Stakes is High: Life After the American Dream

Smith opens the book with Donald Trump’s election, an event that serves as a symbolic pulse check for the state of America. Donald Trump himself is a representation of America’s worst and unhealthiest tendencies. As Smith writes, Trump is “deeply incurious. Arrogant. Convinced of his own importance. Dismissive of that which disputes his preferred narrative. A bully. Power hungry. Insufferable. Image obsessed. Indifferent to the suffering of others” (26). Smith identifies Trump as the personification of white supremacy in America, stripped of its forced nicety and civility. As Smith lists a number of men who have joined Bill Cosby in their reputations as predators—Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly for instance—he includes Trump, as one of the men who “will find communities ready and willing to defend them, to castigate their victims for daring to make the accusation in the first place” (110). In Trump’s case, he not only had such a community, but also became the 45th president of the United States.

Smith holds Chisholm in reverence, as the first Black woman to make a run for the presidential nomination in 1972. Born to immigrant parents from Guyana and Barbados, Shirley Chisholm was a native of Brooklyn. She eventually was elected to the United States Congress, representing New York’s 12th District, in 1968. Following her historic election to Congress as the first Black woman elected, Chisholm decided to make a run at the presidency. Her presidential bid was not an experiment to test the waters of American progress, but a serious attempt to secure the nomination. Smith clarifies her presidential aspirations:

Hers was not a symbolic run at the presidency. It was, however, unsuccessful, and George McGovern secured the Democratic nomination, before being trounced in the popular and electoral vote by the incumbent President Nixon, who resigned in 1974 because of the Watergate scandal (140).

Yet even as Smith recognizes that her run at the presidency was not symbolic, he upholds the deeply symbolic value that a Chisholm presidency would have meant for America, as evidenced in the following passage: “The kind of country that would elect Shirley Chisholm as president would not need Shirley Chisholm to be president. Or rather, it would not view the election of Shirley Chisholm as anything remarkable” (141). Smith admittedly daydreams about an alternate reality where Chisholm won the 1972 presidential election, while recognizing that this hypothetical event contradicts the predominant narrative of American history.

Smith laments that the historical legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. has made him into an ‘“infallible oracle’ […] Reduced to an apolitical dreamer, he can be a tool to divert energy away from forming structural solutions to inequality and injustice while spreading grade-school-level bromides in favor of kindness” (44). Smith argues that Dr. King’s message and methodology has been stripped of its primary essence, and that his image has been coopted by White America in order to “uphold the ritual of lying to ourselves about the disconnect between the stated values of the nation and the reality carried out in our institutions” (46). Smith specifically cites the example of Ronald Reagan, who signed the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday into federal law. According to Smith, Reagan reframed “Dr. King’s accomplishments […] as those of the democratic American people—never mind that it was the bigotry and violence of the American people and the profound lack of democracy that made Dr. King’s work necessary” (42). Smith uses Dr. King’s example to expose the rewriting of Black narratives, in order to maintain the myth of American progress and the preservation of the lie that America is indeed a nation where conditions are equal for all of its inhabitants.

Pleasant Lampkins, born a slave in 1836, is Mychal Denzel Smith’s great-great-great grandfather. Smith tells his story in “Part 4: Freedom,” in order to provide a concrete example of his own family’s connection to the grimmest parts of American history, in this case the institution of slavery. As Smith reflects on the reality of Pleasant’s life, he argues that “no matter how far Pleasant walked, he would not have escaped the thing that had so defined his existence. It is what makes this country” (149). Smith uses Pleasant’s story as an emblematic reminder that stories like this lie at the very center of American history—these stories are inescapable, despite the myth of the American Dream, which claims that if you only work hard enough, you can achieve anything. For Pleasant and millions of others who like him were born enslaved, no amount of hard work could ever change the circumstances of their lives.