I have to return to the idea of the American Dream. "The Discovery of What it Means to be an American" by James Baldwin is perfectly pertinent to the current day American. I suppose this is the mark of a quintessential American work. Though he doesn't address it outright to a large degree he comments on what we still refer to as the American Dream. Here we view ourselves as infinitely mobile. There is no glass ceiling in America. One's hard work and ingenuity can unlock any door as far as it will Take him. Baldwin writes:
We must, however, consider a rather serious paradox: though American society is more mobile than Europe's, it is easier to cut across social and occupational lines there than it is here. This has something to do, I think, with the problem of status in American life. Where everyone has status, it is also perfectly possible, after all, that no one has. It seems inevitable, in any case, that a man may become uneasy as to just what his status is.
The myth of the American Dream you see turns social divisions into a false meritocracy. Th unequal distribution of wealth is due to the hard work of some and the extreme laziness of others. The gap salaries between women and men is explainable in some rationale. Levels of incarceration of the nations minorities are just.
Status in America holds, therefore, a far more weighty definition as it is directly related to our willingness to put in a hard days work and our innate talents. Status in Europe being a notion so long entrenched and outwardly accepted loses much of its gravity.
Furthermore when status is supposedly such a fluid notion as it is thought of by Americans it creates a "social paranoia" that puts at odds with everyone around us with whom we are in competition with in our quest for upward mobility. Any difference between us is is easily disparaged. Yet paradoxically we are supposed to be on equal footing.
The perpetuation of the Dream hinders our ability for national introspection. Writers, artists, academics, all those critical thinkers doing the heavy lifting come up against "a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately.)"
Living in Paris for Baldwin let him free from all his constraints. He allowed himself to relish his otherness as a Negro in America and intern realize his otherness of that of an American in Paris. Often it is only by way of changing our local can we gain insight into our many otherness' intricacies. Here Baldwin elevates our understanding of what it means to live in America as one of any othernesses
We must, however, consider a rather serious paradox: though American society is more mobile than Europe's, it is easier to cut across social and occupational lines there than it is here. This has something to do, I think, with the problem of status in American life. Where everyone has status, it is also perfectly possible, after all, that no one has. It seems inevitable, in any case, that a man may become uneasy as to just what his status is.
The myth of the American Dream you see turns social divisions into a false meritocracy. Th unequal distribution of wealth is due to the hard work of some and the extreme laziness of others. The gap salaries between women and men is explainable in some rationale. Levels of incarceration of the nations minorities are just.
Status in America holds, therefore, a far more weighty definition as it is directly related to our willingness to put in a hard days work and our innate talents. Status in Europe being a notion so long entrenched and outwardly accepted loses much of its gravity.
Furthermore when status is supposedly such a fluid notion as it is thought of by Americans it creates a "social paranoia" that puts at odds with everyone around us with whom we are in competition with in our quest for upward mobility. Any difference between us is is easily disparaged. Yet paradoxically we are supposed to be on equal footing.
The perpetuation of the Dream hinders our ability for national introspection. Writers, artists, academics, all those critical thinkers doing the heavy lifting come up against "a very deep-seated distrust of real intellectual effort (probably because we suspect that it will destroy, as I hope it does, that myth of America to which we cling so desperately.)"
Living in Paris for Baldwin let him free from all his constraints. He allowed himself to relish his otherness as a Negro in America and intern realize his otherness of that of an American in Paris. Often it is only by way of changing our local can we gain insight into our many otherness' intricacies. Here Baldwin elevates our understanding of what it means to live in America as one of any othernesses