Author Casey Gerald on the fantasy of the American Dream
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In his new memoir "There Will Be No Miracles Here," author Casey Gerald writes that the American Dream is real. Gerald doesn't preach from a place of blind optimism. He speaks from his own experiences.
Casey Gerald knows what it means to be a child who needs more than you have, to grow up with parents who weren't there, to arrive on the campus of an Ivy League School and feeling excruciatingly out of place. He understands what it means to come of age in a culture that is in turmoil over race and social justice.
"You take a kid like me, from a forgotten world like Oak Cliff, Texas, and you send him to Yale and Harvard and Wall Street and Washington. You put him on the cover of magazines and it distracts us from the fact that there is a conveyor belt, leading most young people in this country from nothing to nowhere. I am a glitch in the American machine, which works off this fantasy called the American Dream," says Casey.
Guest: Casey Gerald is the co-founder of MBA's Across America, a writer and author of "There Will Be No Miracles Here".
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