Outworking Racism: How the American Dream Shapes Beliefs about Inequality

• In Event: The Politics of National Identity

Abstract

Despite widespread discrimination, Black Americans by and large remain committed to the American Dream, believing that hard work can overcome any barrier to success, including structural racism (Hochschild 1995; Welburn & Pitman 2012; Hartman 2015; Pew 2017). This “work twice as hard” mentality is often lauded by Black celebrities and political leaders alike as a tool for racial group uplift; but, it may have insidious implications for how Black Americans think about racial inequality and how much they support race-targeted social policies. Using a novel measure of belief in the American dream, I show that Blacks who believe hard work is a sufficient condition for success are more likely to make ambivalent attributions for Black-white inequality. That is, they identify both discrimination and Blacks’ own lack of hard work as equally important causes of socioeconomic disparities between Blacks and whites. I further find that Blacks who favor individual explanations over systemic explanations for inequality are less supportive of reparations.
Research on racial stratification beliefs has primarily focused on how dominant groups, like white Americans, explain racial inequality (Kluegel 1990, Bobo & Kluegel 1993, Bobo & Charles 2009). To this end, scholars have identified racial prejudice and conservative political ideology as the most important determinant of whites’ beliefs about the causes of socioeconomic disparities between Blacks and whites ( Kinder & Sanders 1996; Bobo, Kluegel & Smith 1997; Feldman & Huddy 2005). But neither racial prejudice nor principled conservatism can explain the variation in beliefs about inequality among Blacks (Bobo 2012). Previous work has considered the effects of class (Hunt 2007; Shelton 2017) and age cohort (Watts-Smith 2014) on Blacks’ stratification beliefs, but this work has found only a weak relationship between these factors and inequality explanations. In this paper, I propose a different mechanism to explain the variation in explanations for inequality among Blacks: belief in the American dream. American culture and politics reinforce the message that hard work can overcome any challenge. Unlike pure economic individualism, the American dream allows individuals to blame both structural barriers and individual lack of effort for perpetuating inequality between groups. In this way, the American dream leads many Black Americans to believe that hard work and ingenuity can negate the impact of institutional racism on their group’s prospects for social mobility. I hypothesize that Blacks who believe in the American dream will support more ambivalent (Katz & Hass 1988; Alvarez & Brehm 1997; Bobo 1991) explanations for racial inequality. I further hypothesize that Blacks who favor person-centered explanations over system-centered explanations for inequality will be less supportive of race targeted policies.
To test these hypotheses, I leverage a nationally diverse survey of Black Americans (n = 1000) fielded through YouGov. I design a novel measure of belief in the American dream to assess how much respondents believe hard work is sufficient for success. I first test the hypothesis that the American dream is positively correlated with ambivalent (person and system-centered) explanations for inequality using OLS regressions. I then use both OLS and logistic regression to test the hypothesis that stronger support for person-centered explanations leads to decreased support for race targeted policies. I find that Blacks who believe strongly in the American dream are more likely to attribute racial inequality to Blacks’ lack of hard work. Further, those who favor lack of “hard work” over discrimination as an explanation for inequality are less supportive of government reparations for slavery.
The results of my study demonstrate how Black Americans’ negotiate America’s promise of free opportunity with the reality of systemic racism. Many Blacks are firmly committed to the myth of American meritocracy, even if it requires their group to work harder than other groups for only a fraction of the rewards. These findings inform research on the psychology of marginalized groups and illustrate how individuals can be both aware of the structural causes of their group’s deprivation and still committed to dominant narratives about their group’s own culpability for ending that deprivation. As inequality continues to rise in America, this research provides a critical framework for understanding the sources of stratification beliefs among marginalized groups.

Author

• Zoe Walker, University of Michigan