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Fyi! This is my opinion about this topic I know some people may feel some type of way . Feel free to leave your own opinion .

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The topic I researched was African Americans and the American Dream and how African Americans were not treated equally to other races . African Americans in the 1900's were constantly asking for equal rights to vote and constantly fighting for their rights .Such as going on a bus and being asked to move to the back and  certain restaurants not wanting to take colored people and serve them .Which also includes being judged based on a certain hairstyle and skin tone. Including the damage Covid 19 did to everyone which caused everyone lose their jobs .

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What is it like to be African American ?

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What is it like to be African American ?

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To be an African American life is constantly hard because of a certain way of living and a certain skin color African Americans have . Back in the day  a huge thing existed by the name Slavery ( When a person is owned by another person ). African Americans were considered owned by another race . Slaves were beaten , raped , killed , and disowned . African Americans have struggled for over more than 100 years for there freedom and still do to this day .

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Feel free to click this link and read more !

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The Archives holds a wealth of material documenting the Black experience. This page highlights these resources online, in programs, and through traditional and social media.
Header images: Background: Leaders at the Head of the March on Washington (NAID 542002); L to R: Young Woman Soliciting Funds for a Chicago Organization (NAID 556134); Participant of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (NAID 956131); Attendee of the March on Washington (NAID 542029); Student of the Westinghouse Vocational School (NAID 556143)

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The Archives holds a wealth of material documenting the Black experience. This page highlights these resources online, in programs, and through traditional and social media.

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10 Facts!
1. BLM started out as a love letter
2.BLM was a thing before the trend
3.Its more believe police brutality
4.Its a thing called organising
5.Its a global network not just a #
6.Leadful
7.All black lives matter
8. BLM does not say that all black lives matter
9.BLM fights white supremacy everyday
10.BLM resonates in Australia

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10 things you should know about Black Lives Matter

The Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLM) will be awarded the 2017 Sydney Peace Prize in November. The Movement for Black Lives, of which BLM is part, has galvanised the globe from California to London to Australia, and #BlackLivesMatter has proven to be a rallying cry for a new chapter in the long Black Freedom struggle. But how much do you really know about this important movement? Here are 10 things you should know about its origins, leaders, and purpose.

Black Lives Matter started with a love letter.

In 2012, 17-year-old , unarmed Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch who felt Travyon, walking home after buying a pack of Skittles at a nearby service station, was 'out of place' in the middle-class area. Zimmerman was acquitted for all charges.

Alicia Garza retells the experience: "Trayvon could have been my brother. I immediately felt not only enraged, but a deep sense of grief. It was as if we had all been punched in the gut. Yet soon people shrugged, as if to say: "We knew he was never going to be convicted of killing a black child," and "What did you expect?""

Turning to Facebook, Alicia wrote a 'Love Letter to Black Folks': "We don't deserve to be killed with impunity. We need to love ourselves and fight for a world where black lives matter. Black people, I love you. I love us. We matter. Our lives matter."

In a matter of moments, fellow community organiser Patrisse Cullors created the social media hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, and Opal Tometi created the website and social media platforms that soon connected people across the country. Black Lives Matter was born, and the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter started spreading like wildfire. A year later, it went viral during the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, when people took to the streets with a simple demand: Stop Killing Us.

"As we say 'Black Lives Matter', you see the light that comes inside of people from Black communities and other communities. People are like, 'I'm going to stand on the side of Black lives.' You see people transforming, and that's a different type of work. For me, that is a spiritual work, a healing work. What a great time to be alive."
Patrisse Cullors

This movement was born out of love, and love always wins.

2. BLM WAS A THING BEFORE IT WENT VIRAL

In 2013, steadily and strategically, the co-founders started to build the scaffolding of a nationwide on-the-ground political network.

Enter Ferguson. On August 9th, 2014, just a few weeks after Eric Garner died in a NYPD officer's chokehold in New York City, Mike Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was killed by twelve police bullets in Ferguson, St Louis. Police left his body in the street for four and a half hours, steps away from his mother's house.

The events that followed Mike Brown's death have often been described as ' the catalyst ' for the revolution-like protests that followed. "I can't breathe" and "hands up, don't shoot", the last words of Eric Garner and Mike Brown, were chanted loudly - people young and old mobilised to mourn and protest police brutality and racism. They were met with tanks, riot police and tear gas.

