Title: It Was All a Dream Pdf A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America
Author: Reniqua Allen
Published Date: 2019-01-08
Page: 400
"In her revelatory new book, It Was All A Dream, Reniqua Allen amplifies voices that America needs desperately to hear. She explores the lives of Black millennials who strive for success - or sometimes basic survival - with insight, empathy and candor. Pinned between the unfinished business of the civil rights movement and the economic, political and racial rifts of the post-Obama era, their stories are both heartbreaking and hopeful, the pent-up demand of a new generation demanding what has always been its right: liberation."―Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century"Reniqua Allen strikes a fine balance between the personal histories of ambitious Black millennials and the systems in place that threaten their mobility. With acute detail to their location, background, and motive, Allen's sharp journalistic skills are center stage, crafting reportage, cultural commentary, and personal anecdotes into a thought-provoking book that will add to our discussions about race, capitalism, education, and self-actualization."―Morgan Jerkins, author of This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America"Reniqua Allen's must-read book takes us beyond the statistics and stereotypes, telling the stories of young Black Americans who are creating, working, fighting, loving, and surviving. Allen's vital and empathetic reportage shares their voices-and we would be wise to listen."―Heather McGhee, Former President and Distinguished Senior Fellow, Demos "All comfortable notions about the American Dream are shoved aside as Reniqua Allen lays out the harsh and often disturbing challenges facing today's young African-Americans. A powerful, compelling, and important book."―Bob Herbert, author, filmmaker, and former op-ed columnist for the New York TimesReniqua Allen is an Eisner Fellow at the Nation Institute and a former fellow at New America and Demos. She has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Teen Vogue, and more, and has produced for WNYC, PBS, and MSNBC. Allen lives in the Bronx.
A Guide to Feeling Sorry for Foolish Millennials 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 rue 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.”Excellent book on a hugely important topic! Very engaging read on a very important and under-reported topic. A must read.Amazing read! Amazing book that provides an insightful look into black millenialhood. Ms. Allen provides a voice to a generation in the most beautiful manner.
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