Reimagining Equality
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Deeply invested in home ownership as a part of my personal dream, I bought my Victorian and became a participant in the buying boom that was happening across the country. Low interest rates and government policies promoting home ownership as essential to the American Dream fueled the home-buying movement, painting a picture of a vital economy. Behind the public scenes, however, something very harmful, even sinister, was taking place. From the 1990s to 2008, predatory and subprime lending were on the rise, feeding on policymakers’ increasing promotion of home ownership as a way for individuals to establish themselves as respected citizens. At best, lending practices were a way to bridge the growing gap between the real estate haves and have-nots. At worst, they were a recipe for individual and community disaster. In time, the worst was realized.
Instead of accumulating wealth, as the policymakers had promised, black women became more likely to lose what they had. Half of the African Americans borrowing money to purchase a home were women, but they were more likely than men to be borrowers in the subprime lending market.9 That means they were more likely to be charged higher rates and fees. Black neighborhoods suffered economically, and a sense of community—the place where people congregate to share their views of the world—was also lost. Some black women survived the financial minefield. Anjanette Booker, whose story is detailed in chapter 6, managed to keep her home in Baltimore as well as build a sense of community through her work as a hairdresser.
Yet the community problems persist. In 2009, the mayor and city council of Baltimore sued Wells Fargo for economic losses that they attributed to the bank’s lending practices. The allegations included charges of behavior that legal experts had called a “subprime lending spree.”10 If the city’s 2008 projection of nearly half a million home foreclosures was correct, then Baltimore is in dire straits. In January 2010, a federal court judge dismissed the claim, citing “other factors leading to the deterioration of the inner city.”11 The city, however, filed an amended complaint in April 2010, saying that Wells Fargo’s targeting of the city’s minority neighborhoods for subprime loans had “inflicted significant, direct, and continuing financial harm on Baltimore.”12
Anjanette Booker’s story illustrates that what is at stake in making sure that people can make a home in any neighborhood goes beyond the individual; it extends to the entire city and beyond. Moreover, the city’s response and the civil rights laws of the 1960s may prove inadequate to address the problems that face Baltimore, the state, and the nation. As it sheds light on those issues, this story calls upon us to look beyond the rights we’ve come to count on as the insurers of our freedoms from race and gender bias and once again to reimagine equality.
The crisis is more than the collapse of the housing market, it is a crisis of home—a tragic turning point in the search for equality in America. In chapter 7, as I explain why the plights of women like Booker matter to us all, I raise the question of whether the idea of home as a repository of the American Dream and the signifier of equality can coexist with the concept of housing as a measure of national economic prosperity.
The mortgage meltdown was never simply a problem of individual borrowers who overextended themselves in a fickle market, nor did its consequences fall on only a few communities. The collapse reflected systemic failures and exacerbated a host of problems in cities throughout the country. Baltimore is not suffering alone; the city of Memphis and the state of Illinois also sued Wells Fargo, the country’s fourth-largest bank and one of the beneficiaries of the federal bank bailout program. And Wells Fargo, which repaid the government in December 2009 and posted earnings of $3.06 billion for the second quarter of 2010, was not the only bank caught up in the subprime frenzy. The combination of accepted industry-wide practices and a variety of social conditions that predate the housing crisis created the current state of affairs in cities like Detroit, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Memphis. They, along with places like Las Vegas, Milwaukee, and Charlotte, will have to reinvent themselves over the next few decades. The challenge for these urban areas has become how to avoid repeating the past. The challenge for the nation is how to make these and all cities more egalitarian in terms of who is at home in them.
In the years leading up to the housing collapse, both liberals and conservatives tapped into a yearning to realize the American Dream, a deeply rooted desire that transcends political ideology. Neither camp, however, seemed to understand the vulnerability of those most likely to take out subprime or unconventional loans, particularly those living in economically stressed neighborhoods or in neighborhoods where housing prices were hyperinflated or where public services were lacking. American leaders did little to make sure that the dream went beyond simply holding a deed to heavily mortgaged property. Banks and politicians failed to understand that the fates of those borrowers in struggling neighborhoods and the nation’s economy were linked. As a result, because both gambled on the housing market, millions were displaced—not simply from their houses, but from their belief in an America where they could establish themselves and their families for generations to come. The long-term consequences of this lapse in leadership have yet to be given serious consideration.
