Dear Sticky Wicket,
Can minorities achieve the American Dream without an equal opportunity to attain a quality education?
~-Hopeless in Arizona
Dear Hopeless,
The American Dream is the belief that a person can come from anywhere and be anything they want in this country. The fruits of freedom, equality, and opportunity are available to anyone.
However, for some in this country, the American Dream might be more like the American Delusion. For many minorities and immigrants to this country, racism and discrimination might hamper their ability to achieve the American Dream. They often find themselves locked out of the doors of freedom, equality, and opportunity.
Mark Naison, a Fordham University professor, says minorities believe in and strive for the American Dream as much as anyone else. But, racism in forms both subtle and direct, affects their consciousness in ways most white people couldn’t imagine.
“They know they have opportunities that their great grandparents lacked and know that people like them can rise to the highest positions in the society but they still feel the sting of racism in their daily lives,” Naison says.
Posing quality education as a major issue seems off base he adds. “Most people I work with see the police and the criminal justice system, the job market and the housing market as much bigger issues where unequal treatment is at work than schools,” he says.
Calvin Mackie, an internationally renowned motivational speaker and author, quotes Booker t. Washington: “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.”
Mackie says many people in this county, especially minorities, are so far back from the so-called starting line that some people might not think they have achieved that much. “However compared to where they started, they’ve come a monumental distance,” he says. “It sometimes takes two to three generations to go from blue collar to white collar.”
Mackie says minorities have the same opportunity to a quality education but not the same access to that same advantage. He cites a Teach for America statistic that claims a child growing up in poverty has an eight percent chance of graduating from college.
“Right now in this country the better you are off economically, the better you are off of getting a quality education and achieving the American Dream,” he says.