How Does Social Segregation Affect The American Dream

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When talking about the American Dream, there are many situations that can deter away from achieving that goal. Social segregation of blacks is a huge predicament on achieving the American Dream. The lower-class has been redefined as the new “underclass”. It is characterized by its geographic concentration, its social isolation from the middle class, and its joblessness (Small pg. 23). When socially segregated, the people in that community have nowhere to turn too. Social isolation is specifically distinguished from the culture of poverty by virtue of its focus on adaptations to constraints and opportunities rather than internalization of norms. The people living in social isolation tend to adapt to their situation to survive. This keeps them…show more content…
Then the people there turn to crime and drop out of school. “As working families departed and non-working families stayed behind, inner-city neighborhoods became mired in concentrated poverty” (Small pg. 24). These communities are only people that are poor. So when everyone is in a concentrated poverty violence and drugs become more convenient. The American Dream is hard to reach while socially segregated because of the high concentration of poverty that persists. In the absence of segregation, these structural changes would not have produced the disastrous social and economic outcomes observed in inner cities during these decades. Black poverty did rise from the economic dislocations, it was segregation that confined the increased deprivation to these isolated areas. These citizens couldn’t leave their communities because they didn’t have the money too. When the economy switched from manufacturing based to service-sector based people lost their jobs. They couldn’t make money and couldn’t leave so they were left in concentrated poverty. There was no upward mobility in these isolated areas to achieve the American

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