“The ability to distinguish between the ideology of the American Dream and the experience of the American nightmare requires political analysis, history, and often struggle.”
—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor1
“Indeed, white Americans’ historied penchant for both knowing that racial inequality exists but construing that inequality as separable from their own racial advantages, their habit of interpreting economic privilege as a matter of individual merit or virtue, and their studied denouncement of the worst southern crimes while ignoring the presence of other forms of racial domination indicate that our national condition has long been marked by a severe disconnection from reality. In this sense, racial innocence is the alchemy by which Americans turn enduring and otherwise visible inequality into redemptive stories of rights, equal protection, individualism, and progress. It is America’s belief in their own blamelessness for the material realities of racism.”
—Kirstine Taylor2
“Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.”
—Barry Switzer3
A core principle of American exceptionalism is the myth of meritocracy. The myth presumes that the United States is the only place in the world where great fortunes can be derived from hard work and perseverance. The achievement of wealth and private property forms the essence of the “American Dream.” Horatio Alger, a 19th-century author, is often credited with first promoting the myth in his own story about being a “self-made” man who rose from “rags to riches” through hard work. Much of his personal story was a lie, but the myth has become forever useful to an American ruling class that depends on the “American Dream” to obscure the source of its opulent wealth. The narrative firmly reduces race and class position in American society to mere obstacles that can be overcome with diligent participation in the capitalist system.
We are constantly reminded about this supposedly unique condition by American presidents, media pundits, and representatives of the capitalist elite who use the “American Dream” to paint the U.S. as the best country in the world. The “American Dream” legitimizes the wealth of the American ruling class. American capitalism, after all, is about winning and losing. Winners obtain riches while losers must continue to play the game. Yet as Daniel Smith points out,
when you hear someone refer to their professionalism, merit or hard work, it’s generally an attempt to divert attention from their inherited privilege. They are saying they deserve their position because of their individual performance—despite the reality that individual accomplishment almost always lags behind inheritance, accumulated wealth or contacts, and educational credentials.4
Accumulated wealth is a staple of American national identity, which has always been rooted in the relationship between whiteness and property.5 The so-called leaders of American “independence” were not just white, but wealthy property owners, many of whom traded and exploited African slaves. Whiteness purified the American colonial system of inheritance and theft. It altered class relations to ensure that poor whites sought property and not allegiance with property-less slaves. So, when Malcolm X stated that he didn’t see any “American Dream,” just an “American Nightmare,” he was speaking to the actual conditions that Black people have been forced to endure in America throughout the nation’s history.
The “American Dream” has never been achievable for most Black Americans due to the legacies of white supremacy and mass enslavement. To obscure this reality, American exceptionalism has explained American history through the prism of progress. The American Dream narrative tells us that Black Americans are no longer enslaved and have been participating in the capitalist economy as “free labor” for over a century. They’ve had the same opportunities to enrich themselves as anyone else, the story goes, and a small few indeed have become rich. The general economic condition of Black America, however, is far from exceptional.6
Numerous studies have been conducted on the state of Black wealth in America following the 2007–2008 capitalist economic crash. According to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), Black wealth in America will hit zero by 2053 if current trends persist. Black median wealth has dropped from $6800 in 1983 to just $1700 in 2013, a decrease of 75 percent. White American wealth has increased by 14 percent, from $102,200 per family household to $116,800 over the same period. The economic pain inflicted by the foreclosure crisis explains the steep loss of wealth experienced by Black Americans. Home equity for Black Americans was $16,700 less in 2017 than it was in 2007.7 Even more damning to American exceptionalism’s altar of progress are recent studies by the Economic Policy Institute which show no progress for African Americans in areas of incarceration, homeownership, or unemployment since 1965, with over 21 percent of Black men finding themselves unemployed in 2016.8
The 2007–2008 economic crisis hit Black America particularly hard because the American capitalist system was always predicated upon the super exploitation of Black people. As another study points out,
Sworn testimony from former Wells Fargo employees alleged that the bank deliberately tricked middle-class black families they called “mud people” into subprime “ghetto loans.” They were certainly not the only originator doing this, as the overall differences were extremely significant. A Center for Responsible Lending study found that from 2004–2008, 6.2 percent of white borrowers with a credit score of 660 and up got subprime mortgages, while 19.3 percent of such Latino borrowers and 21.4 percent of black borrowers did.9
American finance capitalists motivated by profit and racism had already segregated Black neighborhoods, devalued Black homes, and pushed millions of Black families to the economic margins characterized by low-wage work, unemployment, and poverty. Schools in Black America have been deliberately segregated and underfunded while welfare programs have been significantly scaled back since former President Bill Clinton ended “welfare as we know it” in 1996.10 In fact, ten million of a total of fourteen million Black households fall into the bottom fifty percent of households in America that control just one percent of the national wealth. Overall, White Americans control over ninety percent of the national wealth. It would take the average Black family 228 years to amass the wealth of the average white American family.11
These numbers reflect a racialized poverty that the American ruling class refuses to publicly acknowledge. To do so would cast a light on the reality that the “American Dream” was never meant for Black America. In fact, America’s leadership in the global enterprise of racialized capitalism has driven down conditions for poor people generally both inside and outside of the American nation-state. In 2017, the richest 1 percent of the world’s population usurped 82 percent of all global wealth created, while the bottom 50 percent of the world’s population saw no increase in wealth.12 By 2021, only 1 percent of the population will own 70 percent of the wealth in the U.S. while 80 percent of the American population is on the brink of poverty or worse.
