Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation

“San Francisco is now a cruel place and a divided one. A month before the trial, the city’s mayor, Ed Lee, decided to sweep the homeless off the streets for the Super Bowl, even though the game was played forty miles away, at the new 49ers stadium in Silicon Valley […] The open letter to the mayor published in mid-February by Justin Keller, founder of a not very successful start-up, was typical in tone: ‘I know people are frustrated by the gentrification happening in the city, but the truth is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it.’”

Rebecca Solnit focuses on San Francisco’s gentrification problem in her contribution. Here she criticizes the city’s elites for their disdain for the homeless population that they helped to create. She likewise highlights wealthy tech industry insiders’ sense of entitlement. The letter she quotes suggests that those who are prosperous have earned it while those who are poor somehow deserve their plight and implies that poor people are uneducated and lazy and thus deserve to live in poverty.

“Chicago, how do I explain? For home to be a home, you have to feel that you belong.”

Sandra Cisneros’s meditation on her youth in Chicago acts as a kind of break-up letter addressed to the city. Here she ends her essay on a bittersweet tone. Though the city played a big part in shaping her identity, her relationship with Chicago was largely a negative one. In Cisneros’s reflection, non-white communities face poverty and a lack social services, while exclusion and discrimination are a regular part of their lives. Cisneros leaves Chicago, which never felt like a real home to her.

“I have five thousand in the bank, Elsie told Blaise when he called again that afternoon. She actually had sixty-seven hundred, but she couldn’t part with all her savings at once, in case another type of emergency same up in either Haiti or Miami.”

Edwidge Danticat’s short story highlights the fragile financial status of many Americans, with a specific focus on immigrants and the obligations many must help their family members or friends who remain in their countries or origin. The story’s protagonist, Elsie, wants to help pay a ransom, but she is unable to part with too much of her savings. Family members at home in Haiti, for example, might also need her assistance.

“Here’s the bottom line, I think. Before anybody can be admired, they must first be seen.”

Richard Russo argues that the reason Donald Trump appealed to so many working-class voters is that he made them feel seen, thus bringing them a step closer to feeling respected, something they feel they have lost.

“That’s how it was for my family and their arrival in the Valley, as well as people like the poorest from Texas and from Mexico, looking for work hard enough to never disappear.”

Manual Muñoz writes about the laborious life that immigrants, like his parents, are willing to take on in pursuit of a more prosperous life. Those living in poverty arrive in California seeking fieldwork, physically exhausting labor that is so hard that others do not want to do it. It is necessary work that will always provide stable employment, which makes it attractive as well as exploitative.

“I told him to drop me at a restaurant where I as meeting my wife for cocktails. He did so and I waited until his red Italian sports car sped away. Once it was out of sight I walked to the junk store.”

In “Trash Food,” Chris Offutt writes about how he cannot shake the stigma of the impoverished social class in which he grew up. After having lunch with an acquaintance, Offutt feels too ashamed for the man to drop him off at the thrift store location where the author plans to meet his wife. Rather, he tells his wealthier companion that he is meeting his wife at an upscale restaurant to hide his true destination.

“We are the civilizing force on the planet. We produce great art and great technology. It’s not the opposable thumb that separates us from the beasts, it’s our facility with language. We are able to communicate with great precision. Nevertheless, history is fraught with the persistence of treating fellow humans as garbage, which means collection and transport for destruction.”

Chris Offutt challenges the notion of humans as disposable garbage and the American slur “white trash.” This notion is a dangerous one. Human beings, he notes, are capable of great things, yet have, throughout history, been treated as trash to be disposed of to create an improved world, most notably under genocidal regimes like the Nazis of 1930s Germany, who treated their Jewish neighbors like vermin to be extinguished. 

“Economic status dictates class and diet. We arrange food in a hierarchy based on who originally ate it until we reach mullet, gar, possum, and squirrel—the diet of the poor. The food is called trash, and then the people are. When the white elite take an interest in the food poor people eat, the price goes up. The result is that the cost prohibits poor families from eating the very food they’ve been condemned for eating.”

The quote above from author Chris Offutt addresses the gentrification of food. Typically, gentrification refers to impoverished neighborhoods being overrun by wealthier people, driving up housing costs, thus making home ownership or rental property inaccessible to long-time residents. In this case, however, Offutt points out that the same phenomenon happens with cuisine. Foods traditionally eaten by poor people sometimes become trendy with elites, causing the cost to rise and making them inaccessible to the very people who created the dishes.

“But we both knew that the one way, if you are born to a family without money, is to prove yourself smart enough and pleasant enough and eager enough to convince the gatekeepers to let you in, and then, once you’re there, to try with all your might to convince them to keep you.”

Kristen Valdez Quade summarizes the essence of her experience as a non-white student at Elliot Academy when reflecting on her conversation with Ana, a Latina teen who must leave the summer school program. Ana is forced to withdraw from the program when she cannot succeed in a math course and after the dean refuses Quade’s request to provide extra support. Both know the white students and administrators at the academy act as “gatekeepers,” willing to lose non-white students who they view as not fulfilling their expectations, which are shaped by their white privilege and social prestige.

“The word privilege, composed of the Latin words for private and law, describes a legal system in which not everyone is equally bound, a system in which the law makes graffiti a felony does not apply to a white college student.”

Eula Biss critiques the injustice baked into the legal system in the United States, which applies leniency to white offenders, like herself, but serves racial minorities with harsh, long, and sometimes deadly punishments. Laws are not equally enforced across racial and ethnic groups in the United States.

“Whiteness is not who you are. Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself.”

Eula Biss challenges the idea that white critiques of the racial injustices baked into the foundation and history of the United States are not a form of self-hatred because whiteness, the author notes, is not a culture or kinship group. Rather, white people collectively benefit from social advantages granted to them because of their racial identity. Hating injustice is not the same as despising one’s very being.

