Stakes is High: Life After the American Dream

Smith opens the essay by telling the story of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman to campaign for president. Chisholm, born of immigrant parents, was elected to Congress, representing New York’s 12th District, then campaigned for the Democratic nomination in 1972, losing the race to George McGovern. McGovern would eventually lose in a landslide to the incumbent Richard Nixon, who two years later would resign as a result of the Watergate scandal. Smith admits that he wonders what would have happened had Chisholm been elected, but then reminds himself of the reality of America, a country with a “history of antagonism toward black people, women, and immigrants” (141). Smith contrasts the unlikelihood of Chisholm’s win with the inevitability of Donald Trump, who clearly represents America’s long line of “wealthy white men whose primary concern was ownership and control of the land from which they drew their wealth” (141).

What Chisholm and Trump have in common, however, is that they are both New Yorkers. Smith then goes into telling his own New York story, having moved from Virginia in pursuit of his dreams. Like his family’s past generations, Smith left in pursuit of opportunity. Smith’s reflections about his family lead to him telling the story of Pleasant Lampkins, his great-great-great grandfather, who was born enslaved in 1836. Smith ponders on Pleasant’s life, considering the parallels between them, the inevitable connection of family and history, and of course the experience of being Black in America.

Denying the stories of people like Lampkins, according to Smith, “leaves you with delusions of your own making” (152). Smith admits to hoping for someone like Chisholm to come along, in messiah-like fashion to fix America of its maladies. At the same time, Smith returns to his critique of the overinflation of the importance associated to politicians, even to politicians he admires, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The takeaway from Ocasio-Cortez’s example “should not be more exceptionalism, more mythmaking” (155). Instead, Ocasio-Cortez’s story should serve as fuel to realize that Congress could be filled with Ocasio-Cortezes, which would result in both representational and material progress.

In the meantime, Smith argues that America must tell the truth about itself. This is not a true democracy, where free people seek friendship and solutions based on human compassion. This is the country that finds genocide and racist violence at its very core foundation, so believing anything else is misguided. Smith ends the essay by bringing up De La Soul’s 1996 song and album, “Stakes is High,” which also provides the book with its title. The song emphasizes the urgency of the moment, all the while leaving room for dreaming about what life could be. As Smith puts it, “Stakes is high, and what little time we have left can no longer be spent on preserving our mythical selves. We must be willing to lose our old story. We must choose us” (170). This choice for the collective well-being over insistence on the idea of individualism is what Smith deems necessary for America to fully accomplish what it claims it already has: freedom.