In this acquired image, an American flag is backlit by the sun.
Courtesy Ken Jones
In 2016 we talked with a group of more than 30 young people about the idea of “American Dream,” and what it meant to them. A lot has changed in the last five years, and the young people we spoke to have changed a lot too. They’ve since graduated from high school and college and some have entered the workforce. We wanted to check back in with a few of them to ask them what they think of the idea of the “American Dream” now. Our guests are Juma Sei, an American Studies major at Yale University; Grace Wong, a graduate of Wellesley College now working in finance; and Tyler White, a senior at Swarthmore College.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: In the fall of 2016, back when we could do that sort of thing, we got together in front of an audience of young people, middle schoolers, and high schoolers, at a space in North Portland. We basically had one, big, overarching question for the whole hour: What does the “American Dream” mean to you? That was five years ago. Five, very, very, very long years ago. And if you were, say, 16 years old at the time, another third of your life has passed since then. So, we’ve called up three of our guests from that show to see how their notions of the “American Dream” have evolved or stayed the same. Juma Sei is now a senior at Yale University, Tyler White is a senior at Swarthmore College, and Grace Wong recently graduated from Wellesley College; she now works in finance in New York City. It is great to have all three of you back on Think Out Loud. Grace, I want to start with you, and I want to start with something you said on our original show, talking about your conception of the “American Dream.” Let’s have a listen.
Grace Wong: I am the child of refugees and immigrants. My parents came over in the Vietnam War and I think the ability of the “American Dream” for me has very much been put in that perspective. My father’s parents both died on the way on the boat from Vietnam to America and so he came with very little support. We’ve driven by this house on Killingsworth and 15 of my dad’s closest family all lived in this two-bedroom house for so many years and tried to [plant] their roots in Portland. By some miracle my father got himself through college, has a really great job, and has been able to put me through 13 years of private school at Catlin Gabel. I think one big moment for our family was that my father didn’t have parents to pay for his college. He washed dishes in high school and I’m now a senior and I’m applying to college, and we got to press the button that says no, I will not be asking for any financial aid. I will be able to pay the entire $50,000 plus tuition for four years. That was a big moment for my family. So, I think we definitely believe in the “American Dream” and those opportunities of access, and people believing in us.
Dave Miller: Grace, what’s it like for you to hear that today, five years later?
Grace Wong: I think it’s kind of incredible, right? I very much still believe that and it’s still my family’s story, but I think it’s also changed a lot because of COVID-19 and all of the anti-Asian racism that’s been happening ever since. I am definitely still incredibly privileged, incredibly lucky, but it feels a little bit different now.
Dave Miller: I want to hear about COVID-19 and the last five years, but let’s hear another excerpt from the first show we did about the “American Dream,” just for some perspective. Juma, you too are a first-generation American. Your parents are originally from Sierra Leone, you talked about that on our first show. Let’s have a listen to something about what you had to say about the “American Dream” back in 2016.
Juma Sei: I would say my definition of the “American Dream” kind of changes depending on which community I’m in. When I’m in America and around my friends and my school I see the “American Dream” as sort of like saying that anyone can come to this country and have some sort of opportunity, but at the same time, knowing that that opportunity is subject to different factors in your life; some of those you can control and some of those you can’t. And then when I think of it in the terms of my African community, I think of the “American Dream” or America itself as a land of a lot of prosperity and a lot of opportunity and freedom to determine your own future in many lights. Whether or not that’s true, I’m not 100% sure, but I’d say those are my two definitions.
Dave Miller: Juma, how much of the way you broke that down five years ago, thinking about the “American Dream” from an “in America” perspective vs among people you knew in Sierra Leone, how much of that still holds true?
Juma Sei: I think this is super interesting because I’m about to go back to Sierra Leone next week for the first time since 2012 and I’m sure I’ll be talking a lot about the United States in that trip. I would say that one thing that really sticks out to me in that comment and that clip from five years ago is a sort of natural hesitation at what is possible or what’s purported to be possible vs what is the reality. And I think that comes from the critique of the United States, its systems, and the way that it affects particularly people that look like me. And I would say that in the last five years, the acidity of my critique of the United States has only increased. So, I would say that for the most part, I agree. If anything, I have a little bit more trepidation at the possibility and the feasibility of what this nation promises so many.
Dave Miller: All right, we’ll have to hear more about the acidity of your critique, the pH changing, but Tyler, let’s listen to one more clip from the past. Then we’ll go to the present and the future. This is how you talked about your complicated understanding of the “American Dream” when we first spoke about it.
Tyler White: There’s so many people throughout the United States and around the world who may have this idea, but you almost have to be in some place of peril and coming from a bad[ly] disenfranchised community to have the “American Dream” because if you’re someone who comes from a place where you’re comfortable in social and political arenas, then you don’t really have to think about the “American Dream” because you already have it.
Dave Miller: Did you already have it back in 2016? Did you have a dream based on this classic notion of a better life connected to our country?
