American Dream: Aspiration, Challenges and Racism

Persevere and you will be rewarded

The american dream is an idea that is prevalent throughout the 1800s and 1900s, and it represents the hopeful people of the US who yearn for opportunity regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. This air of hopefully prosperity allows America to become what represents the best of the human spirit. Racism destroyed the possibility of an american dream by suppressing equality for certain groups of people but subsequently supplying them with a stronger reason to fulfill their desire to be respected at the same level as whites.

When the american dream was at its peak, slavery was abolished but segregation was a whole new challenge as African Americans experienced oppression by whites who thought

Most of the fight agfainst segregation and raism was proving that misconception wrong and showing that they are very capapble to learen and suceede in life if given the oppurtunity. In the 1700s, while slavery still existed, Benjamin Banneker wrote a public letter to thomas Jefferson addressing contradictions between principles in the Declaration of Independence compared to the continued existence of slavery and overall mistreatment of African Americans. Jefferson was against slavery but thought whites to be far superior and saw African Americans as unintelligent and undeserving of the same respect as whites. Banneker strove to prove him wrong and show that “his skin had no correlation with his success in life” (Created Equal) as proven by his gifts of writing, philosophy, mathematics, and other scholarly achievements. Benjamin expresses the mistreatment endured by those of darker skin color and complaints that African Americans “are a race of beings” who have been subjected to “the abuse and censure” of society, and “looked upon with an eye of contempt...considered as brutish not human and scarcely capable of mental endowments” (Banneker). By stating the common misconception, he challenges the white people's thoughts to help apprehend how wrong their assumptions really are. Banneker hoped to be

They became creative in thier ways to call for action on the way they were being mistreated. Many of the famous cases we are tough as kids were acctually a set up; the black people put themselves in a situation where they would get caught and then the whites would have been forced to take it to court. They knew it was the only way to fight for justice. African Americans are tired of accepting the unfair treatments, and take action to catalyze the message that they are no longer going to seize under the authority of whites. A case where a guy named Homer Plessy, who was 12.5% black, purposefully sat on the white train cart in Lousianna and was arrested; this soon became a famous case known as Plessy v Furgeson. In this time “Homer Plessy decided to test one of the laws to see if he could change it.” (Lively). This case became a major stepping stone in the fight for racial equality. They were limited in ways to fight for thier american dream due to how they were looked down upon in society and denied simple respect and rights. The lengths that they had to go to in order to get simple aknowlegment shows the way racism destroyed thier amercian dream and deprived them of basic human rights needed to stand up for themselves while being mistreated in socioety. They were aware of how bad thier options