The American Dream and the Power of Wealth

Heather Johnson joins two streams of scholarship in her recent book The American Dream and the Power of Wealth. The first is the now-familiar story that family wealth plays a central role in the stratification of U.S. society, and that social class and race inequalities are magnified due to their association with the intergenerational transfer of wealth and its advantages. The second, more interesting argument is that everyone recognizes that wealth matters, but that this knowledge does not dislodge a deep and abiding belief in the American Dream of meritocracy. Johnson refers to this variously as a ‘‘paradox,’’ ‘‘contradiction,’’ ‘‘unresolved conflict,’’ or ‘‘disjointed logic.’’ Whatever we might choose to call it, the book focuses on the juxtaposition of a sociological truism—that wealth matters in access to good schools and in getting ahead in U.S. society—and a belief system that she refers to as the ‘‘American Dream.’’ How, she asks, can rich and poor alike acknowledge that wealth matters in providing advantages, yet cling so passionately to an ideology that says that anyone can make it, regardless of their social origins? Johnson draws on in-depth interviews with 232 black and white parents of school-age children in Boston, Los Angeles, and St. Louis, most of whom were middle class. She supplemented these data with interviews of the members of 20 wealthy white families in Washington, DC and New York City. The volume and vividness of the data are impressive: the interviews ask important questions about how wealth works, the nature of the ideology of meritocracy, and how parents strategically choose schools for their children to attend. In demonstrating that poor and middle-class families alike recognize that wealth matters, but cling to the American Dream, Johnson invites the reader to join her in illuminating an opportunity structure that is unfair and unjust, and reflecting on the policies and practices that sustain the reproduction of social inequality across generations. In spite of the power and passion of Johnson’s prose, I am not persuaded by her account of the phenomenon she seeks to understand. I have three major reservations, which I develop below. First, I think that