Americans Dreaming: Work and the Politics of Racial Resentment
Stone Center Affiliated Scholar Enobong (Anna) Branch, professor of sociology and senior vice president for equity at Rutgers University, and Caroline Hanley, professor of sociology at William & Mary, are the authors of the recently published book, Work in Black and White: Striving for the American Dream. Based on interviews with 79 middle-aged Black and white Americans, the book reveals how the experiences and histories of workers in each group have shaped their assessments of their own success and their reactions to increasing economic insecurity.
In this blog post, the authors draw on the lessons of their book to argue that it’s time not only to redefine the American Dream but to push for sustainable change that leads to “true economic freedom.”
By Enobong (Anna) Branch and Caroline Hanley
“Are you better off than you were four years ago?” That was the simple, powerful question that presidential candidate Ronald Reagan asked voters in his televised debate with soon-to-be ex-President Jimmy Carter in October 1980. Voters responded with a resounding “no” that carried Reagan to the White House in a landslide election. In 1980, the United States was in the midst of a recession that followed almost a decade of bad economic news. The rising inflation, high unemployment, and stagnant wages of the 1970s marked the end of a long postwar period of widespread economic security.
Just as Black Americans gained access to the good jobs they had long been denied in the post-Civil Rights period, the structure of opportunity in America changed. The transition from the postwar to postindustrial economy went far beyond the turn away from manufacturing as the bedrock of the American economy. The traditional pathways to economic security became less predictable. Fewer jobs offered life-long employment and stable pensions or benefits, forcing workers to compete more often for less stable jobs. This reduction in good jobs meant that workers entering the labor market in search of the American Dream in the 1980s and beyond encountered a fundamentally different structure of opportunity and rewards than those in the 1960s. Since the 1980s, each economic downturn has wiped out good jobs and replaced them with less good jobs, and today even highly educated professional workers are vulnerable.
A myriad of macroeconomic and policy changes drove this reality, but instead of talking about these changes directly, some politicians began winning elections based on a simplistic narrative rooted in race-blame. From welfare to reverse discrimination, the Black poor and the Black educated were, respectively, held up as the cause of white Americans’ economic pain. As economic insecurity has deepened, so too has desperation. The 2015 Charleston massacre, in which nine African Americans were killed during a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, was motivated by the shooter’s desire to “save the white race,” since “Blacks were taking over the world.”
The pervasive and rising racial tensions we see today are no accident: they are the result of a purposefully divisive political discourse that cynically exploits a disconcerting economic reality. The American Dream is a powerful illusion that calls all workers, regardless of their lived experience, to work harder for a better life with the promise that if they do, they can achieve it, but if they do not, they personally failed.
At this moment, our political institutions feel broken, and our economy feels stuck. What does the American Dream mean now? In the 2020 presidential campaign, President Donald Trump weaponized calls to “Make America Great Again” with a more explicit discourse of racial resentment and xenophobia than Americans have seen in the mainstream for a generation, while President Joe Biden called on Americans to “Build Back Better” with social and economic infrastructure investments at a level not seen since the New Deal. Both frameworks appealed to the American Dream, and the sense that something good has been lost, but they presented drastically different visions of how to move toward it.
The Black and white educated, middle-aged workers, whose stories we tell in our book express common ground on the ideal of a meritocratic America in which the individual who deserves security is the person who works for it. Yet, in their accounts, the fairness of the system itself and the feasibility of the Dream are unquestioned.
The meritocracy narrative is a constraint on collective progress, for as long as American workers are focused on their individual efforts, such as obtaining an education as the key to opening the door to the American Dream, the “us” versus “them” competition remains intact — even as who is included in “us” shifts. We need a way to make sense of striving, making great efforts to achieve the American Dream, that doesn’t blame individuals for failing. For as long as individuals are chasing job security, hustling to demonstrate deservingness, and internalizing failure, the broad coalition needed to push for change and sustain it cannot be formed.
Instead, Black and white Americans will chase the elusive American Dream while bemoaning the fact that it is not working for them. The reality is this — unless we redefine the American Dream inclusively, creating the means to enable true economic freedom — not just aspirational opportunity, but the means to achieve it — we will not live up to the ideal, the promise, or the possibility of America.
Read More:
Work in Black and White: Striving for the American Dream, published by the Russell Sage Foundation