The American Dream!

[ Disclaimer: Must be a Straight, White, Christian Man ]

What is the American Dream?

“The American dream is not that every man must be level with every other man. The American Dream is that every man must be free to become whatever God intends he should become,” – Ronald Raegan.

“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear,” – James Baldwin, A Letter to my Nephew.

What is the American Dream? The phrase itself was popularized during the Great Depression and aligned with the cliché value that nothing was impossible if one worked hard enough. The American Dream was a glimpse of hope and pride… for the white, working-class American. It was a gleam of light at the end of a hard day’s labor. It was to say that if one puts in the work, only then would their god, through their country, reward them in return. And as those working-class, white American’s rose with the economy thereafter, the term materialized. The American Dream was fashioned by Campbell McCool’s Plein Air community — transforming into the ideal of a white-picketed fence, a prayer before every meal, and a father with a wife, two kids, and a family dog. The American Dream was a suburbia, a utopia, an attainable goal. Yet the white-picket fence costs $2,500 and the dictionary definition of utopia is nothing more than an imagined place.

Robin D.G. Kelley, a professor of history at UCLA and activist, goes as far to say that the true and formal definition of utopia is nowhere. Still today, in a never-ending search for this imagined place that is nowhere — there is no room for those who come from another religion, another race, or another sexuality. Those who search for the American Dream can picture themselves in this utopia, and with greedy and ignorant eyes, they step on, destroy, beat, discriminate, and oppress the atheist, the gay, the Black, the Latino, the trans, the Muslim, and the list goes on.

Religion and the American Dream: Colonialism Disguised as Divinity

Before understanding the American Dream at face-value, one must step back and take in the history of what it meant to be an ‘American.’ America has only been textbook independent for upwards of 350 years. Though American independence was not directly in response to religion or religious freedom, one of the most radical shifts under the new doctrine was this idea of having the right to choose who and how one worships. There is also the consideration that only decades before American independence, Europe was overtaken by the Great Awakening, which would have been a new and radical influence on the American founders.

“‘The Founders’ use of Christian rhetoric and arguments becomes even more evident if one looks at other statements of colonial rights and concerns such as the Suffolk Resolves, the Declaration of Rights, and the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms—to say nothing of the dozen explicitly Christian calls for prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving issued by the Continental and Confederation Congresses,” - Mark David Hall, Did America Have a Christian Founding?

 As these Anglo-American’s colonized eastward — colonialism referring to the political, social, economic, and cultural domination of territory — they took their values with them. Being patriotic became synonymous with being Christian. To be ‘American’ is to be what the straight, white man would define as ‘divine.’ There is no room for those who do not believe, because to be American is to claim a chair next to a higher authority. There is no room for any other religious belief in the American Dream — because to be an American is to be chosen according to the Christian god. Ta-Neihisi, a Black American activist, philosopher, and writer of Between the World and Me, puts this into perspective reflecting on a visit to a Civil War scene with his son,

“But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.”

Race and the American Dream: The American Struggle

“We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.” ― Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing

“When we open our eyes today and look around America, we see America not through the eyes of someone who has 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.” – Malcolm X

Malcolm was referring not to the ‘we’ that makes up the whole of this nation, rather to the marginalized, the scrutinized, and the discriminated upon. He was referring to the Black race and how they were repulsed by the idealized picture of McCool’s Plein Air. Robin D.G. Kelley directly challenges conventional wisdom about race and class throughout American history and insists that there is no way to ever find the American Dream truly, rather it is a tactic used by capitalist efforts to “continue exploiting workers and create devastating inequality.” He goes on to say,

“I avoid optimistic, and I avoid pessimistic. I don't even use hope; I always use struggle. And why do I do that? Because I think that you cannot be an intellectual in a think tank, sitting around thinking about these things on your own or on a blog and decide what needs to be done. You can only do it in struggle with other people because that's the source of ideas.”

Similar to Kelley, a multitude of Black activists, writers and philosophers write about the American Dream, but instead referencing to it as the American Struggle,

“You have to understand that people have to pay a price for peace. If you dare to struggle, you dare to win.” — Fred Hampton.

“You must struggle to truly remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history […] Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be,” — Coates

The American Struggle even translates across mediums and into the artistic realm. Jacob Lawrence, a social realist who used art to document the experience of Black people in American history, painted the series called History of the American People. The Metropolitan Museum of Art curated an exposition in 2020 which showcased this iconic series in an expedition titled The American Struggle.

“If at times my productions do not express the conventionally beautiful, there is always an effort to express the universal beauty of man’s continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being,” — Jacob Lawrence.

If ‘Dream’ can be used interchangeably with ‘Struggle’ depending on the perspective of the user, then what is the supposed Dream alluding to? This alleged utopia has never been of the majority. It is a ‘Struggle’ among most, a struggle to reach an equilibrium of hope across all people. Baldwin not only understood the American Dream from the perspective of a Black man, but also faced discrimination for being openly apart of the gay community,

“Until the moment comes when we, the Americans, are able to accept the fact that my ancestors are both black and white, that on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity, that we need each other, that I am not a ward of America, I am not an object of missionary charity, I am one of the people who built the country--until this moment comes there is scarcely any hope for the American dream,” – James Baldwin, The American Dream and the American Negro.

Sexuality and the American Dream: A New Identity

The twentieth century was a big shift for America in its efforts to identify who the ‘all’ in ‘freedom for all’ truly referred to. Within these years, people who once didn’t understand where they fit into, began to find cultures and identities that they related to and identified with, and that included understanding one’s sexuality. Harry Hay, the founder of gay liberation, spoke to this shift of being able to identify a new way of being,

“In that time, you aren't a gay person, you aren't a homosexual person, you're a degenerate. And what you were suffering from was what was known as ostracism. Ostracism means you don't exist at all.” — Hay

Before the term ‘gay’ was ostracized, homosexuality was listed as a mental illness until the American Psychiatric Association removed it from the list in 1973. The American Dream established its roots well before the term ‘gay’ came to fruition, and with this new way to understand a person and their sexuality, or in other terms understanding that a couple is not always to be a husband and wife, there was great push-back as proven thereafter. Many close-minded people, whether it be reasons of comfort or religion or personal beliefs, were intolerable of the change happening and therefore pushed back. Some of the major events in this push-and-pull included the Stonewall Riots, removing homosexuality from a list of mental illnesses, the Defense of Marriage Act, and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court case of Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage in all fifty states. Within this revolution, there was a new way of understanding the American Dream. Instead of being a utopia in which everyone aspired to, there was now a new Dream that varied person-to-person. Instead of marriage being a key to American success, the need for marriage was scrutinized and even seen as an assimilation tactic. The Dream became tainted as possibilities and identities consummated. The Dream was now different for each person and no longer just for the American. It was for everyone. 

“I always say to people, "If you share my dream, why don't we walk together?" And that's my only organizing tool.” — Hay

Conclusion: A Deeper Problem

“But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because America makes no claim to the banal. America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist, a lone champion standing between the white city of democracy and the terrorists, despots, barbarians, and other enemies of civilization. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error,” — Coates

It is clear the American Dream is for everyone, except. And most people live in the except. The American Dream has failed because it was birthed in ignorance and ownership. There is something much deeper than the Dream that is broken, and for the Dream to work, we must fix the foundation and principles on which America was founded. It is first redefining America, then redefining the Dream, and it is putting them together in a way that everyone can find themselves in it. The American Dream must be attainable for all, no matter race, no matter ethnicity or culture or sexual orientation or spirituality. The American Dream must represent the whole of the people, not leaving a single person out.