ABSTRACT
As open as they were in discussing wealth and inequality, the parents’ belief in the ideology of the American Dream was the dominant theme of our interviews. This theme emerged throughout the first phase of interviewing, despite it not having even been an original focus of the research. In contrast with the subject of wealth inequality-which
was intended as the focus-families did not require any questions whatsoever to bring the American Dream of meritocracy to the forefront of their discussions; they often initiated the subject themselves and brought it up repeatedly. It seemed as though they knew at some level that by talking so openly about structured wealth inequality, they were somehow compromising the culturally sacred tenets of the American Dream that they believed in so strongly, and felt compelled to defend their beliefs. In the second set of interviews, families were directly asked about the American Dream, and they talked about their perspectives at length. They were also asked about how they reconcile the contradiction between structured wealth inequality and their belief in meritocracy, and while they spoke about it many of them claimed to have genuinely “never thought about it like this before.” Although it was clearly part of their lived experiences, it was apparent in both rounds of interviews that many of the families (if not all of them) had never previously considered the particular subject of this book: the contradiction between the American Dream and the power of wealth.