Tyler White: I would say to some extent I did insofar as I had kind of prefigured what I thought that my life was going to be like. I think since COVID-19, not to be a cliche, it became so much more salient for me, the things that I was genuinely interested in vs the things that I have been socialized to want to pursue by virtue of economic or social mobility. I think that while I did have that vision, it has been constantly jaded, it’s been chipped away, it’s become more pessimistic, in some sense of how that can be obtained. But I also think that I’m more critical, in general, about whether or not the “American Dream” is something to aspire [to].
Dave Miller: You know what’s so fascinating about what all three of you said is that I can imagine someone looking at the briefest version of your biographies and your demographics and saying, “Ha. What we say about the ‘American Dream’ is true. Here are three young people of color. They’ve all either attended or they’re attending elite schools.” Juma, you’re a first-generation American child of immigrants from Sierra Leone now at Yale University. Is that an example of the best sounding stories about American possibility and upper mobility being true?
Juma Sei: Yes and no. This is the primary reason for my hesitation – I’m very aware of my circumstance, very aware that my parents were both Sierra Leonean immigrants and I’m about to graduate from Yale in the spring. And yet I just don’t want to necessarily unabashedly champion this notion that if you work hard, you will achieve success because I don’t think that the metrics are that simple. And I think that my understanding of the “American Dream” is necessarily nuanced in a way that the simple “work hard, you will do well” rhetoric seems to undercut. So yes, I do think that in some ways that I’ve been an example of the “American Dream” reached fruition and yet I know that there are a lot of people who are in my similar situation who haven’t gotten to this point for a whole number of reasons.
Dave Miller: Grace, what about you? I know that you now have a job in finance in New York. That too seems like an old-fashioned version of the success that is available. That’s a part of the “American Dream” if, as Juma said, you apply yourself and work hard enough, and pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Have you been living the quote, unquote, “American Dream”?
Grace Wong: I think, like you were saying, from the outside it could definitely seem like it, like that’s just the truth. If you see “went to Wellesley, now works in finance on Wall Street” it’ [seems] like all these factors come into play. But like what Juma was saying, there’s a lot of hesitation and when I look around at my peers and my colleagues, it’s hard not to feel like the odd one out. I think that my experience has been one of a lot of privilege and a lot of luck, but it’s also not afforded to everyone. Talking to other people who have tried to get into Wellesley or succeed at Wellesley or go into this job that I currently have or make it in New York, I think it just amplifies to me how these opportunities are not equally distributed, especially ones for socio-economic mobility.
Dave Miller: Grace, how has the pandemic itself affected the way you think about your own future?
Grace Wong: Oh man, that’s kind of a loaded question. I think it’s hard not to think about how much I lost of my college experience due to COVID-19 – it was like a year and a half of college – and how, if I had been on campus or with other friends or with my peers, that might have changed my experience or my outlook. I think COVID-19 has also made me really appreciate my family and my Asian heritage and made me less, I don’t know, happy to be on the East Coast. I think there’s something to be said for coming back to Portland and being near my family. It’s definitely something I think about a lot.
Dave Miller: Tyler, what about you? You mentioned it briefly, but just to dig deeper. How has the pandemic, which is still going on and has been so disruptive to all our lives, affected the way you think about your place going forward?
Tyler White: I go back and forth at times with my parents about this. I think it’s very much a generational difference in perception of what is legitimately possible for individuals from marginalized identities. And I think that my previous relationship with my identity and the historical ways in which it’s been marginalized was one of “how best do I pass through these systems to get to a place of power and then leverage that position of power to be transformed into the kind of work that I believe in.” Since growing up and becoming more mature and having a plethora of different opportunities, I think I’ve become more aware that my marginalized identity should be the point in the perspective by which I navigate the world. It shouldn’t be a process of limiting that but expanding it into the fullness of who I am and how I navigate the world. I think the thing that happened for me during COVID-19 is I’ve always been very interested in the creative and visual arts and I think that I’m just becoming more comfortable, [happier], and more full[filled] pursuing that instead of what has been considered a more stable kind of employment pathway. The ways in which folks are quitting their jobs and no longer pursuing lower paying vocations, I think that’s really in line with trying to match what is not only the means by which you produce for yourself, but also the means by which you are happy and feel a full human life.
Dave Miller: All three of you are either in or have just gotten out of the academic world. For the non-academics among us we have to get through some of the vocabulary. Are you seeing the “Great Resignation” and then saying to yourself, “here are people who have the ability to opt out of jobs that are not fulfilling to them, or not paying them enough based on what they’re doing” and you want to avoid that and embark on a different professional life as a result?
Tyler White: Yes, that, and I think a caveat to what you’re saying too is it wasn’t just folks that had the ability to opt out of jobs. Just paying attention to some of the stories that have been published on folks that are quitting very minimum wage jobs, it was also folks that [thought] “I don’t know necessarily what’s next for me, but if I was to die due to the pandemic, I would not want this to be my legacy.” I feel like that is the thing that I’ve been trying to grapple with.
