Dissertation | My Site

When Hard Work Isn't Enough

Race, Inequality and the Politics of Achieving the American Dream*

What are the political consequences of believing hard work is sufficient for economic mobility under conditions of ongoing racial inequality? Despite long-standing racial disparities in wealth, housing, and education, many Black Americans believe the American opportunity structure is open to those who work hard. I propose this confidence in the American Dream narrative constrains Black Americans' awareness of the extent of structural racism. In my dissertation, I expand on previous work in American politics about the role of meritocratic beliefs and individualism in structuring public opinion. I situate the American Dream narrative in the context of Black Americans’ historical and ongoing exclusion from opportunities to achieve upward mobility, amass wealth and gain financial stability. Given substantial social-scientific evidence that the opportunity structure in the United States is heavily stratified by race, Black support for the American Dream myth has insidious implications for racial inequality. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from three nationally diverse studies of Black Americans and a novel measure of belief in the American Dream, I test the extent to which the American Dream myth is associated with justification of the existing racial hierarchy, decreased awareness of structural racism and racially conservative policy preferences. Across these studies I find 1) support for the American Dream narrative is associated with an increased propensity among Black Americans to endorse negative stereotypes about their group's behavior and work ethic 2) the American Dream narrative is further associated with diminished support for racially re-distributive and reparative economic policies and increased support for market solutions to reduce racial inequality and 3) in open-ended survey responses, Blacks who express more support for the American Dream narrative are less cognizant of racial barriers to economic mobility. My dissertation work has been supported by the Russell Sage Foundation Dissertation Research Grant and a predoctoral fellowship from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (Ford Foundation).

In the first chapter of my dissertation, "The Politics of Working Twice as Hard", I introduce a novel framework for understanding how the American Dream myth reinforces negative stereotypes about Black people. Existing work shows the American Dream reinforces status-legitimizing attitudes among advantaged groups. My dissertation intervenes in this literature by describing how minoritized groups, like Black Americans, are harmed by the American Dream myth. Recasting the American Dream myth in the context of Black history in the United States, I argue that because Black Americans have historically been systematically excluded from accessing upward mobility (due in large part to formal and informal legal restrictions on their ability to earn a living, save money and obtain wealth) their belief in the American Dream is based not in reality but in distortion. Despite this, national data from sources like the ANES and the GSS show a surprisingly large proportion of Black Americans believe hard work pays off and that their groups’ own lack of hard work drives racial disparities. For example, the graph below plots Black Americans' explanations for BlacK-white inequality in the General Social Survey from 1996 to 2022. By clicking the arrow in the upper left, you can view the distribution of support for each of the category by year. For the "lack of effort" category, we can see that in most years, between 20 and 50% of Black Americans agreed that Blacks' own lack of will or effort was responsible for racial disparities.

I argue, endorsement of the American Dream narrative partially explains why many Black Americans support individualistic explanations of racial inequality. I describe this process of shifting the burden for racial inequality from systems to individuals as the politics of hard work. The more Black people believe anyone can achieve the American Dream just by working hard, the more they endorse negative stereotypes about their group members’ behavior and work ethic. I further argue attitudes about the American Dream help to explain Black support for spending on social programs like welfare and unemployment, and race-targeted policies like reparations. Finally, the belief that America eventually rewards hard work for everyone is associated with increased support for market solutions to address racial inequality, like Black capitalism.

I use mixed-methods to assess the salience of the American Dream narrative and its relationship to Black political attitudes and policy preferences. To assess the relationship between the American Dream and group attitudes as well as policy preferences, I combine qualitative and quantitative data from three original surveys of Black American adults fielded through Prolific (N = 505), CloudConnect (N = 1,000) and YouGov (N = 1,200) and data from semi-structured interviews ( N = 10). I introduce a novel, bi-dimensional measure, Attitudes About the American Dream (AAD), which combines perceptions of opportunity (dimension 1) with belief in the pay-off of hard work (dimension 2) and validate my measure with confirmatory factor analysis. Using multivariate OLS regressions in both the Prolific and YouGov studies, I find Blacks who believe the American Dream can be achieved through sheer hard work are significantly more likely to endorse negative stereotypes about their group and to oppose race-targeted policies like reparations.

I supplement these findings with qualitative data from open-ended survey responses. With data from the CloudConnect study, I use a structural topic model to analyze open-ended responses to the AAD measure. I find Blacks who believe the American Dream can be achieved through hard work are less cognizant of racial barriers. Conversely, those Blacks who believe strongly in the American Dream are significantly more likely to mention personal factors like attitude and mindset in their responses than Blacks who are disillusioned with the American Dream.

Finally, in my semi-structured interviews of Black adults, I find that when asked about advice they were given about navigating racism as a child, most Black Americans volunteer that they were encouraged to work hard or told that would have to work harder than whites. From these interviews, I also find that many Black Americans reject government intervention as a solution racial inequality and instead focus on ways to change their groups' behavior. Overall, the combined qualitative and quantitative results show that among Black Americans, the American Dream myth shifts the burden for resolving racial inequality from institutions to individuals.

My dissertation introduces needed nuance to research on the role of meritocratic beliefs and values in shaping public opinion among minority groups. My dissertation and book promise to innovate American politics in the following ways.

First, my project proposes and tests the novel claim that the beloved American Dream narrative reinforces the existing racial hierarchy.
Second, it introduces a validated universal measure of attitudes about the American Dream which can be applied to assess the relationship between these attitudes and several policy and attitudinal outcomes for any group.
Finally, my project interrupts existing literature's conclusions about race and meritocratic belief systems. I show compelling evidence that, among Black Americans, across partisanship, age, and ideology, ideas about economic mobility are intimately tied to racially conservative policy preferences and negative attitudes toward their own racial group. This project presents a multi-methodological test of how perceptions of economic systems influence public opinion by clarifying the relationship between abstract beliefs about economic mobility and specific beliefs about the behavior and attitudes of Black Americans.

My dissertation also has broader implications for longstanding debates in American politics about the relative significance of structural racism and individual behavior as causes of racial inequality. In recent years, federal and state policymakers have disputed the importance of public education on the consequences of structural racism. For example, in 2022 Florida passed Senate Bill 148 (aka, the S.T.O.P. W.O.K.E. Act) which bars public schools from teaching, among other things that "Such virtues as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness are racist or sexist, or were created by members of a particular race, color, sex, or national origin to oppress members of another race." This law and others like it illustrate the soft power of the American Dream myth to shape policy and public discourse around racial inequality. Despite the reality that hard work does not reap the same payoff for Black Americans (and other minorities) as it does for whites, legislation like Florida's makes the mere mention of unequal access to opportunity illegal. As the American public grapples with disputes about the meaning and significance of race and racism, my work underscores how inaccurate narratives about the causes of upward mobility harm Black Americans and reinforce the existing racial hierarchy.

*This research was made possible by generous funding from the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (Ford Predoctoral Fellowship) and the Russell Sage Foundation (Dissertation Grant) .