“She crosses the street, comes up to me, bold as a rabbit in predator-purged territory, ferret-like herself, well-trained suburban calling card on leash beside her, and asks me, right in front of all the other mothers, if I’m looking for more work as a nanny.”

In this inner monologue from Ru Freeman’s “Fault Lines,” main character Mira, a Jamaican woman living in the suburbs, is confronted with the blatant racism that surrounds her when a white mother at the children’s bus stop assumes that Mira is a childcare worker. This line also previews the class divisions that shape Freeman’s short story by providing insight into the way that Mira thinks about her own nanny, Gabriella, as merely a service worker who makes Mira’s life easier.

“What was important about those jobs—what’s lost in the new Seattle and all the other gilded brain capitals prospering in their lovely settings—is that they used to give longshore workers equal footing with citizens laboring in offices overlooking the sound. Today—forget about buying a getaway cabin with earnings from the dock, even at almost $80,000 a year base pay/ That kind of salary will not get you into one of the starter homes being bid up by people fleeing the $1 million tag for a leaky shake in the Bay Area.”

Egan addresses the decline in working-class labor conditions, the problems caused by a city’s gentrification, and the widening divide between America’s social classes. Where once dockworkers could afford to purchase homes and live a comfortable middle-class life in Seattle, they no longer can because of the city’s transformation under the rise of the tech industry, which has made both the Bay Area and Seattle hubs for corporations.

“The poor have long been valued for what their how much work their bodies can do. Today, the body itself is a commodity.”

In her essay “Blood Brother,” Sarah Smarsh highlights the trend among poor people of donating plasma to earn extra money. In these lines the author points out that poor people have long been exploited for the physical work that they can do. Now, pharmaceutical companies exploit them for the physical components of their bodies, like plasma, which is used to make various expensive drugs and for which the donors are paid relatively little.

“A cruel, de facto segregation held sway. Only blacks and Latinos lived there.”

Héctor Tobar writes about the south-central Los Angeles barrio, a neighborhood that, though not formally segregated by law, exists in a segregated state with non-white populations pushed into impoverished and dangerous living conditions that sometimes end in death, like the murder of an innocent Hispanic child in a drive-by, gang-related shooting that Tobar recounts.

“Hanna looks at all the broken people sitting in her living room on her broke furniture looking to her to fix their broken lives.”

This quote from Roxane Gay’s short story about a poor white woman living in an upper-Michigan Finnish community embodies the story’s focus on dependance and despair. The main character, Hanna, lives a life of drudgery and dreams of something different and better.

“He wasn’t old, around forty, forty-five. The age where you have enough to lose that you’ll lose yourself in the process.”

In RS Deeran’s short story “Enough to Lose,” the protagonist, Tim, encounters a man whose home has been repossessed and who is living on the porch of his former house. Tim observes that the man is relatively young and had come to own just enough so that when he lost it, he lost his identity and sanity.

“I feel a need to explain myself, Phil, to beg a measure of forgiveness, though I understand you may not want to grant it. It’s just that we don’t often find strangers asleep in our driveway.”

Anthony Doerr explains why he calls the police when he finds a man living out of his car sleeping in his driveway. Doerr is plagued by guilt after law enforcement asks the man to leave and he drives off into the cold night. Rather than send him away, Doerr wishes that he had been less selfish, behaved more compassionately and neighborly, and offered the man help.

“As it turns out Barber Block is haunted, haunted by the living.”

When writer Karen Russell and her boyfriend find an affordable apartment in Portland, a friend jokes that the rent must be so low because the unit is haunted. Russell soon discovered why the rental costs were low; the apartment is above a homeless shelter and the neighborhood comes alive with the sounds of despair in the evenings

“‘Us’ versus ‘them,’ that binary view, fails to recognize that sickness and health and solvency and bankruptcy are of course porous states; that sanity and insanity exist on a continuum; and that every house standing is a house of cards, be it a brick-and-mortar duplex or a human body.”

Karen Russell challenges the notion that those living comfortably are somehow inherently better than those facing poverty or homelessness. Indeed, we are all vulnerable to tragic, unfortunate circumstances. Comfortable lives can easily be disrupted by unexpected events and misfortune. 

“At some point the houses that our parents had bought with the idea that they would live out their lives in them (true for my mother; she died in the house she’d lived in for more that fifty years) weren’t large enough for school principals or doctors or oil company executives or heads of state agencies. Families believed they needed more. One bathroom certainly wasn’t enough.”

Larry Watson writes about the growth of materialism and consumerism among the middle and upper-middle class in American society, specifically reflected in the changing landscape of Bismarck, North Dakota. Neighborhoods where the wealthy and working class once lived alongside one another are no longer acceptable for those of above-average means, and now extravagant homes dot the hills surrounding the town.

“More money, for instance, goes to those who are living around more money places, and people in the wealthier places have more money to have and choose more.”

This quote from Dagoberto Gilb’s essay comments on the way that wealth, and the privilege that comes with it, begets more wealth and opportunities. Those without it, on the other hand, naturally have fewer opportunities and few chances for social mobility.

“The women laugh, then brag to one another how their children are fluent in Spanish, and though it annoys them that now the nannies and their offspring can have private conversations, at least it’s still cheaper than hiring an American babysitter or paying an agency commission for a European au pair.”

In her essay on socio-economic and racial division in contemporary Miami, Patricia Engels highlights the hypocrisy and selfishness of white women who employ Hispanic immigrants as caregivers. She overhears a conversation between some of these women who denigrate the women they employ and relish the low wages they pay while simultaneously bragging about their children’s bilingualism, something made possible by the women they employ. These women take but give little in return.