Troy was stopped from achieving the American dream because of his race. Not only was he segregated from Major League baseball, but he continues to suffer the indignities of racism even as a garbage collector. In Act One, Scene One, Troy discusses with Bono his filing a complaint at work.
This complaint addressed the race division between the blacks and whites in his work, how the whites did the driving and the “colored lifting”. It was recompense for his segregation from Major League baseball to make the job equal, as Roudane argues, and it is significant because, though Troy remains limited, there is still a feeling of satisfaction from this small victory. The self-hate that Troy exhibits within the play is also remarkable.
Though he admonishes white people for their discriminatory practices, Troy is the only character within the play to uses excessive derogatory language to describe his own race. Use your imagination, but I doubt you'll have to go far.
This is a reflection of his views on his own race. In fact, the play itself reinforces this through its focus on the characters and their personal conflicts rather than the larger civil rights movements that were occurring during the time this play is set in. This self-hate also appears in Act One, Scene One, when Troy discusses with Bono an incident where a black man tried to steal a very large watermelon in his coat that was left an obvious and suspicious bulge.
This is the same man that apparently accosts Troy for complaining about work-place discrimination, and so the self-hate he exhibits comes not just from society at large, but also from what he sees as his own race holding him back. Another motivator for this hate for his own race is his traumatic past, made so by his abusive father. Troy describes an incident where his father tried to rape Troy’s thirteen-year-old girlfriend; Troy himself was only fourteen at the time of the incident and Troy stood up to him.
The ensuing beating that nearly killed Troy gave him a necessary wake-up call, “I thought I was blind. I couldn’t see nothing. Both my eyes were swollen shut. I layed there and cried. I didn’t know what I was gonna do. The only thing I knew was the time had come for me to leave my daddy’s house. And right there the world suddenly got big. And it was a long time before I could cut it down to where I could handle it”.
This extreme colloquial and systematic racism oppressed Troy, keeping him from the American Dream, and from capitalizing on his passions and skills. In the 2013 movie version, Bono mentions that Troy did get some taste of fame and fortune and having a taste of this perspective might just have been detrimental for Troy’s mental well-being.
Basically, knowing what he is missing tortures him, and that could be what made him cheat on Alberta. The poverty that the Maxson’s experience is not only caused by fences, but is a fence itself, reinforced by their race and poverty.
