Facing Up to the American Dream or The Social Meaning of Money

Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation

Author: Jennifer L Hochschild

The ideology of the American dream--the faith that an individual can attain success and virtue through strenuous effort--is the very soul of the American nation. According to Jennifer Hochschild, we have failed to face up to what that dream requires of our society, and yet we possess no other central belief that can save the United States from chaos. In this compassionate but frightening book, Hochschild attributes our national distress to the ways in which whites and African Americans have come to view their own and each other's opportunities. By examining the hopes and fears of whites and especially of blacks of various social classes, Hochschild demonstrates that America's only unifying vision may soon vanish in the face of racial conflict and discontent.

Hochschild combines survey data and vivid anecdote to clarify several paradoxes. Since the 1960s white Americans have seen African Americans as having better and better chances to achieve the dream. At the same time middle-class blacks, by now one-third of the African American population, have become increasingly frustrated personally and anxious about the progress of their race. Most poor blacks, however, cling with astonishing strength to the notion that they and their families can succeed--despite their terrible, perhaps worsening, living conditions. Meanwhile, a tiny number of the estranged poor, who have completely given up on the American dream or any other faith, threaten the social fabric of the black community and the very lives of their fellow blacks.

Hochschild probes these patterns and gives them historical depth by comparing the experience of today's African Americans to that of white ethnic immigrants at theturn of the century. She concludes by claiming that America's only alternative to the social disaster of intensified racial conflict lies in the inclusiveness, optimism, discipline, and high-mindedness of the American dream at its best.

Publishers Weekly

Drawing on a rich lode of polling data, policy studies and popular journalism, Hochschild, professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton, probes the essential questions suggested by this book's title. She focuses on the dichotomy in which whites increasingly feel racial discrimination is ``slight and declining,'' while blacks believe the opposite. Both blacks and whites value the American dream; both groups believe that hard work should bring success. Paradoxically, the growing black middle class-in part, because of reality's failure to live up to the high expectations inspired at the peak of the civil rights movement-is more skeptical of the dream than poor blacks. However, the author observes that many poor African Americans ``only sort of'' believe in the American dream, while many of the ``estranged poor''-her preferred term for the ``underclass''-reject it. She notes that most of the oft-stigmatized white immigrants from 1880 to 1920 were transformed by civic tides into believers in the dream. Without new politics to alleviate race and class injustice, she warns, we face abandonment of the dream, perhaps leading to a formalization of American hierarchy and a separatist black nationalism. (Sept.)

Library Journal

At the center of U.S. ideology rests the promise that all Americans have a reasonable chance at success, however defined; Hochschild (What's Fair?: American Beliefs About Distributive Justice, Harvard Univ. Pr., 1990) demonstrates how that promise now faces severe challenge from real and perceived barriers of race and class. Using survey data, essays, ethnographies, and memoirs, Hochschild exposes paradoxes in black and white values and visions. Focusing on blacks, she uncovers a disillusioned, bitter middle class but a lower class that persists in believing in the American dream. Overall, she shows that shared disaffection and hardening black and white views of each other threaten to rend the nation's social fabric. Her work demands thoughtful reading and earnest discussion. Highly recommended for all collections on the United States.-Thomas J. Davis, SUNY at Buffalo

Table of Contents:

	Tables and Figure
	Preface to the Paperback Edition
	Preface
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	3
Ch. 1	What Is the American Dream?	15
Ch. 2	Rich and Poor African Americans	39
Ch. 3	"What's All the Fuss About?": Blacks' and Whites' Beliefs about the American Dream	55
Ch. 4	"Succeeding More" and "Under the Spell": Affluent and Poor Blacks' Beliefs about the American Dream	72
Ch. 5	Beliefs about One's Own Life	91
Ch. 6	Beliefs about Others	122
Ch. 7	Competitive Success and Collective Well being	141
Ch. 8	Remaining under the Spell	157
Ch. 9	With One Part of Themselves They Actually Believe	174
Ch. 10	Distorting the Dream	184
Ch. 11	Breaking the Spell	200
Ch. 12	The Perversity of Race and the Fluidity of Values	214
Ch. 13	Comparing Blacks and White Immigrants	225
Ch. 14	The Future of the American Dream	250
Appendix A	Surveys Used for Unpublished Tabulations	261
Appendix B	Supplemental Tables	267
	Notes	271
	Works Cited	341
	Index	399

Interesting book: Farewell to the Factory or Staffing Organizations

The Social Meaning of Money: Pin Money, Paychecks, Poor Relief, and Other Currencies

Author: Viviana A Zelizer

A dollar is a dollar--or so most of us believe. Indeed, it is part of the ideology of our time that money is a single, impersonal instrument that impoverishes social life by reducing social relations to cold, hard cash. Arguing against this conventional wisdom, Viviana Zelizer, a distinguished social scientist and prize-winning author, shows how people have invented their own forms of currency, earmarking money in ways that baffle market theorists, incorporating funds into webs of friendship and family relations, and otherwise varying the process by which spending and saving takes place.