NAACP Essay Contest Winner
Prejudice and the American Dream
This is an essay from the annual NAACP essay contest
The responsibility of an archetypal American citizen is, vaguely put, to better your nation and cooperate with the machine of the U.S., churning ideas and opinions into one, thick butter of the so-called American dream. There are many covenants made to citizens who take charge in their responsibilities and duties; the promise of a voice and the lifestyle of the nuclear family. Nationalistic American citizens read the newspaper in their cookie-cutter house, take their children to public school, and take their place in the cycle of the American economy seriously. However; the American dream is a fallacious one. It is not promoting the idea of helping your fellow man; it is, in fact, every man for himself. The dark truth of the American dream is that citizens are supposed to strive for it, but not every citizen can have it. Certain backgrounds, cultural beliefs, political views, and gender roles do not fit into the perfect American life; it is a prejudiced system, after all, with unspoken rules suggesting the success or failure of races, genders, and sexual orientation. To earn yourself a seat at the round table of akin brethren, you must adopt the idea that you yourself are superior to people who don’t fit into the mold. The American system is desperately in need of further change for it to become the kind of Utopia its citizens and admirers would like to believe it already is.
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” said Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967, one year before his untimely death. A national icon with the ability to move people so much that they themselves can finally break free of their societal chains and fear of rejection, MLK was a figure who realized the flaws within the American dream. How could you fight for all men, for all citizens, if you chained yourself to the political machine of the U.S. government? How could you let yourself be enslaved to something who promises nothing more than an abstract noun at the expense of your brothers? Prejudice is no paperweight, it’s the biggest boulder blocking the entrance to Utopia; the American dream is not the quintessential life, it is a phantom promise of things that only you yourself can earn with the help of a giving society.
The biggest change that America still needs is incentive; the incentive to help your community. Unity doesn’t just mean tolerance, it also means doing your part to help someone else; do things solely for someone else, and they will do the same for you. When you shop at Aldi, you put a quarter into your shopping cart in order to take it inside; at the end of your visit, you return the cart for the next customer and get your quarter back; this cuts payroll costs at the store and helps them translate the savings to their customers. The quarter, in this case, is the incentive to do something that will help others; what America is missing is a quarter. By nature, humans don’t do things for others without a reason; in order to come together and protect the rights and equality of all people in the nation, a reason must be given as to why they should do so outside of intermittent charity. The Golden Rule should be instituted into economic and political practices, give and receive. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. For America to begin to embody the Utopian ideal it is founded on, it needs to restructure how it approaches the very idea that is behind our economy and our politics. They aren’t there for an individual to make a lot of money and succeed by themselves. If you would like to climb to the top, you can’t use the little guy as the ladder, you have to take him with you.
Hannah Jenkins is a junior at North Davidson High School.