For the Black Lives Matter Global Network, it meant that the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag went viral on social media. Black Lives Matter became a slogan that leapt into the streets. Technology accelerated the pace of organising people, and allowed the movement to amplify their calls in ways that were impossible before.Over 500 members from across the US joined Patrisse Cullors in a #BlackLivesMatter 'freedom ride' to Ferguson to support the movement in St. Louis.

We were humbled when cultural workers, artists, designers, and techies offered their labor and love to expand #BlackLivesMatter beyond a social media hashtag.
Alicia Garza

For some 'Black Lives Matter' was a wakeup call, for many others the words gave voice to a deep seeded awareness of what it felt like to be black in America.

Black Lives Matter became a rallying cry that captivated the country, galvanising a national movement for dignity, justice and respect.

3. BLM IS ABOUT MORE THAN 'JUST' POLICE BRUTALITY

Black Lives Matter is an intervention.

It is an affirmation of the value of Black life, and a condemnation of the racism that devalues it.

On their website, BLM writes: When we say Black Lives Matter, we are broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state. We are talking about the ways in which Black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity.

Co-Founder Patrisse Cullors says: " Black Lives Matter is our call to action, it is about replacing narratives of black criminality with black humanity, a tool to re-imagine a world where black people are free to exist, free to live, and a tool for our allies to show up for us ".

Black Lives Matter demands that American society reconsider how it values black lives by identifying where and how black life is cut short, whether in viral videos of police brutality, the self-fulfilling prophecy of the criminal justice system, or in areas where black communities disproportionally face homelessness, poverty and economic disparity.

Black Lives Matter is about structural change. It is about sparking dialogue and changing the conversation: If it is true that black lives matter, then what does that mean for police reform, for our justice systems, for schools, for jobs, for infrastructure, and for economic development? If black lives matter, then what needs to change in politics and in the media?

To steer these conversations, over 50 organisations - including the Black Lives Matter Global Network - united in the Movement for Black Lives to launch "A Vision for Black Lives" in August 2016, ahead of the Presidential election. Following a year-long consultation process, a series of 40 policy goals calls for divestment from law enforcement (including ending the death penalty and mass incarceration) and investment in black communities through reparations, educational reform, jobs and infrastructure, and increased community control of neighbourhoods.

4. BLM IS ABOUT A THING CALLED ORGANISING

Protests are just one tool in a big toolbox of tactics for change.

BLM's disruptive actions and protest strategies are modern and bold, and regularly make media headlines. But whilst protests may get lots of media attention, organising is what builds sustainable, resourced movements. Organising includes building critical communities connections, convening member-led organisations where everyday people can strategise together, and cultivating local leadership. Organising includes creating space to reimagine what a fair and just society looks like, and to develop political thinking and ideas. Organising includes finding allies and co-conspirators, and building collective power to demand changes. Organising also means fostering peoples' skills to hold office bearers accountable for their decisions, and creating space for the celebration and humanisation of Black lives.

BLM's persistence and evolvement has breathed new life into the legacy of the black freedom struggle, reenergising older activists who are eager to connect with a new generation of organisers.

I identify as an organizer versus an activist because I believe an organizer is the smallest unit that you build your team around. The organizer is the person who gets the press together and who builds new leaders, the person who helps to build and launch campaigns, and is the person who decides what the targets will be and how we're going to change this world. Our folks have continued to organize locally, not just hit the streets. Many of our people are thinking about how to enact a political strategy. How do we build black power in this moment? How do we actually get people in office? It's not a hashtag that built the movement. It was organizers, activists, educators, artists - people who built an actual infrastructure so that a movement can exist and have life. Patrisse Cullors

5. BLM IS NOT JUST A #HASHTAG, IT'S A GLOBAL NETWORK

For Alicia, Patrisse and Opal, #BlackLivesMatter was never meant to be 'just' a hashtag or social media meme. Long before the protests that grabbed the world's attention, the Co-Founders started to organise people across the country, encouraging a broader and deeper conversation about what justice and dignity for black people might look like in an era of increasing inequality, mass incarceration and relentless police violence-and how people could join forces and build the power needed to achieve it.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network now has over 40 chapters worldwide, scattered across the US, Canada, the UK and with a growing presence in South African and Australia.

Activists for black, brown, and Indigenous rights around the world have adopted the Black Lives Matter slogan alongside homegrown movements against racism and police brutality.

