Joe Doakes emails:
“The American Dream” has changed several times.
Used to be, laborers living in filthy tenements in New York or Chicago dreamed of traveling West where they could bust the sod, build a home, and make a new life for their families.
Used to be, GI’s in foxholes dreamed of finding a nice girl to settle down with and a job in a factory to afford a bungalow on a quarter-acre lot.
Used to be, parents worked overtime to send their kids to college to be doctors and lawyers, so they wouldn’t have to work with their hands and could afford a McMansion in Eagan plus a lake cabin Up North.
For young Americans nowadays, The American Dream might consist of an college degree in Sociology to get a job working in a cubicle for a non-profit so you can live in a converted warehouse and ride Light Rail.
Notice what they have in common? They’re all White dreams. Black people living in pre-Civil War days had entirely different dreams of freedom. Black GIs came home to segregated dreams. And since the 1970’s, Black families have fragmented and crime in Black neighborhoods has skyrocketed.
What is The American Dream for Black youth today? What should the schools be teaching to help them achieve that dream?
Joe Doakes
More on this tomorrow.
I don’t know that white dreams are that different from black dreams. My daughters run with a delightful young lady whose mother grew up in a black neighborhood in Minneapolis, and when she told stories of growing up there, it was the same kind of thing I grew up with. Go off and play, kids, and make sure you get back by suppertime. There is a reality to “Stuff White People Like”, but I don’t think the cultural gap is that big.
It would take a miracle, though, for the schools to help–we’d have to persuade them to put a lot more Booker T. Washington in along with Frederick Douglass, to put it mildly. I think the big thing that’s plaguing black communities (and poor white ones, too, really) is not that black dreams are that different, but rather that poor communities have entirely different ideas about how to achieve those dreams.