Comparing The American Dream In On Being Black And Middle Class

In a country that has implicitly fabricated a universal aspiration called “the American Dream”, the application proves to be exclusive in who will attain and who will be rejected. Through racist historical archives such as slavery, Jim Crow Laws, Three Strike Law, and War on Drugs, African-Americans have mostly failed to shatter societal discrimination and accustomed the despair that “the American Dream” and “melanin” do not intertwine or even worse, coexist in the same reality. However, there are the few exceptions that disobey the convention, which receive polarizing reception from Caucasian Americans and fellow minorities on their transformative approach to reality. Individuals like Booker T. Washington, Nat Turner, W.E.B. Dubois, Angela Davis, and the incumbent president, Barack Obama, proves to diversify the face of the African American, which however cannot fully modify due to the overwhelmingly white patriarchal dominance in the American Dream. Pieces of literatures such as Just Walk on By: A Black Men and Public Space by Brent Staples, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and On Being Black and Middle Class by Shelby Steele, reflect the exhaustion and vexation of being an African American, through anecdotal evidence, stylistic rhetoric, and qualitative diction. Through societal predispositions of African Americans, color victimization, and depiction of violent reactions, the three texts mutually convey the limitations people of color face when engaging in pursuit of individualism and stability, elements of the American Dream.
Initially, evidence from each of the three texts manifests how the predisposition of black people from referential racism have had baleful impacts on their achievement of individualism and success, elements of the American
Dream.