The Black condition thus reflects the common adage that one would have to be asleep to truly believe in the “American Dream.” There are many reasons why these conditions have not caused massive upheaval. Most American workers are not in labor unions and few organizations exist to collectively demand redress for worsening inequality. The displacement and chaos that poverty causes in the lives of working people is mainly to blame. However, a less visible reason is the belief among many Americans that the U.S. remains the most “exceptional” country in the world regardless of hardship.
This widely held sentiment is supported by the optics of the United States’ political and media apparatuses. Critical to the optics of the “American Dream” is the heavy promotion of individualism as the means to economic and cultural progress. In her book Myths that Made America, Heike Paul traces the centrality of individualism in the historical development of the American nation-state. Tales of individual striving toward personal economic glory trace back to the days of Benjamin Franklin and run a thread through American history. The notion of the “self-made” man has long become one of America’s strongest cultural values. As Paul further explains,
The term . . . is deeply intertwined with various aspects of American exceptionalism. There are contradictory forces at work in this notion, as it includes both aspects of self-denial (education, hard work, and discipline) and self-realization based on an ethic of self-interest that aims at the sheer accumulation of property, recognition, prestige, and personal gain without any concern for others.13
Unsurprisingly, today’s most ardent promoters of “self-made” individualism and the “American Dream” often describe themselves as modern day Horatio Algers. The post–Civil Rights era in particular has seen the advent of a politics of representation that fuels a “hero mentality.” Black politicians and celebrities are advertised as role models and proof that the “American Dream” does in fact exist. When Barack Obama became president in 2008, posters went up of a popular Jay-Z lyric in schools around the country that read, “Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Obama could run, Obama ran so all our children can fly!” This perversion of history equates the aims of the Black Freedom movement with those of Obama, obscuring the fact that the former Black president is credited for instituting economic policies that decimated Black wealth during his tenure.14
The “hero mentality” thus bestows innocence upon the U.S. by fetishizing the wealth and personal success of American celebrities, politicians, and business elites. That the accumulation of wealth is predicated upon exploitation or that the safety of wealthy suburbs is dependent upon homelessness and racist policing are effectively obscured. Poor Black Americans are supposed to “dream big.” Dreaming big means becoming NBA players, rappers, or entrepreneurs rather than fighting for social and economic justice. Social uplift is defined as whatever the elite class says it is, namely, the desire to achieve the status possessed by the very people responsible for poverty.
Lisa Guerrero places a spotlight on the role the National Basketball Association (NBA) plays in defining Black economic success. The NBA, she writes, is “marketing (and manipulating) the [American] dream better than almost anybody in the pop culture game today.”15 The NBA achieves such success by iconicizing players like Michael Jordan and LeBron James and attaching “American Dream” tropes to their personal success. The message corporate enterprises like the NBA send to Black America is often riddled with conflict. Black NBA players are expected to both reject their Black identity and embrace it at the same time as a key marketing tool for advertisements and product promotions. A duality is created where some players, like Michael Jordan, embody the rejection of racist, anti-Black stereotypes while others like Allen Iverson are encouraged yet chastised for representing the “street” life (i.e., poor Black communities) to maximize and diversify sales to white and Black fans alike. Whatever the case, the NBA and sports leagues generally are some of the biggest distributors of the American Dream ideology that exist today.