The universality of the damage done goes beyond the economic losses claimed in lawsuits. The actions of lenders and our leaders’ failure to impede them are more appropriately viewed as an assault on the American Dream of finding a place to be truly at home. As author Christopher Clausen puts it, “What is at stake is not only the stability of the larger economy but something psychologically even more important—a shared ideology of . . . mobility.”13 That ideology of mobility has forever been linked to the idea of equality. Throughout American history, the desire to escape racial and gender bias has motivated the search for a place of refuge, satisfaction, and expression.
In his 2010 book The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations, historian Ira Berlin tells of a four-hundred-year search for home, a series of four migrations to escape repressive forces and embrace something more hopeful. Even today, migration on a smaller and more intimate scale continues; women and people of color, displaced by the housing crisis, grapple with whether to stay put or to venture into unfamiliar roles and communities. Moreover, recent census data tells the story of young, educated African Americans, many of them women, choosing to make their homes in the South, reversing the journey of their ancestors. Latinos are changing the demographic landscape of southern cities and suburbs in America as well. Americans, whatever their race or gender, do not move for the sake of moving. They move to find a place where they truly belong. Others opt to remain in familiar places where they can create the homes they desire, even if the locations are less promising ones. The choice is often between a place where expectations of equality were not realized and a place where they can be reimagined—where they can live the American Dream.
Home ownership alone is not the answer assuring that individuals enjoy even the “place” of home, let alone the state, of being at home in America. The full participation of all citizens is much too important to be left to the whims of the housing market. In 2011 migration, along with a sense of rootlessness, is taking place on a much larger scale among Americans caught in the crisis of home. In chapter 8, I explore the pivotal question for all of us: What can our leaders do to ensure that the home remains an integral and achievable part of the American Dream? Punishing a handful of lenders in isolated lawsuits throughout the country is not a national strategy for addressing the displacement of millions. Administrative programs that cover just a fraction of the households suffering from the collapse of the market address only the end result of a crisis of home, which is rooted in inequalities that have plagued the country throughout its existence. History shows us that more fundamental approaches, those that require us to rethink our ideological investment in home ownership and our equating of home ownership with “home,” are necessary to address the predicament we confront today.
In 2008, two
events spurred me to think anew about equality in the United States. One, the presidential election campaign, took place in full public view. The other occurred in the quiet of my home, as I sorted through the seventeen years of correspondence that I had received from people throughout the country since my testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Clarence Thomas hearing. I saw the richness of the content of those letters, which came to represent a community in which I had become a member. I culled them for what they taught me about belonging to that community. Between those letters and the real prospect of living in a country that, for the first time in history, might be headed by either a white woman or a black man, I began to feel more at home in America than I had since 1991, when the public rejected the testimony of my life experience.
In 2009, when the first African American family to call 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue home moved into the country’s most symbolic house, the political dimensions of the concept of home could not be ignored. President Obama, the son of a white American from Kansas and a black African from Kenya, and First Lady Michelle Obama, a descendant of slaves, were perfectly positioned to bring us to a new understanding of what it means for every citizen to feel at home in this country. Their personal and family stories are emblematic of the struggle of America to become a more inclusive democracy. The calls for proof of President Obama’s place of origin, Hawaiian birth certificate notwithstanding, indicate that a vocal minority of Americans are still not “at home” with Barack Obama as president. Nevertheless, even in this time of crisis, he has an opportunity to resurrect and expand the American Dream and to lead the country to see home as something more than individual ownership of a house. Chapter 8 will focus on that reimagining.
From Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama, presidents have shaped who is at home in America and whom America is at home with. Lincoln’s signatures on the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Emancipation Proclamation redefined our thinking about who belonged. Together they gave blacks, and others who had been locked out of the American Dream because they lacked the resources to buy land, a chance to put down roots, to enjoy the benefits of citizenship, and to be represented by their government. The American family was greatly enlarged, but not complete, as Native Americans were left out and many others, including the newly freed slaves, remained vulnerable.
Other presidents have made similar contributions to the expansion of democracy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal ideas promoting home ownership opportunities were so strong that they prompted African Americans to reinvest in the country’s political system and defect from the party of Lincoln to the Democratic Party. Lyndon Johnson’s unyielding support for the passage of civil rights legislation, enforcement of housing nondiscrimination laws, and efforts to provide better housing for the poor also come to mind. Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Johnson confronted inequality and moved the country toward a stronger democracy. Yet none saw America reach its capacity as an inclusive community. Each left work to be done by future generations.
