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

Whitney Terrell’s personal essay reflects on his time living in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Kansas City and his friendship with a Black teen named Terry Hemmitt. The reflection also critiques the author’s own white saviorism and his previous inability to recognize his white privilege.

Most white people had left Kansas City for the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s because the city’s schools were integrated. Property values plummeted in their former neighborhoods, where the demographics shifted to mostly Black residents, and Kansas City’s school district consequently suffered a loss of tax revenue. These were the schools that young Terry attended.

In 1998 Terrell introduces himself to Terry, who has come to live with Jackie Eason, his grandmother and the author’s next-door neighbor. The two soon strike up a friendship, with Terrell acting as Terry’s mentor. Terrell persuades Terry to consider going to college at his alma mater, the University of Kansas. Terry applies, is accepted, and is awarded an academic scholarship plus a financial aid package.

Terrell soon takes Terry to visit Lawrence, where the university is located. This trip causes Terrell to see the town and campus in a new light. As they drive down the main street, heading for the university, Terrell begins to feel a new and unfamiliar discomfort. He writes:

I’d driven down it a hundred times and always loved it, always felt at home, but then, for the first time in my life, cruising down that block with Terry riding beside me, I was looking at that street through his eyes. I was searching the sidewalks, and the bars, and the packs of laughing coeds, for somebody, anybody, who looked like him (275).

After Terry’s first semester at the university, he calls Terrell and tells him that he plans to withdraw to pursue a career in the Air Force. His choice concerns both the author and Terry’s grandmother because the United States is involved in wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. However, pursuing a military career is a good option for Terry, who struggles to afford college even with a scholarship.

Terrell and Terry remain in touch, and Terry goes on to have a rewarding and successful career in the Air Force, flying missions over both Afghanistan and Iraq. He remains in the Air Force and lives in Washington D.C. Terrell always believed he would leave Kansas City and that his publications would facilitate his exit, but it is Terry who made that escape: “He’s not coming back, I don’t think. Which makes him a stronger man than me” (279).

Lawrence Joseph’s poem is about Detroit’s gradual urban decay. The verses begin with the city’s landscape, set against the Great Lakes, and its early history, comparing it to the Turkish city of Istanbul on the Bosporus. It was a natural place for industrialists, like Henry Ford, to set up their factories. It became the heart of the industrialized United States: “Here, in ultimate concentration, is industrial/America—Chrysler, Continental, Budd, Hudson” (280).

The city has an ugly past with a history of racist hate crimes. In 1967 riots erupted in response to police violence directed at Black residents. Joseph writes, “How many summers after that/the Motor City burned to the ground” (280).

The poem’s final lines address Detroit’s current state of economic downturn, white flight from the inner city, and the desolation that cuts through the landscape of the once bustling “Motor City.” As the auto industry cut jobs and moved production abroad, the city became a wasteland. Joseph writes, “[…] more is owed on properties in Detroit than/they’re worth (281). Mansions that once stood impressive now sit deserted.

Larry Watson’s essay looks back on the social changes that his hometown, Bismarck, North Dakota, has undergone. When he was growing up during the 1950s, Bismarck “was a classless society” (282). The town had its impoverished and wealthy citizens, but much of the populous had a traditional, middle-class existence. Working-class people lived alongside bankers and doctors in modest homes. There was little noticeable difference between the homes of Bismarck’s rich and middle class. Watson says, “When my wife moved to Bismarck with her family in 1958 they lived on the same block as the governor of the state, and I’d defy anyone who didn’t already know which house was the governor’s to pick it out from its neighbors” (282). What caused this “middling effect”? Perhaps it was the aftermath of the Great Depression or World War II military service, which had an equalizing effect. Regardless, Bismarck’s residents chose not to show off or appear more affluent than their neighbors.

By the 1970s, Bismarck’s social and physical landscapes had changed. The hills around the town were no longer absent of human habitation; instead, large and imposing homes populated the hillsides. Elites no longer resided in modest and middle-class homes alongside their lower-income neighbors. Rather, they sought out more, even when they didn’t need it. This way of living continues as homeowners choose larger and more extravagant homes to socially differentiate themselves from others through their ostentatiousness. Consumerism and materialism swept through the town, and American society more broadly, at the expense of the more modest and middle-class hometown Watson once knew.