Don’t Believe That The American Dream Is Dead

Pessimism about America has become fashionable. It’s a dangerous narrative.

This essay originally appeared in Persuasion in December 2024.

In 1991, my dad went to prison for being a Jew.

He was born in Azerbaijan—a former Soviet republic and predominantly Muslim country, although with a considerable Jewish population. Religion was suppressed in the Soviet Union, but my dad grew up in the shadow of a rich cultural tradition. In 1991, taking an engineering job at Azerbaijan’s first “tech firm,” his work ethic resulted in an early career victory in which he took a relatively senior position at the company. Around the same time, as the Soviet Union collapsed and Azerbaijan became an independent state, a few corrupt officials, jealous of his success, decided to frame him for money laundering.

With no set legal process in a new country, my dad was sent to prison. Wrongfully incarcerated for nine months, he reflected on an eerily similar anti-Semitic incident that had taken the life of his grandfather, who was beaten to death by the KGB after being accused of stealing government money.

You could say my family knows something about oppression. But my dad survived his unwarranted sentence by cunningly gaining the respect of a group of high-profile criminals, who helped him secure a parole-like reprieve after nine months in prison. By the time he got home, my grandparents had already been in contact with the U.S. government and, after a few months, the entire family escaped to America for political asylum. Forced to abandon his career and his possessions, my dad took the first plane of his life and found himself in O’Hare Airport in Chicago with a few stock English phrases and just $100 in his pocket.

My dad’s family spent their first several years in America living in, effectively, a Jewish ghetto. My aunt, who had accompanied my father, taught piano lessons for seven dollars an hour, and my dad—an engineer with a master’s degree in computer science—fried potatoes at Burger King. After using all of his money to buy a bicycle for his commute, he emerged from work the following week to find his bicycle stolen (coming from the USSR, where draconian policing made petty crime unknown, he didn’t understand that you had to lock your bike when you left it out in public). Eventually, he learned enough English to secure a job repairing computers in people’s homes (this was the ‘90s), and, after three years, saved up enough money to propose to my mom and buy the two-bedroom apartment that my parents still live in today.

I grew up in that same claustrophobic two-bedroom apartment. I did not understand why my spring break stories never featured the Eiffel Tower sightseeings and ski trip adventures that always cropped up in the recollections of my peers. But for my parents, who grew up in kommunalkas—communal Soviet apartments that often forced four or more people to share a single bedroom—that apartment was everything. Reaching the American middle class and the freedoms that came with it was far beyond anything they had ever dreamed of back in the Motherland.

The older I got, the more I became certain that I needed to give back. I learned equations and vectors, read every book I could lay my hands on, and, as a teenager, declined party invitations so I could work on my first novel. I spent the first seventeen years of my life not resentful of the modest circumstances I had grown up in but proud that my parents, immigrants and refugees, had succeeded in entering the American middle class. I knew they had sacrificed everything for the education of their two kids.

So when I was accepted to and matriculated at an Ivy League school, I was puzzled by how I was perceived. Almost immediately, I was no longer the introverted literature nerd who got into Columbia because she had committed the entire first book of Paradise Lost to memory and had written a novel. I was no longer the girl who had envied her peers for their large backyards and elaborate European vacations. I was no longer the Jewish student with unruly black hair and a family history of oppression.

Suddenly, I found myself cast as the privileged kid.

By the time I graduated and founded my own company, there was a consensus among my peers: No one believed that I could have figured out how to out-earn my parents and live the American Dream through my own work ethic. At a party, I was once asked how much of my dad’s money I had used to start up my company. (The answer was zero—we operate on a consulting model, which requires little upfront investment.) In response to a clip I posted that mentioned my Columbia education, I was told that I was a product of nepotism and must have been born rich. (A surprise since I’m still paying off the loans I took out to fund my education.) Even many of my friends react with disbelief when I tell them I grew up as an average middle-class kid. (This seems to undermine what they have internalized about the lack of social mobility in the U.S.) In the reflexive response of many of my peers, the inbuilt assumption was that I had only gotten to where I was because I enjoyed the privilege of being rich and white (Jews, of course, couldn’t possibly count as an oppressed minority group). I was, in short, not oppressed enough.

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There’s a lot of buzz in our culture around the idea of “oppression.” Definitionally, the word refers to any sort of prolonged unjust treatment, but in our cultural lexicon, the word almost invariably refers to identity-based injustices. The University of Colorado Office of Equity’s “Matrix of Oppression,” to take one striking example, lists queer, working-class, atheist, polyamorous, and adolescent people, among others, as classically “oppressed” groups, and wealthy white heterosexual Christians as members of the privileged elite. Through the doctrine of “intersectionality,” being a member of one or more oppressed groups has become the hip thing on college campuses. Students who, often, come from wealthy backgrounds—students privileged enough to attend a four-year university and receive a world-class education—have somehow become convinced that they are oppressed and that, therefore, it is not worth it to work hard because the mysterious hand of oppression will shoot them down no matter what they do to pursue the American Dream.

As students digest ideologies of oppression like the one presented at the University of Colorado they will graduate into the workforce unduly pessimistic. Indeed, according to a poll conducted this January, nearly 70% of Americans believe that the American Dream is dead. Similarly, a 2023 National Opinion Research Center poll found that a full 50% of Americans believe that political and economic systems are stacked against them based on their identity. That profound, and irrational, skepticism towards the American Dream persists, even as, according to the Federal Reserve, American households have hit record wealth—and I suspect it is not just inflation that is to blame. If Americans are taught to believe that success is contingent on belonging to a certain identity group, then many of them will buy into the idea that the American Dream is unattainable.

I do understand that skepticism towards the American Dream comes from experiences that are very different from my family’s—that racial inequities are real and that the road to the American Dream is, often, far from smooth. But by focusing obsessively on shortcomings, so many Americans—young, educated Americans above all—have come to believe that upward mobility doesn’t exist. That widespread pessimism flies in the face of so much lived experience.

My own family is one of many examples of an immigrant success story. What they experienced is, in a word, exactly the dream that my dad was sold when hopping on that airplane. And if my parents’ example has taught me anything, it’s that hard work and resilience do count. I might not have grown up in a large suburban house (and we had no picket fence), but I come from a family that suffered genuine ethnicity-based oppression in the Soviet Union and later in autonomous Azerbaijan and nonetheless kept on pushing. Based on what I’ve experienced in my own life, it is impossible to convince me that the American Dream has ended.

So let’s scrap this notion that America is inherently discriminatory and start teaching younger generations that America really is the land of opportunity. The American Dream is intact in our time, as it was for so many generations before. But in order to seize that opportunity, you do need to recognize it—to start with determination and hope.

Happy 4th of July! Forever grateful to be an American. ❤️💙🤍

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