Dreaming in Black and White

After skimming over the various chapters, I found myself most interested in “Dreaming in Black and White.” The subsection in this chapter that really stood out to me was “The Nadir of Race Relations.” Nadir is defined on the web as the lowest point in the fortunes of a person or organization. Of course in this case the author, James W. Loewen, is referring to racism. He starts out this subsection talking about how racism rose to new heights between 1890 through 1940.  He says, “Owners expelled black baseball players from the major and minor leagues” (Loewen 61). Because I know a lot about how African Americans were segregated from sports this is really interesting to me. I spent a long time writing a research paper in high school about how Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier is sports. Sports team owners wouldn’t take a chance on any African American no matter their talents. But the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers took a chance on Jackie Robinson even though he received harsh backlash and criticism. Robinson turned out to be so good people were forced to let him play even though they hated it. Robinson opened the door for black people to play sports and he is one of the most important people in sports and racial justice history.

Another important and interesting subsection to me is “Residential segregation’s impact on the American Dream, Black and White.” He starts off by saying, “As blacks and whites moved away from each other physically, they also diverged socially and even linguistically” (Loewen 67). I agree with how he says that the geographic locations has changed the culture of white and blacks. From where I am from most African Americans that went to my high school lived in Marin city and most white kids lived in Mill Valley, which makes them act a lot different socially. The author also says that this causes them to have developed increasingly different accents and created distinctive. Many of my black friends on my basketball team talked differently than the white kids.

I’m interested in learning more about how the segregation of communities by race has affected culture. I wonder how the American Dream is affected by that. I mean obviously the American Dream is going to be different based on how and where one is born but I want to know how.