The American Dream is the idea that anyone living in America, regardless of where they come from, can attain success and happiness. But according to Mona Hanna-Attisha, this ideal was “never meant” to work for people like the citizens of Flint, Michigan, a majority-Black city that’s plagued by poverty, racism, and harmful governmental policies. For Mona and her family of Iraqi immigrants, who arrived in America after fleeing Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1970s, the American Dream was real—but Mona’s parents were already educated, successful, and somewhat integrated into Western culture by the time they arrived in the U.S. Thus, they never experienced the same kinds of injustices and disadvantages faced by Black Americans living in Flint, a city with a long history of anti-Black racism and segregation. Indeed, Mona suggests that people who are disadvantaged by outside factors such as poverty, racism, and government corruption have a much more difficult time attaining the American Dream. By contrasting Hanna-Attisha and her family’s experiences with those of Flint’s residents, What the Eyes Don’t See suggests that although the American Dream is attainable for some, it doesn’t apply to everyone.
Mona shows how the American Dream worked for her family in order to illustrate its promises—as well as its conditional nature. When Mona describes her parents’ successful transition to life in America, she’s careful to allude to the many advantages they had before they even arrived in their new community of Royal Oak, Michigan. Mona’s parents were well-educated—they were both scientists, and her father had an advanced degree from a university in Europe. Thus, her father was able to secure a good job at General Motors when they immigrated. And Mona’s paternal grandparents lived in another nearby suburb of Detroit—so not only did Mona’s belong to a large Middle Eastern diaspora community in Michigan, but they had also family members nearby to help them with childcare and offer support. The advantages that Mona’s parents had upon arriving in America were not afforded to their very own neighbors in the Detroit metro area. For countless Black families in Flint and the surrounding areas, years of segregationist housing policies and racist hiring policies at the local automotive plants meant that well-paying jobs, good educations, and safe, fair housing were not attainable. While Mona’s family was able to participate in the American Dream almost immediately upon their arrival, for generations of Black Americans in the Flint area, the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were still long overdue.
As Mona describes how American industry and greed failed Flint and its people, she illustrates how people stymied by disadvantages beyond their control are often unable to achieve the American Dream. In the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, Flint was the epicenter of American industry, as all the major automotive plants had factories in and around Flint. For many Americans who arrived in Flint hoping to seize on its prosperity, there were lucrative jobs to be found, affordable homes to be bought, and the rapid emergence of a thriving middle class. But for millions of Black Americans who came to Flint seeking refuge from racially motivated violence and restrictive Jim Crow (segregation) laws in the South, Flint was not all it seemed to be. Racist hiring policies, segregated schools and housing, and the phenomenon of “white flight” (white families fleeing any neighborhood where Black neighbors moved in) made it clear that Flint’s—and, by extension, the U.S.’s—opportunities were not equally available to everyone. As the automotive plants moved out of Flint for cheaper locales, so too did many of the plant’s employees. Black Americans who’d fought tooth and nail for homes and jobs were left in a city whose industry had abandoned it. For decades to come, local and state officials neglected Flint and left the city to fall into disrepair as public health declined and violent crime rose. So, the people who lived in Flint when the city government switched Flint’s water source—many of them low-income and Black—had already experienced the failures of the American Dream. A debilitating blow like the water crisis just showed Flint residents even more clearly that they’d been lied to about the attainability of the American dream.
“Where is the American Dream?” Mona asks toward the end of the book. “It’s not there,” she concludes. While the U.S. touts itself as a place where freedom and equality are universal and where anyone can chase their dreams, the reality is that the U.S. still suffers from racism and other forms of injustice. For people like the residents of Flint, there are many barriers—both old and new—to attaining the American Dream. Flint’s complicated past means it’s a place that’s often overlooked or seen as unworthy of investment in programs geared at education, affordable housing, and public health. But for the American Dream to be real, it must be something anyone can pursue. It shouldn’t be only attainable “by way of a miracle.” Until there is real, lasting change in Flint—and communities like it all over the country—there is arguably no such thing as the American Dream.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The American Dream ThemeTracker
The American Dream Quotes in What the Eyes Don’t See
The road behind my family disappeared too. The Iraq they knew was lost, replaced by war and ruins. In my mind, this lost Iraq is a land of enchantment and despair. But its lessons endure.
No single bad decision or unfortunate event created modern Flint. The greatest forces working against the city were racism and the corporate greed of GM, which pulled out of Flint, the city that birthed and nurtured it, to satisfy financial problems caused by a lack of imagination.
I thought about everything he’d been through, largely preventable, all the toxic stresses: violence, fear, bullet wounds, hospital visits, surgeries, and PTSD, and then the effects of lead poisoning. For many people, life isn’t long enough to recover from a childhood like that.
A sea of red tape lay between me and an official health advisory which would hopefully free up resources and qualify the city for bottled water, filters, and other aid.
For the hundredth time, I wondered: Is the official indifference because these are Flint kids? Poor kids? Black kids? Kids who already have every adversity in the world piled up against them?
A central tenet of [environmental justice] is that local communities must have control over their environments—and decide whether a pipeline gets a permit, or a wind turbine gets built instead of a natural gas plant. When people have a say, smarter decisions are made—both for the environment and for public health.
Now, as the press conference loomed, I was beginning to see that my family’s saga of loss and dislocation had given me my fight—my passion and urgency. […] I grew up with dismay and knew how wrong leaders could be, how cruel and negligent. They have to be held accountable, have to be challenged, because power corrupts, and our moral sensibility can be so dulled that we let atrocities happen right around us, unless we manage to stay constantly vigilant, sensitive, aroused, and ready to take a stand.
I was drawing on something deep inside me. Maybe it was the letters my mom received from Haji in Baghdad, or the pictures I’d seen of the gassing of the Kurdish babies. Maybe it was the tenacity and optimism of Mama Evelyn or the strength and integrity of my dissident parents. Maybe it was the inspiration of my heroes, fighters like Alice Hamilton. […] Or maybe there was even something in my DNA, an ancestral inheritance of persistence and rebellion and activism, handed down to me from the generations of prolific scribes who had hoped to keep Nestorian traditions alive, or from Nuri […] with his brave rebellion, or from Paul Shekwana with his passion for public health.
Flint falls right into the American narrative of cheapening black life. White America may not have seen the common thread between Flint history and these tragedies, but black America saw it immediately. That the blood of African-American children was unnecessarily and callously laced with lead speaks in the same rhythm as Black Lives Matter, a movement also born from the blood of innocent African Americans.
Mv family came to the United States basically as refugees fleeing oppression, in search of a peaceful and prosperous place for my brother and me to grow up. The American Dream worked for us. […]
Yes, people are still running to America, or at least trying to. It remains the epitome of prosperity for the entire world, the richest country that ever was. But there really are two Americas, aren’t there? The America I was lucky to grow up in, and the other America—the one I see in my clinic every dry.