Last month, BLM marked its four-year anniversary and released a report about its guiding principles, challenges, and plans for the future, along with a snapshot of where its member organisations have been.

" Four years later, we still declare with conviction that Black Lives Matter everywhere. "

Patrisse Cullors

6. BLM IS LEADERFUL

Many people have called Black Lives Matter the civil rights movement of a new generation. There is a great deal of nostalgia in comparisons with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, but if it's up to the Network, this movement will look very different.

The Founders are committed to building a movement that relies less on the establishment voices of a single or few very charismatic, cisgender men. Rather, they nurture a decentralised movement from the bottom-up: A movement that encourages different voices to emerge and shape their leadership based on experiences and needs rooted in the community they organise. The Network is truly a grassroots movement with a commitment to a 'leaderful' structure.

It is in this spirit that the three Founders have accepted the Sydney Peace Prize for the Black Lives Matter Global Network:

The Sydney Peace Prize is an affirmation and reminds us that we are on a righteous path. Accepting this award is about our people on the ground striving for justice every single day. It's truly meaningful to be recognized in this way. We'll continue to push forward until structural racism is dismantled and every Black life matters. It's our duty in times like this to keep our eyes steadfast on the freedom we deserve.
Opal Tometi, Co-founder Black Lives Matter and Executive Director, Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI)

7. ALL BLACK LIVES MATTER

The Black Lives Matter Global Network was founded on the values of inclusivity and love.

Black Lives Matter means ALL black lives matter and are creators of this space. Queer Black lives, Trans Black lives, formerly incarcerated Black lives, differently-abled Black lives, Black women's lives, immigrant black lives, Black elderly and children's lives. We rise together.

The Founders want the faces of this movement to reflect the change they strive towards in their own communities, which is that all black lives matter, regardless of their gender, class, sexual orientation, or age. Everyone's contribution is valid as long as people commit to uphold a number of Guiding Principles. These include working "collectively, lovingly and courageously", making space for queer leadership, respecting diversity, practicing empathy, and working towards an intergenerational network.

Black Lives Matter is committed to "(re)building the Black liberation movement": the Network supports those who were previously on the margins and invisible from the public eye - women, LGBTQIA people, undocumented immigrants, people with disabilities, and people with records - to take centre stage.

8. BLM DOES NOT SAY THAT ONLY BLACK LIVES MATTER

When people counter Black Lives Matter's call for justice with the phrase "all lives matter," there is undoubtedly a fallacy is this response.

While all lives should matter, this is a utopia as we do not currently live in a world where all lives are equal. The statement "Black lives matter" is not an anti-white proposition. Contained within the statement is an unspoken but implied "too," as in "black lives matter, too," - it is a statement of inclusion rather than exclusion. Only when Black lives matter will all lives matter. Black Lives Matter doesn't mean your life isn't important - it means that Black lives, which are seen without value within White supremacy, are important to your liberation.

Therefore, to say "all lives matter" in response to Black people saying "Black lives matter" is actually saying that Black lives don't matter.

"But we're a group that's looking at the totality of anti-black racism and its effects on communities of color," Cullors says.

Black Lives Matter sprang from a place of love, and inclusivity is at the very heart of their important work. A common misconception is that Black Lives Matter is only a trendy hashtag or that it only fights police brutality or vigilante violence against black people. BLM is not about saying yes to one identity, but about looking at how all marginalised people are impacted by Trump and his regime. BLM looks at the totality of anti-black racism and its effects on communities of color, collaborates with other progressive coalitions (sometimes under the banner of ' The Majority ') and supports other minority groups. For example, they have stood in solidarity with the Water Protectors at Standing Rock, and were amongst the first to gather at airports to protest President Trump's Muslim ban, declaring:

" We must rise in solidarity whenever and wherever necessary. (...) We know that these attacks do not live in a vacuum and that our issues are connected. This fight is for all who believe in justice."

9. BLACK LIVES MATTER FIGHTS WHITE SUPREMACY EVERY DAY

White supremacy, both the visible and more insidious invisible incantations of it, is alive and well across the globe. The rise of Trump in the US saw the emboldening of hate groups across the US. To garner votes and stoke anti-establishment flames, Trump latched on to the ideology of white supremacy and incentivised violence on the campaign trail, promising his supporters - some of whom carried the banners of Nazism and Klansmanship - he would " pay for the legal fees " of anyone who got violent with anti-Trump protesters.

While Trump can certainly be credited with fanning the flames of white supremacy, it is undeniable that violent racial inequality is woven into the very fabric of the American story (as is the case here in Australia). The sickening violence at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, made visible structural imbalances and privileges that have historical roots and continue to divide a nation and drive inequality. It is clear that white supremacy is not on the fringes of our society - it is in the White House and in Trump's Cabinet, but also in our work places, living next door to us, and serving us our morning lattes.

"To be shocked really means folks have an ahistorical analysis of this country. What we saw in Charlottesville, and what we'll continue to see across the country as white nationalist groups rise up and take to the streets, is that this is very much the fabric of American culture."
Co-Founder Patrisse Cullors

Black Lives Matter is working across geographical and issue areas to call attention to white supremacy and build sustainable, resourced movements to significantly reduce it. Organisers are taking the fight to their own backyards, organising people in local communities, having courageous conversations with people who would not otherwise have courageous conversations with us, or encouraging our allies to have those conversations in our stead.

10. BLM RESONATES HERE IN AUSTRALIA

We can't talk about Black Lives Matter without looking at our own backyard.

Racism and systemic discrimination is all to prevalent in Australia. Whilst the struggles are different in many ways, various communities feel a strong resonance with the Black Lives Matter movement in the US.

As BLM Co-Founder Alicia Garza, who in 2016 spoke with Stan Grant at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, says: People in Australia tend to highlight how big BLM is in the States, but Australia has some serious, serious issues around Black lives mattering."

Australia struggles to come to terms with its past and fails to right ongoing wrongs. Australia's First Peoples have fought for justice and dignity for decades, very few people know about Australia's past of slavery or ' blackbirding' of which our South Sea Islander community is still feeling the repercussions, and Australia's treatment of refugees and migrants, whether on Australian soil or in overseas detention centres, reeks of racism and discrimination.

The Black Lives Matter Global Network declared "we receive this award with tremendous gratitude and in solidarity with organizers throughout Australia who, in the face of egregious oppression, fightback against the state and proclaim that all Black Lives Matter."

Particularly Australia's First Peoples continue to endure systemic inter-generational injustice and trauma.

Most of the 339 recommendations from the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths have been gathering dust for years, yet imprisonment rates for Indigenous Australians are at an all-time high. In the Northern Territory and Western Australia more than 80 percent of the prison population is Indigenous, and the number of deaths in custody is increasing. In Western Australia, Indigenous suicides are eight times the national rate, and children as young as eight years old are suiciding. Since Kevin Rudd's Apology, children have been removed from their families four times as often than during the Stolen Generations.

When Ms Dhu died after being jailed for unpaid fines, and when Elijah Doughty's killer was found not guilty of manslaughter, communities around the country used 'Black Lives Matter' to demand justice for all Black victims.

Senator Patrick Dodson, 2008 Sydney Peace Prize Laureate, strongly supported the choice of the Jury: "This movement resonates around the globe and here in Australia, where we have become inured to the high incarceration rates and deaths in custody of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It's as if their lives do not matter. When there is ignorance, hostility, discrimination or racism, and they are allowed to reign unchecked, then we are all diminished."

Click for tickets to BLM's Sydney Peace Prize events Click for more information

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10 things you should know about Black Lives Matter | Sydney Peace Foundation

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The Black Lives Matter Global Network (BLM) will be awarded the 2017 Sydney Peace Prize in November. The Movement for Black Lives, of which BLM is part, has galvanised the globe from California to London to Australia, and #BlackLivesMatter has...

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Research Question 1:  Are African Americans finally gonna be treated correctly ?

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Research Question 1:  Are African Americans finally gonna be treated correctly ?

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Research Question 2: What damage did covid 19 really do ?

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Research Question 2: What damage did covid 19 really do ?

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Research Question 3: What is the actual meaning of the american dream ?

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Research Question 3: What is the actual meaning of the american dream ?

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The American Dream of all people to be able to be financially  free . Plus have the job and the family that they want for there own dream .

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American Dream | Best Indoor Amusement Park Near NYC - Water Park, Ski Resort & Luxury

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American Dream is an entertainment & retail center in NJ. We have an indoor theme park, water park, ski slope, & high-end luxury stores. Buy tickets online & save today!

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Back in the day the American Dream for the black people was the ability to be free and move and work jobs and to have the freedom they wanted. To be equal.

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By Nigel Chiwaya and Janell Ross
Aug. 3, 2020
Ebony Jones thought she was one of the lucky ones. Jones, a Black woman in her 30s, inherited a home her grandfather, a World War II veteran, had bought nearly seven decades earlier with the help of his GI Bill benefits.

But when Jones and her two children moved into the house in Compton, California, which was paid off almost 40 years ago, they soon discovered that sewage sometimes backed up in the living room and that the plumbing needed to be repaired. The distressing process of securing a home equity loan introduced Jones to an American reality.

Despite Jones' good credit score, low debt-to-income ratio, better-than-average income and several thousand dollars of savings, lenders who immediately expressed interest stopped or went quiet when they got to two questions.

What was her ZIP code? Answer: 90220. That's Compton, 29 percent Black, 68 percent Latino.

Was she married? Answer: No.

Federal law prohibits lenders from using the answers to those questions to determine a borrower's ability to repay a loan.

"When I initially apply for a loan online, without fail, I get no problem," said Jones, 37. "They bombard me with emails and letters. Then they see the property address or ask me if I'm married, and everything changes."

The United States is in the midst of a racial reckoning as protests that began in the wake of George Floyd's death in Minneapolis police custody, as well as high Black unemployment due to the coronavirus pandemic, have prompted some Americans to contemplate the ways institutionalized racism and discrimination have constrained Black lives for centuries.

Advocates, scholars and officials say one of the clearest examples of that ongoing discrimination exists in the housing market, where the gap in homeownership rates between Black and white Americans is wider than it was before the Civil Rights movement.

Seventy-six percent of white households owned their homes at the end of the second quarter of 2020, compared to just 47 percent of Black households, according to the Census Bureau. That 29-percentage-point gap, perpetuated by decades of housing and economic policies favorable toward white buyers and designed to exclude Black buyers, has only been exacerbated by the pandemic and before it the 2008 financial crisis. Homeownership is the prime driver of America's ongoing wealth gap.

"We have a housing market with different components, including rentals and purchases and financing and insurance, that is really built on a structure that was explicitly racist," said Debby Goldberg, vice president of housing policy and special projects at the National Fair Housing Alliance, a consortium of nonprofit anti-housing discrimination organizations. "It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone looking around to see how segregated we remain. To see this enormous homeownership gap. And hand in hand with that to see the enormous wealth gap that exists."

In Jones' case, being able to live reasonably required access to a home equity loan. Ultimately, just one bank, Navy Federal Credit Union, offered her a loan, but only after making her wait eight months - supposedly to see whether any additional heirs would lay claim to the house, she said - and with the condition that her boyfriend co-sign. Even then, the credit union offered her only $185,000. That's far less than $248,000, or up to 80 percent of the equity Jones had in the home after earlier repairs. That's what lenders typically allow a person with good credit to borrow.

Navy Federal declined to comment on Jones' case, citing its obligation to protect borrowers' privacy. The credit union is "committed to serving all of our members as a trusted financial partner," a Navy Federal spokesperson said by email.

The consequences of not owning a home or of becoming a homeowner later in life are enormous, experts say. It often leaves a family unable to reach other pillars of the American dream, like tapping into home equity to start a business, survive a job loss or a medical emergency or pay for a child's college education. It is part of the reason a higher percentage of Black households owe student loan debt than white households. And experts say not owning a home makes it harder for Black children to become adult homeowners.

"Black Americans are locked in a vicious cycle," said Andre M. Perry, a fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution who is author of "Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America's Black Cities." "It is the lack of wealth that is the first and most fundamental barrier to homeownership for Black people in this country."

America's housing gap ballooned after the New Deal, experts say, when the federal government rolled out a suite of programs to boost homeownership and construction-industry employment in the wake of the Great Depression. Many of the programs, such as the Federal Housing Administration, an agency that oversees federal backing of private mortgage loans, the introduction of the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage and a tax credit for those with mortgages, made buying a home much more affordable for white families.

But Black households were often left out of the homeownership boom because of redlining, a practice in which the Federal Housing Administration refused to back loans in areas that were occupied predominantly by people of color. Those areas, often lined or shaded red on agency maps, were considered too risky.

Other discriminatory policies also proliferated. In several cities, including Minneapolis, St. Louis, Seattle and Chicago, it wasn't uncommon to see housing deeds that forbade the sale of specific properties to people of color.

As a result, by 1950 only about a third of Black households owned their homes, compared to more than half of white households.

"Housing is a story about wealth. Access to housing is one of the ways to generate wealth," said Skylar Olsen, senior principal economist at Zillow, an online real estate information platform that regularly analyzes market trends. "Not having access to housing in the past because of redlining, that really, really impacted generations of wealth building."

The 1968 Fair Housing Act outlawed redlining. But experts say the barriers between Blacks and homeownership didn't evaporate with the law. A Northwestern University study of bias in the housing market published in January found that while overt forms of discrimination - a real estate agent who won't return a phone call or who will deny that a listing is available - have decreased over the past four decades, discrimination in the mortgage market showed little change from 1968 to 2016.

And Minneapolis, one of the cities where racially restrictive deeds were prominent during the early 20th century, to this day has the largest homeownership gap in the United States.

Experts say the reasons for the lack of change are baked into the financial system. Black neighborhoods are less likely to have bank branches in them, depriving many households of a chance to build a personal relationship with a banker that can lead to loans and positive credit histories. On-time rent payments aren't tallied into credit scores, while late payments are, creating a system that punishes misfortune while ignoring positive behavior. Rent payments and lower incomes also make it difficult for Black households to save for down payments.

And Olsen said that in an era when nearly half of young homebuyers needed gifts from their families to purchase homes, the lack of existing home equity from Black parents makes it harder for their children to purchase homes.

Since the Great Recession, bank lending standards have tightened in a way that bars many moderate-income buyers and those looking to purchase low-cost homes from the world of homeownership, Perry said.

Even when they make it to the mortgage market, Black homebuyers are more likely to be denied mortgages than any other racial group, according to a 2019 report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB.

When they are approved for mortgages, Black buyers remain more likely than any other racial group to be charged higher interest rates and to be steered toward predatory loans. And when unemployment rises, as it has during the COVID-19 pandemic, Black households are more likely to lose their jobs and homes. Black Americans were twice as likely to be foreclosed upon during the 2008 financial crisis, Olsen said. They were also far more likely to have been offered high-cost and therefore high-risk loans. Between the second quarter of 2004 and the second quarter of 2019, the Black homeownership rate fell 9.1 percentage points while the white homeownership rate fell 3.1 percentage points.

The homeownership gap between Black and white Americans on the cusp of retirement reached a 30-year high, according to a 2019 Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies Report. And among those ages 50 to 64, the Black/white homeownership gap is even larger, at 27 percentage points.

"Let's be clear about what those numbers really mean," said Odette Williamson, a staff lawyer who oversees the Racial Justice and Equal Economic Opportunity project of the National Consumer Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy group. "Not only is this a generation of Black people who have less than some before them, less to help cover medical and other expenses at the end of life, less to live on in retirement. This is yet another generation where many will have absolutely nothing to pass on."

During the Great Recession, a 2007 Rasmussen poll found that 54 percent of Americans believed greedy, dishonest borrowers were to blame for the last housing crisis. The idea, along with racism and a declining sense of white American power, helped to bind the tea party together. But Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who proposed a wave of financial regulations before and after that crisis, blamed banks and Washington lawmakers.

"Part of the reason for the confusion is that the lenders first peddled their products in communities of color," Warren said in an interview. "They perfected their cheating ways by taking advantage of African Americans and Latinos all across this country. And that just didn't raise anybody's attention.

"The fact that Black families were being stripped of their homes didn't feel like an urgent problem to the regulators in the Bush administration," said Warren, who first proposed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2007. It became a reality during the Obama administration. "The lenders ... figured out the most effective ways to cheat people and then sold those products in every community. And that's when they brought down the whole economy."

Banks also packaged and sold groups of high-risk, high-cost mortgages like securities.

Those who manage to buy their homes also face a gulf in how their home prices will grow. According to the most recent Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, the mean net housing wealth for Black households was $94,400 in 2016, less than half the $215,800 mean for white households. And an NBC News analysis of home value estimations from May 2020 on Zillow found that homes in ZIP codes that were predominantly Black were valued at just 60 percent of the value of homes in predominantly white neighborhoods.

And prices of Black-owned homes have appreciated far more slowly, as well. An NBC News analysis of home valuations from Zillow from 2010 to 2020 found that price growth of homes in predominantly Black ZIP codes was about half of the growth in predominantly white ZIP codes.

Experts say the same fundamentals that prevent would-be homeowners from getting mortgages keep Black homebuyers from getting loans to perform maintenance on properties and make retailers less interested in setting up shop nearby. Even parks and other public facilities tend to be more common and better maintained by governments in predominantly white areas.

"So now, not only do I not have as much of an income boost, I also have a limited ability to improve the capital stock," said Olsen, of Zillow. "The quality of the homes becomes more and more disparate between Black and white communities."

Perry, of the Brookings Institution, said: "The long-standing narrative in America is that the conditions of Black neighborhoods and cities are a direct result of the residents in them. People are so ahistorical that they forget there has been a policy violence leveled against Black people that comes out in the wash of research. There has been violence in practice from the nation's appraisers, which are almost 90 percent white. You cannot discount that violence happening on paper and in communities, year after year after year."

"To this day, our American Dream looks like an isolated hope."
Ebony Jones

As in many other American industries, The Appraisal Institute, an industry trade group, has maintained a " Diversity Pipeline Initiative" and has committed to expanding the profession in January.

In Compton, Jones said, a regular topic of conversation is how happy people are that Compton has its very own big-box store, part of a national chain. That's a meaningful convenience that Jones said she still can't believe people in other parts of the Los Angeles area have the luxury and gall to protest.

While the Black homeownership rate has increased since mid-2019, advocates worry that the homeownership gap will only grow, not only because the pandemic has sent Black unemployment to its highest level since the 1980s, but also because federal agencies have walked back Obama-era efforts to combat discrimination.

The CFPB, the government financial watchdog created under President Barack Obama and proposed by Warren, has drastically scaled back its discriminatory enforcement actions against bank lenders. The agency filed 11 such actions during the Obama era. The actions reclaimed what former Director Richard Cordray, an Obama appointee, described as $12 billion for consumers. After substantial resistance, they created conditions in which lenders knew the agency was watching and behaved accordingly, he said. The agency has filed just one enforcement action since then.

In July, the Department of Housing and Urban Development terminated a 2015 regulation connected to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing section of the Civil Rights Act. The rule, which required local governments and jurisdictions receiving HUD funding to analyze systemic barriers to fair and equal housing, was deemed "unworkable and ultimately a waste of time" by HUD Secretary Ben Carson, the only Black member of the Trump Cabinet.

In its place, HUD introduced a rule that lowered the requirements for jurisdictions, allowing them to continue certification as long as they take an "active step" toward promoting the agency's new definition of fair housing.

Goldberg, of the National Fair Housing Alliance, said the new rule disregards segregation and other systemic factors in housing.

"You look around us at what's been going on in this pandemic and you can see the conditions of neighborhoods of color that have been disinvested have put them in harm's way," Goldberg said. "This rule was one of the tools we had to try to tackle the inequalities. To take it away now is just inexplicable and inexcusable."

A senior HUD official said that fair housing remains a vital goal to the department and that freeing jurisdictions from paperwork compliance burdens would allow them to continue making progress in promoting fair housing.

But President Donald Trump in a series of tweets last week appeared to confirm that rescinding the rule was about preventing further racial and economic integration of suburban neighborhoods. Trump, who has repeatedly returned to the racist theme that the American way of life is under assault from Black protesters since the George Floyd protests began, said the rule change was aimed at protecting the "Suburban Lifestyle Dream" from "low income housing built in your neighborhood."

...Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!
- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2020

"In the time we were building new suburbs after World War II, we made low-cost credit available to white families and explicitly did not to people of color," Goldberg said. "This is how we thought about the American Dream at that time. That's the image the president is trying to conjure up."

Cities and states have tried to address parts of the gap. Minneapolis voted in 2019 to increase housing density and, with it, likely residential integration by eliminating single-family home zoning. That will allow apartments, condominiums and townhomes to be built in many more neighborhoods. A similar bill is pending in the California Assembly.

But advocates say real change must come from the federal government.

"The benefit of the federal action is that it can be larger-scale," Goldberg said. "It sets a floor for everyone. Everyone has some basic level of protection."

Without leadership from the government, advocates and regulators say, the gap will continue.

"What I fear," said Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., chair of the Financial Services Committee, which regulates banking, "is that in the absence of so many cops on the beat, now that Trump has installed his people over at the CFPB, at HUD and all the agencies, is that redlining may have returned, that new forms of discrimination are taking shape."

