"'In' the Afterlife of the American Dream: Race, Mythology, and a Requiem of Promise," presented by Dr. Shelton Johnson

About this event

Steinberg Reading Room, Elting Memorial Library. For the 4th year in a row, the New Paltz Community Partner Organizations (the Elting Memorial Library, Dr. Margaret Wade-Lewis Center, Historic Huguenot Street, New Paltz Historical Society, and Ulster County Historian) have come together to bring the New Paltz community free programming that explores and celebrates Black strength, history, and culture. This year we are honored to host Dr. Shelton Johnson of the SUNY New Paltz Black Studies Department. Dr. Johnson's talk will examine the American Dream as a racialized political mythology, tracing its historical formation, its enduring authority in shaping ideas of merit, mobility, and belonging, and the ways Black intellectual and political traditions have imagined freedom beyond its inherited terms. Join us at the Elting Memorial Library (93 Main Street, New Paltz, NY 12561) on Saturday, October 3rd from 4:00-5:30 pm for this engaging, in-person presentation. This program is free and open to the public. Pre-registration is required as limited seating is available. Click here to register. The American Dream endures as one of the nation’s most consequential political mythologies, organizing freedom through an inherited faith in effort, advancement, and eventual arrival while teaching generations to interpret success as evidence of individual worth and national possibility. Its historical coherence emerged within a racial order that distributed the protections and material conditions of citizenship unevenly, allowing ideals of merit and belonging to acquire authority through institutions that determined whose aspirations could become durable forms of security. Within this history, the Dream became a language through which the nation could imagine itself as open and democratic while racial inequality continued to shape access to what that promise could materially provide. Black Americans also invested deeply in its promise, binding personal advancement and generational progress to expectations of security,…

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