The American Dream
A The American Dream is an national ethos within the United States of upward social mobility through hard work.
- Context:
- It can (often) be represented by Rags to Riches Stories (Outliers).
- It can require that individuals Play By the Rules.
- It can rely on the exploitation and exclusion of Black people (Coates, 2015).
- …
- Example(s):
- the example of Barack Obama.
- the example of Alexander Hamilton.
- the example of Benjamin Franklin, (1706-1790).
- the example of Frederick Douglass, (1818-1895).
- the example of John D. Rockefeller, (1839-1937).
- the example of Arnold Schwarzenegger, (1947-).
- the example of Ta-Nehisi Coates.
- …
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Social Class in The United States, Life, Liberty And The Pursuit of Happiness, Ethos, United States, Socio-Economic Mobility in The United States, United States Declaration of Independence, All Men Are Created Equal.
References
2021
- (Wikipedia, 2021) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Dream Retrieved:2021-1-21.
- The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, the set of ideals (democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity and equality) in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, as well as an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers. In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.
The American Dream is rooted in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that “all men are created equal” with the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Also, the U.S. Constitution promotes similar freedom, in the Preamble: to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity".
- The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, the set of ideals (democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity and equality) in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, as well as an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers. In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.
2019
- https://prospect.org/economy/myth-rugged-individual/
- QUOTE: The American dream promises that anyone can make it if they work hard enough and play by the rules. Anyone can make it by pulling themselves up by their “bootstraps.” Baloney. The truth is: In America today, your life chances depend largely on how you started — where you grew up and how much your parents earned. Everything else—whether you attend college, your chances of landing a well-paying job, even your health—hinges on this start. ...
... So, why is America still perpetuating the fallacy of the self-made individual? Because those in power want you to believe it. If everyone thinks they're on their own, it's easier for the powerful to dismantle unions, unravel safety nets, and slash taxes for the wealthy. ...
- QUOTE: The American dream promises that anyone can make it if they work hard enough and play by the rules. Anyone can make it by pulling themselves up by their “bootstraps.” Baloney. The truth is: In America today, your life chances depend largely on how you started — where you grew up and how much your parents earned. Everything else—whether you attend college, your chances of landing a well-paying job, even your health—hinges on this start. ...
2018
- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/opinion/sunday/tm-landry-louisiana-school-abuse.html
- QUOTE: ... The American dream relies on stories like mine and the Landry situation to distract from the American reality: There is a conveyor belt that sends most young people, especially from neighborhoods like mine, from nothing to nowhere, while the chosen few are randomly picked off and celebrated. ...
... There is another secret, too: The American dream can also destroy people who make it “out.” I had achieved, by my late 20s, about everything a kid is supposed to, but I was cracked up by the process. So were many of my friends. Before I finished my book about that experience, one of my closest friends from Yale, who’d made a similar Horatio Alger journey, took his own life. He came to me in a dream a few months later and told me: “You know, we did a lot of things we wouldn’t advise anybody we loved to do.” I knew what he meant. If you catch it from the right angle, a kid picking himself up by his bootstraps can look like a suicide. We “success stories” are driven from elementary school on to be perfect. To ignore whatever hardships we’ve endured, whatever loneliness or pain we feel in the new worlds we’re sent off to. ....
- QUOTE: ... The American dream relies on stories like mine and the Landry situation to distract from the American reality: There is a conveyor belt that sends most young people, especially from neighborhoods like mine, from nothing to nowhere, while the chosen few are randomly picked off and celebrated. ...
2015
- (Coates, 2015) ⇒ Ta-Nehisi Coates. (2015). “Between The World And Me.”
- QUOTE:
- "The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing."
- "The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake."
- "The Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies."
- "The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return."
- "The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all."
- QUOTE: