Janerik Larsson
Nya generationer invandrare i USA på 1800-talet och i början av 1900-talet betydde nya generationer av gangsters. Med tiden förvandlades gangsters till hedervärda entreprenörer vars förflutna inte ägnades något polisiärt intresse.
Idag ser det annorlunda ut. Den amerikanska drömmen har blivit svårare att förverkliga.
Om detta handlar en läsvärd artikel i Washington Post:
Policing policies do not simply deny young men of color the time to transition into the licit economy as entrepreneurs or business owners. They make it exceptionally difficult for them to enter it at any level. These policies interacted with cultural narratives that suggested people of color were uninterested in the path trod by others before them, preferring criminal activity or welfare to work.
When we have made it so easy to exile people from the American dream, whether because their criminal records make it impossible for them to work or vote, or because people like Michael Brown are killed before they even have a chance to pursue it, no wonder the fantasy of the crooked ladder persists in culture. The off-screen reality, in which fewer and fewer ladders of any kind are available to people of color, is a gross diminution of American ambition. And it is only one of the things we should have found intolerable long before Michael Brown’s death.