Discrimination In A Raisin In The Sun Essay

What would you do if you were told that your dreams would never come true? Dreams are what we hold onto to motivate us to achieve our goals. In Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, the characters of Mama, Walter, and Beneatha are faced with discrimination that affects their lifestyle, dreams, and education. Mama has lived on the South Side of Chicago for most of her life, but housing discrimination created obstacles that set her dream of living in a nice neighborhood. In this time period many apartments that African Americans lived in were in very poor conditions. “Many were quite small and overcrowded. These spaces offered little access to natural sunlight and required the residents on a floor to share a single bathroom” (A Raisin

Many African American men in this time period were not able to set their dreams high as starting a company. He tired hard to get a job that would pay him well so he could support his family. He told his mom, “I open and close car doors all day long. I drive a man around in his limousine and I say, “Yes, sir; no, sir; very good, sir; shall I take the Drive, sir?” Mama, that ain’t no kind of job … that ain’t nothing at all” (Hansberry 75). Walter is trying to explain to his mom that any job he could get as a African American man in Chicago is a low class blue collar job. In the 1950s, “Blacks still faced widespread employment discrimination. Stores in the Loop refused to hire African Americans as clerks. Black bus drivers, police officers, and firefighters were limited to positions serving their own community” (Manning). The employment rate in Chicago was extremely low for African American males which made it extremely hard to find jobs and support their families. Walter says to his mom, “sometimes when I’m downtown and I pass them cool, quiet-looking restaurants where them white boys are sitting back and talking ’bout things … sitting there turning deals worth millions of dollars … sometimes I see guys don’t look much older than me” (Hansberry 62). Walter does not understand why so many guys around his age