That’s the thing that I have been most fundamentally trying to reckon with it. It’s not just being less traditional in my career path. It’s more about how I become as full and as complete as a person in every single thing that I do. I think that oftentimes as Black folks, as queer folks, there’s this understanding of this positionality as being something you have to navigate and something that you adjust to, but instead, stepping into that and claiming those identities as not only being the way that you navigate the world but what you want to contribute to and how you want to leave a mark that really represents what you contributed to the world as you were here.
Dave Miller: Juma, I mentioned that we talked in the fall of 2016. It was actually October, right before the 2016 election, obviously well before the 2020 election. We can’t encapsulate five years of American political history in the next eight minutes, but in the big picture, how has your understanding of US politics in that time affected the way you think about your future?
Juma Sei: I would say that there was definitely a point where I was bright eyed, and bushy tailed as a 17-year-old and I thought maybe I would want to change the system from within, running for some form of political office at some point in my life. I’ve just been increasingly jaded, increasingly disillusioned with the bureaucracy of the American government over the last five years, and at this point, I don’t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole. I think that 2016 and 2020 were particularly salient examples of seeing the world crumbling around all of us and wondering why there wasn’t a more robust institutional protection against all of the everything that was Donald Trump and his influence. I was talking about this with Allison Frost, the producer, in a conversation yesterday. I did not know what a filibuster was in 2016 and now I feel like it’s the bane of my existence. I just believed so much more way back when, and conventional politics just doesn’t really seem like it at this point in my life. It sounds sad to say, but I feel like I believe in the American political system less.
Dave Miller: Grace, what about you?
Grace Wong: I definitely agree with Juma with that feeling of powerlessness in looking at news events and everything that’s happening in the world. But something I’ve been reflecting on in the last five years is how much youth activism there’s been and how many protests and rallies and social movements that I’ve [been able] to witness or be part of or see my friends be part of. I think it’s been astounding. Realizing how much power young people do have when we put our voices together has been the light in a very challenging time.
Dave Miller: Tyler, speaking of activism, there’s maybe not a single sphere of activism where youth have been more prominent than in climate change activism. Maybe the most basic question here is, is the “American Dream” possible if we’re actually facing a global nightmare?
Tyler White: Absolutely not. I think that this American way of living – the excess amount of space, the excess amount of things that we use, that we consume, [that] we waste – has been transported as the leading way of [relating] to the land, to each other, and to the things that we need to exist. Globally, that’s just not going to be feasible for the kind of future that we have. I think we have to disrupt this specific aestheticism or vision that we have of the nuclear family that is very heteronormative, that is specific to cis gendered identities. We have to break up this idea of owning homes and the way in which we engage with private property that is not sustainable for everyone to be able to have. We have to think critically about the means by which we are navigating the world [and] the kind of energy systems that we’re using. I’m currently someone who does not believe in the “American Dream”, and I don’t think it’s something that we should even aspire to if not everyone has the access to it. If we are able to access it then that means that we are withholding someone else from being able to, so I would say no.
Dave Miller: Grace, Tyler is not just trying to blow up the white picket fence idea, but big parts of capitalism. You are working on Wall Street right now, your first post-college job. What does this look like in the context of your current job?
Grace Wong: I find myself at odds politically or culturally from my colleagues a lot, and it’s hard. I consider Juma and Tyler both friends and have so much respect for them, and my friends at Wellesley, [and] everyone is saying a lot of these things and a lot of these ideas that I agree with. And then I’m in this space, and I work in this space, and spend a lot of my waking hours working with people who have a very different idea of the “American Dream” and of capitalism and of the future. It leads me to feeling like my identities are split. I can’t say anything because I’m in a position where if I say something, what if something adverse happens in my career or what if someone takes it the wrong way and doesn’t want to work with me? I think that’s a really difficult position to be in. Thinking about longer [term], like you were asking earlier, I don’t know if that’s sustainable.
Dave Miller: Juma, in the most concrete way that you can think about it now, how do you want to make your imprint on the world going forward?
Juma Sei: I’m trying to do a little bit of what you’re doing. I’ve thought about my future a lot, as an existential college junior and senior and an existential person in general. I’m hoping to be writing in some capacity in my future. I feel like the world of public media journalism is something that I hope to see myself in at some point in my life. I applied to a couple fellowships in the NPR sphere and fingers crossed, I end up there.
Dave Miller: Fingers crossed, indeed. Tyler, what about you? Concretely, what do you want to do in the world?
Tyler White: I just finished some of my grad school applications, but I’m hoping to pursue a master’s in urban planning as well as a master’s in landscape architecture and/or curatorial practice in the public sphere and then hopefully get a PhD in geography. Because I personally don’t believe in the American political system at all, I’m really interested in how to equip citizens, mostly vulnerable communities that live close to environmental hazards that are constantly dealing with the impacts of climate change and the negative impacts of capitalism, to have the resources and the skill sets to navigate the current system in lieu of dismantling it, and hopefully creating more just systems and relationships. I just don’t think the state of the government really has that interest at heart. Hopefully, I’m able to build a career in planning, curation, and community activism that really synthesizes how we create and make the public work for more folks.
Dave Miller: Tyler, Juma, and Grace, thanks so much. Congratulations to all of you.
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