Achieving Against The Odds

8 Teaching American Dreams/American Realities: Students’ Lives and Faculty Agendas

Lois Rudnick 8 Teaching American Dreams/ American Realities Students’ Lives and Faculty Agendas My American dream is to fit in the American society, be Americanized without losing my cultural heritage, inhale the freedom and human rights, and have my own “home page” in the American history as an active individual. —fall 1996 student response to the question, “What is the American Dream?” IF I were not an academic, I might argue that I was fated to title my survey course in American Studies, American Dreams/American Realities. My life is, from one perspective, a paradigm of the middle-class norm of the American Dream. I am a third-generation Jewish American who started life with my parents and grandparents in a double-decker in Dorchester, Massachusetts (a few miles from UMass/Boston). My family moved to the suburban wilderness of West Roxbury in the early 1950s and became a part of the great white American escape from the cities. Here I lived an almost entirely sheltered life, innocent of issues of race, class, and gender, except for my forays to Girls’ Latin School, where I experienced some ethnic and class diversity. At Girls’ Latin, I was given an almost messianic vision of what a young woman could accomplish, which reinforced my faith that I could do and be anything I wanted (except a mathematician or a scientist). It wasn’t until I was in my twenties that the veil drawn over American history—and the history of my own family—first lifted, as my father regaled me with tales of his days as a member of the Communist and Progressive Parties, including stories of me as a four-year-old standing on a Dorchester street corner, handing out Henry Wallace for President leaflets. My dad’s radicalism was a taboo subject in my household during the McCarthy era: he had been contacted by the FBI just at the point when he had achieved his American Dream by receiving an academic appointment in an engineering department at a local university. My 141 father was one of the lucky ones who survived, and my family thrived during the expansive 1950s and 1960s. My college years at Tufts University in the early 1960s were almost as sheltered as my childhood. As a liberal Democrat, I noticed with approval that there were students organizing for voter registration drives in the South, but that didn’t concern me personally—not to mention the fact that my mother would have had heart failure if I had so much as mentioned putting myself in any kind of danger. My academic awakening to the tensions that existed between the American Dream and its realities came in a course called Introduction to American Literature, taught by Jesper Rosenmeier, a Danish immigrant and student of the historian Perry Miller (one of the founding fathers of American studies). Rosenmeier’s course committed me to a lifelong fascination with the idea of the United States as a “city upon a hill,” whose “errand in the wilderness” was supposed to achieve “the last, best hope of man,” a utopian promise that left both wonder and havoc in its wake. However, it wasn’t until after my semi-bucolic college years that I learned to face the race and class vectors of that wake. Between 1966 and 1972, although I couldn’t have known this at the time, I was preparing myself for teaching at UMass/Boston: formally by studying for a Ph.D. in American Civilization at Brown University, and experientially through involvement in learning environments far removed from my own elite education. I was a reading teacher in an Upward Bound Program in which some of the urban students I worked with distrusted me because of my class, race, and religion; a composition teacher at a junior college whose working-class students challenged my “lecture” format; an antiwar activist living under suspicion (though unharrassed) in a Republican suburb of Boston; an instructor in an Introduction to Black Studies course at Brown University who was boycotted by my black and white students in protest against my race. My most important epiphany came the summer after the black studies course, when I was employed as the only white instructor of innercity high-school students. After one of my students called me “a jive-ass nigger-loving honky” in front of the class, I decided to quit my job. I could no longer stand being put into a “category” that had nothing to do...