In the realm of the corporate media, however, perhaps no one embodies how steeped American culture is in the myth of the “American Dream” than Oprah Winfrey. Known to many as Oprah, the Black woman turned billionaire rose to stardom during the neoliberal era of American capitalism. Oprah’s show became immensely popular for the host’s ability to sell the “American Dream” by connecting her early life struggles to the personal struggles of “ordinary people” and advising her viewers to strive for personal self-help and well-being. In his book, Fabricating the Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture, Jaap Kooijman aptly summarizes Oprah’s neo-liberal philosophy:
Oprah Winfrey herself, as a formerly overweight African-American woman who became one of the most powerful individuals in the American media industry, embodies an American success story, whose star myth (Oprah’s American Dream) is reinforced by each episode of her talk show [. . .] The Oprah Winfrey Show regularly employs American celebrities, who appear on the show to promote themselves and their recent products by revealing a glimpse of their personal lives, suggesting that they too are just ordinary people, encountering the same problems as the Oprah! viewers do.16
Oprah has accumulated a billion-dollar fortune by prescribing individualist solutions for systemic problems. Through hard work, perseverance, and Oprah’s “self-help” tools, we too can become billionaires. Yet in the age of neoliberal capitalism, Oprah and the celebrity class represent mere proxies for American exceptionalism and innocence. Their fortunes tell the mythical story of racial progress and the development of a more exceptional society despite the reality that wealth distribution is highly skewed to a tiny minority of the population; that a wealthy minority keeps Black America without wealth; and that even Black celebrities such as Kanye West and Tisha Campbell-Martin have revealed their own struggles with debt, making their public image as wealthy millionaires a mere illusion.17
Wealth concentration and the explosive growth of debt and poverty in the United States have called the “American Dream”—and thus the whole notion of American economic exceptionalism—into question. The narrative that one can achieve prosperity on the basis of individual effort and hard work has given way to the reality that American capitalism has always been a racialized inheritance system. And the wealth of the 1 percent has never come about primarily because of merit, effort, or “small government.” Rather, history shows that banks, businesses, and corporations—far from letting “the free market do its thing”—actually depend on government intervention to maximize profits. As Matt Taibbi argues, “nobody, be he rich or poor, wants his government services cut.”18 Such government handouts to the wealthy and powerful include: military contracts from the Pentagon; Quantitative Easing programs from the Federal Reserve; strict government regulation and protections from competition for pharmaceutical companies; and, finally, spending “twice the amount of the annual federal budget” to bail out and preserve bonuses for the thousands of Wall Street bankers “who nearly blew up the world economy.”19 It might be more accurate, then, to call our system a “trickle up” economy, one where the earnings of the poor, working, and middle class subsidize the wealthy and the powerful. Capitalism does indeed involve a redistribution of wealth, just not in the way a just society is supposed to.
Wealth is privately accumulated through the exploitation of workers, especially Black workers, and then passed down to future generations. Every lever of American capitalism reinforces inheritance, whether it is in the low taxes that corporations and wealthy individuals pay on capital gains or the tax code’s deductions on donations to the nonprofit sector. Nonprofits, often seen as the benevolent hand of private enterprise, help reify wealth disparity by providing tax shelters to rich donors who receive a tax deduction for their contribution. Most nonprofits are under the direct control of their wealthy donors. According to Christine Ahn,
In 2000, 66 percent of foundation board members were men and 90 percent were white. Although a handful of liberal foundations may employ some program officers that are people of color or progressive, it is ultimately foundation trustees who have the final say in the grantmaking process. And with few exceptions, foundation trustees are extensions of America’s banks, brokerage houses, law firms, universities and businesses.20
With the amount of bracelets, marathons, and free concerts promoted by and for charity groups, the average American may not feel comfortable critiquing what has been coined the nonprofit industrial complex. After all, who could be against giving money to charity? But as Heike Paul observes, “Giving away one’s wealth, of course, retrospectively affirms once more that one had earned and owned it legitimately.” So the problem with many forms of charity, she continues, is that it “seeks to close the gap between self-interest and the common good by ‘returning’ to the general public what had previously been extracted from it through often exploitative practices.”21
Nonprofits are not the only example of how American capitalism is based more on inheritance than meritocracy. The institution of marriage is another example of American capitalism’s veracious system of racialized wealth inheritance. Historically, marriage has organized the family into a monogamous pair in order to facilitate the patriarchal control of women as the private property of men. Today, this institution has served as an important social control mechanism in many respects, including the state’s privileging of the romantic couple (either straight or gay) as the ideal form of relationship. In addition, the institution of marriage reserves certain health and immigration benefits exclusively to monogamous couples, while at the same time creating the rather crude categories of “legitimate” and “illegitimate” children. Finally, and more importantly for our discussion here, scholars like Morgan Bassichis and Dean Spade have shown that marriage has historically been weaponized to reproduce the accumulation of white wealth at the expense of Black America, mainly by demonizing the Black poor as incapable of the stable marriages necessary to achieve economic uplift.22 This is why imagining a way forward out of capitalism must include the abolition of inheritance. After all, it’s not just wealth that is inherited in American society, but poverty as well.
