The paradox of"what' all the fuss about?"has several nuances.Most centrally, whites either do not understand or understand but reject blacks'claims that opportunities are racially biased and that blacks cannot control their own life chances. As whites become more and more satisfied with the trajectory of racial change in the United States,African Americans become less and less satisfiedwith it ; on the few occasions when black gratification increases,so does white disapprobation. Within that central perceptual divide lie several other quandaries that complicate each race's belifs about the dream and evaluations of each other. These external contradictions and internal puzzles would threaten any dominant ideology,but they are especially threatening to one as predicated on equality and on faith as the American dream....
Adding comparisons within each race to comparisons across races reveals two additional paradoxes beyond that of what's all the fuss about?They are:
Succeeding more and enjoying it less: As the African American middle class has become larger,more powerful,and more stable, its members have grown disillusioned with and even embittered about the American dream.
Under the spell of the great national suggestion:As black poverty has deepened and become concentrated,poor African Americans have continued to as poor blacks did thirty years ago,But that support is tenuous and under great pressure.
In combination these paradoxes produce the surprising pattern that poor blacks now believe more in the American dream than rich blacks do, which is a reversalfrom the 1960s. But these paradoxes are more than merely surprising ; together they point to the secound threat posed by American race relations to the future of the American dream.If poor blacks and all whites follow middle-class blacks in their deepening disillusionment with the American dream, than the dream faces an even greater problem than the comparatively simple racial hostility depicted(earlier).....