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Racial And Income Inequality In The Great Gatsby

597 Words3 Pages

According to James Truslow Adams’ book The Epic Of America, the American Dream was traditionally known as "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement... a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain... regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position." (P.214-215) Books, such as The Great Gatsby by Scott F. Fitzgerald, convey the message that the American Dream is no longer about upward mobility and labor, but materialism and greed(use characters actions paragraph). Due to obstructions like ---- along with racial and income inequality, lead my generation to believe that the American Dream …show more content…

According to CNN’s Jack Cafferty, “[i]n 2010 the median household net worth for whites was about $111,000 compared to less than $5,000 for blacks.” Being in the lower half of the social classes, there are less opportunities and chances to move up the economic ladder. This proves that the black population, among other minorities, has less chance of upward mobility than the white population, this relates back to the American Dream being an invalid aspiration because minorities believe that they will never achieve the dream with being stuck in the social class they were born in, which tends to be the low-middle class. Many African American students come to find that they tend to be enrolled in underfunded schools, in a HuffPost Politics article, a study by the Center for American Progress reveals that “schools with 90 percent or more students of color spend a full $733 less per student per year than schools with 90 percent or more white students.” Completing a full 16 years of schooling is considered crucial in the U.S. for upward mobility, when most under-privileged minority students don’t receive the opportunity for higher education they are left feeling forlorn. The American Dream seems impossible to accomplish when there are gaps in wealth and education preventing people of all racial backgrounds from reaching the

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