How race and gender affect the American Dream

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/why-is-the-american-dream-dead-in-the-south/283313/

This is an older article about the limitations of the American dream, but I found it relevant to our discussions of race and class. The article made a few good points and a few bad ones. First, the article was strong in its discussion of lower class women. It addressed the argument that because children raised in stable, two parent homes are more likely to move up in class, poor women should get married more often. The article addresses this by correctly pointing out that lower class women are in a better place to make judgments about the well being of their children and the merits of marriage than middle class women who are not in those same circumstances.

This biggest flaw of the article, however, was its treatment of race. The article noted that it was found that black communities saw lower rates of social mobility, but the author quickly dismissed this not as a matter of race, but as a matter of class. As we have discussed many times in class, economic class has an enormous impact on mobility, but it is incorrect to completely ignore the problems caused by racism. Doing so not only wrongly discredits the accounts of African Americans who claim they have faced racial discrimination, but it prevents us from addressing the underlying issues that limit social mobility in the black communities addressed in the study.