech deemed, “The American Nightmare,” wherein he highlighted the glaring hypocrisy of America’s political leaders.
“When I speak I don’t speak as a Democrat or a Republican – I speak as a victim of America’s so-called democracy,” X said.
“You and I have never seen democracy, all we’ve seen is hypocrisy. When we open our eyes today and we look around America — we see America not through the eyes of someone who as enjoyed the fruits of Americanism. We see America through the eyes of someone who has been the victim of Americanism. We don’t see any American dream. We’ve experienced only the American nightmare.
“We haven’t benefited from America’s democracy. We’ve only suffered from America’s hypocrisy.”
According to recent research of Emma Roller, a political reporter for Splinter News, “the median white family has somewhere between 10 and 16 times the net worth of the median black household,” and based on a scholarly discussion that she had with University of Georgia researcher and law professor Mehrsa Baradaran, Roller noted that “the U.S. government, in conjunction with the financial sector, has exacerbated economic inequality,” most visibly to the detriment of Black people.
Simply put, wealth has been given to Whites, Hispanics, Asians, and an array of other immigrant groups, while it has been steadily and thoroughly withheld from Black Americans – who, according to conventional moral standards – deserve the bulk of the wealth that the hegemony has to offer.
Similar sentiments are articulated in an opinion article that appeared in The Week magazine entitled “Ta-Nehisi Coates is right: The American Dream is a lie,” by Ryan Cooper.
Cooper opined in his well-framed piece that the American Dream is indeed a lie for the general populace of Black Americans – the Black man in particular – in concurrence with Coates, a well-noted author, journalist and educator and a well-regarded national correspondent for The Atlantic.
Cooper, a national correspondent for The Week, brilliantly used Coates’ position in his 2015 book, “Between the World and Me,” to frame his ideas concerning the falsity of the ‘American Dream’ for Black Americans.
“Regardless… Coates is right: The American Dream is a lie. Mind you, that is not to deny the fact that many Americans enjoy considerable prosperity in this country. Many millions do float easily on the tide of America’s fantastic wealth.
“The lie is found in the universal application of the Dream, that America is a place where everyone can get a fair shot at a decent life — ‘equal opportunity, social mobility,’ as [critic and New York Times writer] David Brooks puts it. Inheritance alone can make the case against the Dream. Everyone can agree that, under slavery and then Jim Crow, Black Americans were systematically locked out of a fair chance at prosperity.”
ABC aired a 1978 special that highlighted alarmingly high rates of poverty and crime in New York City. Many of the subjects of the documentary were Black men from underprivileged backgrounds; many of whom expressed discontentment with being denied opportunities that comprise the supposed ‘American dream.’
One of the Black men being interviewed made a profound remark surrounding the falsehood of the American dream: “We know by birth, we’re all Americans. But then we’re all not given part of that American pie, that great American dream. To a lot of Black people – what’s a dream to you [a White reporter] is a nightmare to me.”
Miserably, 40 years later, the abovementioned statement still holds true. And for millions of Black men in the United States, the American Dream is nothing more than a vague idea, an abstraction, an empty promise, a myth, a mere fantasy.
Demetrius Dillard is a North Carolina-based freelance writer.