That possibility could distort the lives of generations of Black Americans to come.

"I think the issue for us is that we don't come from generations of wealth. Most Black people can't say that - they cannot say their parents and their grandparents, aunts and uncles all owned homes," Jones said. "So, to this day, our American Dream looks like an isolated hope."

"I'm trying to break cycles," Jones said. "I'm trying to assure that my children's goal is not survival but to thrive and flourish in a world full of possibilities that remain easier for some people, white people, to access."

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The American dream while Black: Locked in a vicious cycle

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By Nigel Chiwaya and Janell RossAug. 3, 2020 Ebony Jones thought she was one of the lucky ones. Jones, a Black woman in her 30s, inherited a home her grandfather, a World War II veteran, had bought nearly seven decades earlier with the help of his GI Bill benefits.

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The aspects that I found most interesting were mainly the articles they  each had a different intake on the American dream. Each resource gave a story and an example of how African Americans were judged and based on other people's opinions . I found it most interesting how non colored people found a way to always shut down black businesses and other colored people shops. Another point that caught my attention was the amount of deaths and incidents involving the black community.  The last thing I found interesting was the American dream after covid 19 hit . Covid 19 was the year where a virus made over a ton of people lose their jobs and homes . The main point of the American dream is to have wealth but how could people have wealth without a job or freedom .

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This area of my project focused mainly on the damages and how some particular colored people didn't really have a chance at life . In the article "There Is No A Black Man " by Kamga Tchassa the writer talks about how he wanted to leave his hometown to pursue his own education . He mainly talked about the power and belief of hustling for colored people and another benefit of being born privileged and not having to deal with being black .Kamga also talks about the lack of his education and lack of street knowledge For example he states that he " wish they’d hammered on the necessity of learning how to drive before I left Cameroon because it would be arduous to take the bus, and expensive to use Uber." This is a prime example on how black kids were never taught good knowledge and street smarts .

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Lil Baby - The Bigger Picture (Clean - Lyrics)

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With these prime examples it mainly focused on the lack of knowledge and the equal rights for African Americans to learn that they should be treated correctly . This is a major topic because education was the only way to get a job to be a part of the american dream . Without education it showed a primary example that they wouldn't be able to get a house , wife , kids ,and money or simply anything added to their name .One image that really spoke out to me was a photo I saw on one of the articles which showed a homeless person after he lost his job due to the lack of covid 19 money paybacks . This was a major deal in the world and a major aspect which left most people homeless and broke . With this research it relates to the topic because it studies that fact no matter what color , what job , or where you're from everyone wants one thing: wealth.

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There Is No American Dream For a Black Man

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Growing up in Cameroon, I believed America was the only dream. But the reality is much more complicated.

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Magazine, Smithsonian. “The Original Meanings of the ‘American Dream’ and ‘America First’ Were Starkly Different from How We Use Them Today.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 1 Oct. 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/behold-america-american-dream-slogan-book-sarah-churchwell-180970311/.

Tchassa, Kamga. “There Is No American Dream for a Black Man.” Medium, LEVEL, 9 July 2020, https://level.medium.com/they-lied-about-merica-238cdc38e10c.

“The American Dream While Black: Locked in a Vicious Cycle.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 3 Aug. 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/american-dream-while-black-homeownership/.

Zangrando , Joanna Schneider, and Robert L Zangrando. “Black Protest: A Rejection of the American Dream - JSTOR.” JStor.org, Sage Publications , INc , https://www.jstor.org/stable/2783799.

“The American Dream after Covid-19.” Origins, https://origins.osu.edu/article/american-dream-after-covid-19?language_content_entity=en.

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This project helped me learn a lot of information on this topic with the separate benefits of simple knowledge and learning more information . I felt that this project tested me more on being able to research certain topics and certain details with learning how to combine the topic into one . I felt that personally it was easier to do because we already focus on this topic a lot in class . I was able to use some of the discussion answers and add into my explanation  all in one.

This topic was easy to talk about also because I already knew a lot of information . I also felt it was easier to discuss .I  learned the difference between already having the American dream and having to earn it due to the color and based on where you are from which I still think isn't right . I also learned that the covid -19 will forever have a major impact on some people which made them homeless today and not able to get a job due to the lack of knowledge . Which also caused a huge outbreak of students to drop out of school .