The American Dream or Nightmare?

The American Dream or Nightmare?

Operating on the idea that all men are created equal, the American Dream is an ideology in the United States in which freedom includes the possibility of prosperity and success to all, regardless of social class or race. This idea promotes equal opportunities for all to succeed in a capitalist community and attracts most people to this country in the first place. However, more and more sociological studies reveal that the American Dream, in fact, perpetuates the cycle of inequality and poverty, building high racial barriers where people who are not white cannot truly succeed. In The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality, author Thomas Shapiro focuses on wealth to analyze the consistent growth of racial inequality in United States. Shapiro argues that wealth, more specifically the accumulation of assets (inheritance, savings accounts, stocks, bonds, home equity, etc.), fundamentally allows racial inequality in the United States to persist. Shapiro demonstrates how the lack of these family assets along with continuing racial discrimination in important areas such as homeownership, dramatically impacts the lives of many African American families. This lack of assets prohibits advantages one could gain in schools or jobs and perpetuates the cycle of poverty in which African Americans find themselves trapped.

Shapiro's study combines in-depth interviews with about two hundred families from Boston, St. Louis, and Los Angeles with a national data survey of ten thousand families to demonstrate how racial inequality is transmitted across generations. His analysis shows that families with private wealth are predominantly white, and are able to move upward from generation to generation, relocating to safer communities with better schools and passing along the accompanying advantages to their children. In the same vein, those who lack significant wealth are predominantly African American and remain trapped in "bad" neighborhoods that prohibit upward mobility, no matter how hard they work. With this established, Shapiro challenges those who possess privatized wealth to consider how the privileges that wealth brings not only improves their own chances for success but also hold back the people who have not the ability to accumulate the wealth needed to provide advantages for their families. Shapiro argues not only that the government's racialized policies it implemented throughout history contribute to the perpetuation of inequality, but families' individual decisions as to where they live and send their children to school contribute to the cycle as well.

First, it is important to recognize the history of racial inequality in the United States in order to understand its perpetuation in society. Throughout the twentieth century, institutions assigned racial identities through laws and everyday practices that provide opportunity to certain kinds of people, in turn reinforcing racial inequality. The innovation in the housing market at the end of World War II demonstrates more specifically how the government perpetuates racial inequality. In 1934, the Federal Housing Administration was created and implemented the National Housing Act in order to provide affordable housing and mortgages to GIs returning from war. Construction on the outskirts of major cities boomed and the suburbs were born. (Race: The Power of an Illusion Vol. 3).

However, as African American GIs returned home with the same hopes of buying homes and starting families, the housing market made it extremely difficult for them to receive the same advantages as whites. The FHA underwriters warned that the presence of even one or two non-white families could undermine real estate values in the new suburbs. Starting in the 1930's, government officials institutionalized a national appraisal system where race was as much a factor in real estate assessment as the condition of the property. Known as redlining, federal investigators evaluated hundreds of cities across the country for financial risk. This meant that neighborhoods far away from urban, minority areas received a higher rating and were colored green. Minority neighborhoods in developing areas were awarded a much lesser value and labeled red. Real estate companies and banks privatized this scheme and, as a consequence, most of the mortgages went to racially suburbanizing America (Race: The Power of an Illusion Vol. 3).

These institutional policies subtly prohibited African Americans from purchasing homes in higher valued neighborhoods, in turn keeping them from accumulating wealth in the largest sense. Middle-class families participate