ABSTRACT
The idea of the “American Dream” provides another example of how race has been removed from the discussion of achievement and replaced with proxy terms based on Americanism. In essence, the creation and maintenance of the American Dream was the first effort at producing racial color-blindness. The American Dream posits that success follows hard work, or that the harder you work, the more likely you are to be successful in achieving your goals. Success, in this sense, can be defined in a myriad of ways, including earning a high salary, having a prestigious job or even something as amorphous as freedomof action and speech (Hochschild, 1995). Philosophically, the American Dream is available to everyone (Hochschild, 1995); and everyone has equal access to it as long as they are willing to participate in trying to achieve success (i.e., work hard). In reality, the American Dream is unachievable for the majority of American citizens because of systemic racism.
