If redefined as more than bootstrapping and colorblindness, the American dream has the potential to appeal across the political spectrum. Framing the radical American dream not just as a deferred freedom dream of the Black radical tradition but also as an immigrant dream—a familiar theme—points the way to a nearly unexplored possibility: a dream of Indigenous Americans as well. As many have pointed out, in targeting Latinx people, ICE is also singling out descendants of First Peoples, descendants of Mexican land appropriated in the treaty following the Mexican-American War.

Yet the American dream’s iconography from the start centered around the images of frontier and pioneer, and its protagonist was the white settler, in opposition to the Native American. A Native American dream remains a paradox and an open question but nonetheless an imperative.

The justification, means, and goal of integration deserve much further exploration, as do the possibility of a more complex dialectical relationship to Black nationalism, which Afrocentric movements already enact through coalition and allyship with non-Black people, but Adams and Blake, among others, have pointed the way.