The "American Dream" for Americans of European Descent History Essay

The "American Dream" for Americans of European Descent
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The United States is currently fighting climate change, but the root of this issue runs deeper than the economic crisis that it experienced in the 1930s. Since the colonial times, there has been a culture of exploitation which has been integrated into the American social and environmental practices, the state function, and the idea of progress. This has also been the case with the Natives’ pursuit of the American Dream. According to the Natives, the American Dream was understood to be white nationalism in America, thus subjecting other populations to forced labor and grabbing their land as the Americans chased the American Dream. Realizing the American Dream has become elusive, proving the futility of the unfair labor practices and land acquisition measures the Americans used as they pursued it albeit for personal interests.
As understood by Roosevelt and reminded to use by Ocasio-Cortez, correcting the inequities and harms which resulted from unchecked personal interests in the name of pursuing the American Dream may call for coercive restrictions and powerful incentives. The popular sense of the American culture as progress and pursuit of the American Dream condemns such practices and interventions, but there is a need to revisit that history so as to expose how the American culture of exploiting other populations and subjecting them to forced labor contributed to economic aggression rather than focusing on sustainable practices which would have enabled them to achieve the American Dream.
In fighting for their freedom, British settlers who lived in the North attacked the Natives in the area and also expropriated their land. The settlers also sought to justify their actions of displacing the Indians living in the Eastern Woodland by ignoring their extensive farming culture and dismissing them by branding them ‘savage’ gatherers and hunters. They also argued that the Indians did not practice any form of cultivation, and failed to subdue and extract the earth as required in the Christian scriptures. In this case, the British tried to hide their private interests of land-grabbing under the faзade of Biblical teachings. Soon, this trend of grabbing land from other populations became common among Natives as they sought to establish their supremacy over the British in the North, which was fabricated under the American Dream. The American Dream basically sought to ensure that the Natives had better living standards, better jobs, and better financial standings than the rest of the populations, regardless of the measures that it would take to achieve this.
The British settlers in North American exploited Indians and other populations with the excuse of environmental protection, and this became a superficial justification for the whites to claim entitlement to the land. After the Cherokees had embraced such white’s ways of life such as Western dress, tobacco farming, African slavery, and written language, Americans considered them a threat to their freedom and their realization of the American Dream and thus drove them away at gunpoint. The main issue during this time was not how to ensure the land was utilized maximally, but who owned the right to use the land. Native Americans considered occupation of part of the land by the Cherokees as a barrier to the realization of the American Dream, but the real issue was the personal interests of the Americans as they sought to take over the land and enslave Africans and other populations to work on the acquired large lands.
Native Americans had gone hungry for profit regardless of the negative impacts that this had on human rights or sustainability, and how it shaped the society. In the colonial period in Virginia, for more than 60 years, tobacco farmers showed that they were not interested in racial slavery until structural changes took place and this made the cost of living of the white servants to rise, reduced the cost of the enslaved Africans, and put the political hegemony at risk for the landholders in the area. This resulted in the next generation crafting a slaver slave labor system which enabled the white settlers to improve their prosperity, adding a dimension of racial profiling and brutality to the issue of land and environmental protection. In this case, the pursuit of the ...