Right after Obama was elected, a book came out called A Day Late and a Dollar Short, about the
failure of government aid and service. The Obama age isn’t expressly written
about in this book, but the Hope & Change ideal (or was it a cult?) was
definitely a motivation. Did having a Black man in the White House make a
difference? Could anything really change in Alabama or Mississippi, the poorest
states in the Union? Would anything change in Detroit, Philly, Camden, Chicago,
or The Bronx, where decades of Black Democrat rule had failed?
Reniqua Allen
regards herself as a beneficiary of the American Dream. Born and raised in New
Jersey, with educated and successful Black parents, she was (like me) a child
of the 1990’s. She recounts the sitcom Living Single and how it inspired her to
be just like the character on the show; a financially independent Black women,
who can get away without being overly girly and still find a decent man. As an
adult, Allen seems to face a puzzle about the goals of American life. Firstly,
is prosperity achievable, or do young minorities get left out? Secondly, are
young Black Americans achieving the American Dream without realizing it?
Allen’s first
subject is a Morehouse graduate who aspired to live and work in New York City.
Not an impossible dream; anyone can take a train north, if they can pay.
Unfortunately, his three years in The Big Apple were a disappointment from the
very start. First, he didn’t get the journalism job he’d studied for. He became
a Teaching Fellow but hated to long commute on the city’s crumbling transport
system. He felt stressed, worn out, defeated, and after taking stock of his
life, realized that the problem wasn’t the job, but the city! He returned to
the South, went to live in Georgia, goodbye dirty subways, hello front porches
and easy car commutes. This is an example of a New Millennium trend – The
Reverse Migration – now that America’s cities are no longer the so-called
“promised land.”
In the Morehouse
graduate’s case, we also face another dilemma in the USA – the student loan
debt crisis – and it makes you wonder if a dream is worth it, when you have to
spend your life paying for it. The next problem is the delusion of the creative
job. Did he know how competitive journalism is? Did he know how low the pay is?
Did he think he could compete with someone who’d written for their high school
paper, college paper, interned at a paper, and had a record of reporting? When
he became a teacher, that was a much more achievable goal. So, the question is,
was his dream in fact a “dream deferred,” or was it a broken dream, or was it a
pipe dream?
Just as I expected,
Reniqua Allen goes into another American problem, the college athlete. You have
a group of boys who fall for the myth that sports are a way out of poverty.
These boys waste all their time on their sports, put the ball before the book,
never have part-time jobs or summer jobs, get a sports scholarship to college,
and then lose it thanks to an injury. This is where I have a problem with the
author using the words Broken Promises in the title, because nobody promised
these youths anything! One of the saddest examples of the student athlete
delusion is the documentary Hoop Dreams,
which I hate. Yes, I know you all loved it, but I call it Hoop Nightmares,
because it’s about sorry kids being cheated by wolves. All over the USA, high
school ball games are watched by men in suits, sent by colleges to find Black
athletes for their teams. Is this any different from a cattle call, or even a
slave auction? Slave owners used to dress their slaves in fancy clothes for the
auctions, and the buyers would select the ones who were big and strong. Never
did they look for a slave with accounting skills or legal knowledge, because
slaves were never sent to school. Slavery ended 150 years ago, and today the
college scouts are after tall Black boys who can play ball. They never visit
the school looking for Black kids who are good at science. The kids who are
good at science have to seek out the college themselves.
Back to the
subject of student loan debt, Allen calls the chapter Don’t Double Down on Stupid, and recounts another graduate drowning
in bills. He takes out loans to go to college, doesn’t get the job he wants,
takes out another loan for graduate school, and despite all his education, he
has no job and huge debt. It sounds like this young man is pretty stupid,
despite his education. Nowhere does the graduate (or even the author) consider
all the other viable options he could’ve taken. He could’ve become a police
officer, or corrections officer, or he could’ve gone into teaching. I know that
law enforcement isn’t attractive to a lot of young Black men, and few desire to
go into corrections, but these jobs are easy to get into and they’re a way to
quickly pay off debts. After doing two horrible years as a corrections officer,
you’ll be glad to take any other job, or go to grad school. Maybe do a degree
in political science? I’m sure the years in corrections will give you plenty to
write about!