“American Dream” mythology is embedded in every fiber of the U.S. power structure to prevent Americans from seeing capitalist inheritance and the inequality it produces. Corporate media such as the Oprah! show, the sports industry, marriage, and even the nonprofit sector reinforce the sanctity of individualism and the notion that the U.S. is a meritocratic society. Material conditions, however, beg to differ. Black Americans, and indeed most Americans (as well as most the world’s people generally) have seen a dramatic decline in their share of total wealth in recent years. Of course, this doesn’t stop many white people—who naively believe that their wealth is earned—from blaming Black people for their dire economic situation. Katie Grimes argues that this sentiment is nothing new, and places such racial animus in historical context:
Federal spending practices . . . accorded white power much-needed ideological camouflage. In the Cold War era, whites needed to believe themselves not only not “racist” but also not “communist.” Authorities assured them that federal meddling in the mortgage market represented not a violation of free market principle but their illumination. Rather than the gift that enabled their affluence, whites considered government housing subsidies a type of reward they earned by being hard-working winners. As if recapitulating the ideology that animated racialized slave mastership, whites believed both that they deserved these interventions but that they did not need them. They conversely imagined black people as those who did not deserve but greatly needed federal aid. As whites, they had rights and well-earned rewards while slave-descended black folks had already been given more than they deserved. Black people were owed nothing; white people had been given nothing and deserved everything they had.23
To give another example, as Ira Katznelson shows in his book, When Affirmative Action Was White, the GI Bill played a significant role in “widening an already huge racial gap in postwar America.”24 Such are the material realities produced by racial and American innocence when applied to the framework of the “American Dream.” Innocence has us assume the United States offers equal opportunity for all to flourish. If you do succeed, it’s because you took advantage of the greatness America has to offer. But if you don’t succeed, then it’s your fault, not the state’s.
The time is coming when the narratives of American exceptionalism and American innocence will no longer be able to sustain the country’s meritocratic image. Wealth disparities will eventually give way to popular frustration. We have already seen signs of such frustration in the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, the Wisconsin labor protests that same year, and the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign of 2016. It is time to build on these efforts and develop a new model of social organization based on Martin Luther King Jr.’s idea of a “Beloved Community”—“a global vision, in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth” and where “poverty, hunger and homelessness will not be tolerated because international standards of human decency will not allow it.”25
To begin this process, future social movements will have to rejuvenate the political ideas of Martin Luther King, ideas that had developed radically in the last years of his life. By the time of his assassination, King was organizing a “Poor People’s Campaign” to aid the strike effort of sanitation workers in Memphis while simultaneously denouncing the triple evils of militarism, racism, and materialism (capitalism). The complete evaporation of Black wealth in America should lead to similar visions and drive us toward a society where dreams of true economic justice for working and poor people are in fact a reality. This will require a system of wealth redistribution that rids of the many mechanisms that loot Black wealth under American capitalism’s system of profit and inheritance, thereby eliminating the conditions that allow the “American Dream” ideology to fester and thrive.
Yet because of the economic impact that the system of slavery and capitalism has produced for Black Americans, we must not stop at a call for radical redistribution or even reparations. As Saidiya Hartman points out:
The reparations movement puts itself in this contradictory or impossible position, because reparations are not going to solve the systemic ongoing production of racial inequality, in material or any other terms. And like inequality, racial domination and racial abjection are produced across generations. In that sense, reparations seem like a very limited reform: a liberal scheme . . . that reinscribe[s] the power of the law and of the state to make right a certain situation, when, clearly, it cannot. I think too that such thinking reveals an idealist trap; it’s as if once Americans know how the wealth of the country was acquired, they’ll decide that black people are owed something. My God! Why would you assume that? Like housing segregation is an accident!26
Racial capitalism is no “accident.” It is deeply entrenched in the American political, economic, and social structure. We cannot rely on reform alone to remedy such a grave, structural injustice. We must move beyond debates about a universal basic income, a higher minimum wage, what a fairer tax policy might look like, and how to punish the big banks. We need to expand on these important demands further and try to imagine a world without capitalism, without private property, without the sale of labor to property owners, and without the American Dream. We need to admit that we’re unable to imagine what exactly this will look like because our conception of what is possible has been so contaminated by capitalism and its ideologies of American exceptionalism and innocence in the first place. Yes, it is hard for us to imagine otherwise, to imagine a world without capitalism. But if Claudia Jones taught us anything, it is that we must dream of a different kind of politics—one that, as her biographer writes, is even “more radical than communism.”27