Table of Contents
The American Dream is the idea that all individuals have equal opportunities, all treated equally, and that it can be achieved through hard work alone. Realistically the American Dream can not be achieved through hard work alone there are many obstacles individuals can come across. Through the book Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks on what it is like to be a black man in society and what challenges come along the way, the problem of police brutality and racism in society. While, the article “Segregation 2.0: America’s School-to-Prison Pipeline”, Dennis Parker points out that minority children are forced out of the educational system and into the criminal justice system. On the other hand, the article “Teaching Note Race, Housing, and the Federal Government: Black Lives on the Margins of the American Dream” Richard Hughes educates us on racial discrimination and the problems African Americans face which prevents them in the end from living the American Dream. The American Dream is rewarding those who are hard workers, who have skills, those individuals can always reach the top goals. But nowadays we have individuals who are hard-working, who have skills but can barely achieve the dream without obstacles getting in the way.
American Dream Definition
The American Dream is the idea that the government should protect each person’s opportunity to pursue their own idea of happiness. It was all made possible by a setting that was useful to prosperity, peace, and opportunity. In his book, Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates examines the bottom line of the dream and how the supporters of the dream agree with the fact that it can be achieved through hard work alone when in the end there is so much more to it. Coates observed, “ This is the foundation of the Dream- its adherents must not believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works” (Between the World and Me, pg.98). In order for the Dream to operate correctly, individuals who buy into it must believe they are morally innocent and the fact that they do buy into the Dream ends up distancing themselves from their life’s meaning by denying their reality and choosing to live in a state of fantasy.
When individuals are influenced by the Dream, individuals infrequently see the existence of policies and rules forced on minority schools and people of color, which in the end demonstrates structural inequality to equal access to the American Dream. Many adults and non colored individuals do not know what the school environment or learning material is like in a minority school. In “Segregation 2.0,” Parker observes zero-tolerance policies and how they are strictly enforced specifically in low-income neighborhoods of color. Parker states “Zero-tolerance laws harshly punish them regardless of the circumstances, ultimately expelled from all state public schools for a year, and is taking them out of school and placing them in the criminal justice or juvenile detention system all but eliminates their chances of getting into college or even graduating from high school”. As for not getting into college or graduating this is why many-colored neighborhoods do not have a possibility of achieving the American Dream because they have been suspended many times and do not see the point in going back to school or furthering their education because they see it as useless.
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American Dream in The Between the World and Me Book
In his book Between the World and Me, Coates examines the curiosity he had in school because he always felt that schools were hiding things from their students and giving them false hopes. Coates asserts “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance”. Coates states “I sensed the schools were hiding something, drugging us with the false morality. When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing”. Students are given false hopes and they are not given the answers they need when it comes to learning. These children’s parents would send the to school to keep them off the streets and being able to see their faces every day instead of them getting into troublesome parents did not care for the learning so much just that it was a safe place, knew where they were, and kept their children out of trouble.
Besides schools proposing unequal policies, police and the government continuously act in ways that individuals of color can not achieve the American dream alone due to obstacles that the police and government put them through limiting their possibilities. Individuals of color get picked on the most when it comes to the law enforcement if you look suspicious and most of the times it does not end well the individual which was stopped ends up injured or even dead. In Between the World and Me, Coates explains what it is like when coming across a police officer and what these individuals deal with and the fact that even if they are innocent the law enforcement is not held accountable and get away with it. Coates states “The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people and all of this is old to black people. No one is held responsible”. Individuals go through this on a day-to-day routine either because they look suspicious or just because perhaps.
These individuals can not achieve the dream if they have to go through this all the time they may get the feeling that they can not achieve and if they keep on going through these issues they may end up in jail or not alive. If these individuals end up in jail then there is no way of achieving the American dream because they now have a record, if they did not finish school then they do not see a point in going back to school, and they perhaps may just turn to crime and stay in crime. They let what others have to say about them and their doubts get in the way of their achievements and goals.
In his article “Segregation 2.0,” Parker examines the amount of police officers in low income communities and the fact that schools invest more in metal detectors and high quality surveillance than resources. Parker argues, “police officers have grown in low-income neighborhoods of color. Instead of investing in guidance counselors and librarians, school districts are pouring money into school resource officers to patrol schools, permanent metal detectors, and state-of-the-art surveillance systems”. The amount of officers you begin to put into a school begins to affect the attitude students begin to have towards school. Students begin to feel more like prisoners than learners they feel like they can not achieve anything because they always have eyes on them all the time have no hope in these students. School is all about safe learning environments if the school makes it feel like a jail the students begin to give up and have low self-esteem because they see how the school is treating them and feels like the school has no confidence in them and sees them as criminals.
Work Cited
- Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. Spiegel and Grau, 2015.
- Parker, Dennis.. “Segregation 2.0: America’s School-to-Prison Pipeline.” MSNBC, 17 May 2014, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/brown-v-board-students-criminalized.
- Hughes, Richard. “Teaching Note Race, Housing, and the Federal Government: Black Lives on the Margins of the American Dream.” Radical Teacher, Issue 106, 2016, p.138-140.
- EBSCOHost,search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=tfh&AN=120046620& site=ehost-live&scope=site.
