ZOE C. WALKER, Ph.D.

What does it mean to believe in a country that has never fully believed in you? The ``American Dream" promises that hard work leads to success no matter where you start in life. But since the nation's founding, this promise has been undermined by the systematic exclusion of Black people from the very opportunities the Dream proclaims to be universal. American Dreams, Racial Realities explores how the paradox of racial inequality in an ostensibly meritocratic system shapes Black public opinion, revealing how narratives of resilience and resistance shape and constrain Black political imagination.  

 

Advancing existing work about the centrality of values in public opinion, I contextualize the popular and fondly-regarded narrative of upward mobility through hard work and thrift within a growing body of literature which shows that Black people encounter persistent, racial barriers to economic advancement, no matter how hard they work. This re-framing serves two purposes: first, it calls on scholars to regard public opinion about economic mobility with more scrutiny, particularly among structurally disadvantaged groups. Second, this re-framing offers a nuanced account of the tension between American national identity and Black racial identity.  Using multiple methods, including surveys and qualitative interviews, I find that Black Americans are deeply divided in their beliefs about what it takes to get ahead in America amid rising inequality and persistent systemic racism. 

 

​​​​​​​In a departure from existing theories of Black public opinion, which center Black Americans' alienation and exclusion from the American Project as the impetus of their political behavior, I consider how Black Americans' racial and national identities jointly inform their attitudes about the nature of  inequality. Drawing on the DuBoisian concept of double-consciousness and in conversation with work on nationalism and citizenship, I introduce a new framework to describe how Black Americans navigate being Black and American. I show that Black people do not passively accept the myth of the American Dream; rather, they actively adapt the myth to narrate their own stories of survival and success in the nation they call home. These narratives of Black resilience and Black resistance have consequences for political attitudes and behavior. With original data compiled from large national surveys, I find that the American Dream Myth informs beliefs about poverty, preferences for redistribution, and stereotypical beliefs about Black culture. 

 

When narratives of American progress cast Black advancement as validation of the social, political, and economic status quo, they simultaneously constrain the imaginative and political space available for reform. By making individual success the measure of collective progress, the narrative structure of the American Dream myth is also unequivocally political. It reconciles the tension between liberal individualism and racial egalitarianism (a tension that has long been at the heart of debates about race in American politics) at the expense of recognizing the structural barriers that sustain America's race and class divides.  Understanding how and why national narratives limit political possibilities is a prerequisite for any serious analysis of the gap between American ideals and American realities.

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