One of the problems
that the author herself suffers from is lack of financial sense. Throughout the
book she makes it look like a “microaggression” for a Black man to have to wait
patiently for something and declares it racist to discourage a Black kid from
college. She admits she dumped a $70,000 TV job for another degree, which she
pretty much admits is useless. Then she writes about a UCLA student, the
daughter of an LAPD cop and kindergarten teacher, limited in life because her
parents never went to college. Here again is the author’s blindness to reality.
This man had 25 years on the force, plenty of time to take a 2-year degree at a
cheap college, and so did her mother. On one hand the author laments the strain
of the student loan, but then declares that having no college degree means
you’ve been cheated out of American life, obviously through racism.
Nowhere in this
book does Allen give blue collar careers any respect, not even a modicum. When
I saw the chapter titled Blue Collar I thought “maybe now she’ll acknowledge
that college is NOT the magic pill to sure all of Black America’s ills.” Tough
luck for me, she doesn’t. She describes Appalachian coal towns as a good pace
to be because mining pays so much, but then she goes back into her routine of
indulging the underachiever. Brandi, the
author’s new martyr, finds that coal towns don’t suit her, goes to college,
drops out when her mother gets pregnant, and ends up at Walmart. This sort of
thing I’m sure happens to White people, but if it happens to a Black woman,
then the author will obviously use it in her quest for victimhood. A page is
devoted to the story of a Black coal miner who preferred Trump to Obama, and
when I read it, I knew that Allen has a huge dislike for the White working
class. The miner makes no bones about the racism that exists, but Allen seems
to resent him for getting along with the Whites, not fighting them. There’s a
story of a Black farmer and army veteran who sought out farming as a form of
therapy. He doesn’t deny the racism either, and he speaks of the ignorance
among farmers, but the author does plenty of ignoring herself.
Next comes the
African immigrant and his experience as a Black American. An African boy, the
son of diplomats, is raised in Switzerland, moves to the USA and gets a culture
shock; his host family are Mennonites in Pennsylvania and they have no TV! They
all assume that in Africa everyone rides elephants, but back in Nigeria his
house had a TV! All the while, I’m thinking of all the US families, Black and
White, ruined by materialism, so hooray for the Americans smart enough to get
rid of their boob tube. Those simple-living Mennonites (or even the Amish
without electricity) could teach us something about life. As for the African in
the chapter, I’m surprised he didn’t prepare better. He could easily have
stayed in Switzerland after his parents were recalled (liberal Switzerland
wouldn’t have thrown him out) and gone to college or a trade school in that
country for free. Then he could’ve emigrated to the USA with either a top
education or a marketable skill. He would’ve entered the USA as one of the
highest order of people. Another missed opportunity.
It Was All a Dream
is basically an exercise in Millennial whining. She goes looking for Black
American who have problems (often they’re the same problems that Whites have)
and uses them to prove that America is racist and Blacks are the victims. My
theory is that Black leaders like Sharpton and Jackson needed to find a common
enemy, and it was easier to gain support from their own power base by playing
the victim. Then the Black Democrat politicians did the same thing, by
convincing Black voters that their problems were the result of racism and that
they deserved money. They’re not going to go to poor Whites and say “listen up,
we’re all getting screwed, let’s work together.” Police abuses, for instance,
effect Whites as much as Blacks (if you don’t believe me, look at New Mexico)
and the problems of drug use, teen pregnancy, student loan debt, and civil
asset forfeiture are a problem for all races.
Reniqua Allen is
just another young whiner. She needs to see racism in everything so that she
can play the victim. These “dreams” she discusses are just dreams, and these
so-called victims may be just that; victims of the American Dream. When it
comes to dreams versus reality, remember what Josephine Baker once said,
“Sometimes the best way to make a dream come true is to wake up from it.”
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