Barack Obama’s presidency became another milestone in the full citizenship of African Americans and others who had felt left out politically in the previous twenty years. But the first black president’s achievements must mean more. Like Lincoln, Obama must seize the moment of crisis to enlarge our concept of home for all Americans, particularly those who have been displaced by the economic and housing crises. Just as previous presidents came to hold special places in the hearts of the disenfranchised, the enslaved, and those without property, President Obama could become a champion of the displaced. Having been raised mostly by a single mother and her parents, he helps us think more broadly about what a family is. So can Michelle Obama, the descendant of slaves and slaveholders. The Obamas’ personal histories are living stories of dislocation and progress in the search for home in America.
To move the country forward, the president will have to confront lingering inequality by engaging us in a discussion about the meaning of home, by enforcing laws that protect against housing discrimination, and by establishing policies that encourage the building of communities of equals. True, for the first time in our country’s history, the house “at the center of a nation’s identity,” as C-SPAN called the White House, is presided over by an African American family.14 But the job of creating a more inclusive democracy is not the president’s alone. One of my greatest privileges as a university professor is to work with a generation that sees race and gender differently than mine. Its members challenge conventional categories and long-held thinking. Indeed, today 2.9 million people, a majority of them under the age of thirty, identify themselves as multiracial. As much as they believe in equality, for them a discussion of rights is abstraction. If we are to engage young Americans in a struggle for progress, we must understand that some ways of excluding those viewed as different will not be addressed by a discussion of rights and find new ways to talk about what it means to belong and live the American Dream. Our schools—at every level, elementary to university—must rise to the challenge of giving young people new ways of understanding equality and how it works in their lives.
The more than twenty-five thousand letters I have received from the public over the course of nearly two decades extend beyond the specific issues of the day. Consequently, my letters offer long-view lessons about equality that remind me of our common desires to be truly at home in America. Among their many messages is that, at its best, the American Dream is an application of our shared values. The views of the letter writers, like those of my students, reflect a larger portrait of the American Family. However, most of those who wrote to me won’t return to school to learn how to realize that vision. They must be able to look within their own homes, as well as to religious institutions, the media, local leaders, and even businesses, for programs and policies that include the experiences of the disenfranchised and that promote our connections.
While he is in the White House, President Obama can make “home” the symbol of equality that Americans have envisioned in the past and that many of us continue to pursue. But it will take all who believe in an inclusive democracy to ensure that the American Dream stays alive and remains real for generations to come.
Chapter 1. Home: Survival and the Land
Home: 1. The country or place of origin.
2. The house and grounds with their appurtenances habitually occupied by a family.
3. The family environment to which one is attached.
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary
The Luggage
In August 1973, three weeks past my seventeenth birthday, I packed my clothes in three hand-me-down Samsonite suitcases and left the only place I had ever called home. Even at that age, I wanted a “better place,” just as my grandparents had more than a hundred years earlier. College was my first stop on the road to that better place—wherever it was.
Situated in Stillwater, Oklahoma State University was only three hours by car from the farming community of Lone Tree, where I’d grown up, but it was a world away from what I was leaving. The university had built its first high-rise dormitories only several years earlier, and as a freshman on scholarship, I was assigned to live in one. The twelve-story concrete-and-steel structure known as Willham Hall would be my home for the next two years.
In just about every way, our family’s house in Lone Tree stood in stark contrast to my new dwelling. Like the other homes in our community, ours was a one-story wooden structure. A front room led to a dining room, followed by a kitchen and utility porch joining three bedrooms and a single bath. As the youngest child, I was the last to leave my parents’ house, but I could recall when my parents, six of my brothers and sisters, an elderly uncle, and I shared a home that was a beehive of intimate activity—with sibling squabbles, parental admonitions, family meals, music, homework, and chores. Willham Hall was bustling as well, but the activity inside was, like its exterior, much more impersonal, even institutional. Its hundreds of
residents and I were there for the purpose of learning. For the most part, we treated the building and each other like the temporary measures we were.
Lone Tree, a smattering of small family-owned farms, had no post office, no streetlights or signs, and little hint of any government presence. Our “town hall” was the two-room Lone Tree Missionary Baptist Church, which at one time doubled as an elementary school for black children. Lone Tree’s African American citizens worshiped there on Sundays. During the week, they occasionally gathered there to discuss issues of concern to the community, matters like who would contact the county commissioner to make sure equipment was sent to grate the unpaved roads. The few whites who lived among us spent Sunday mornings elsewhere. Though my college town of Stillwater was no booming metropolis, it had paved roads, stoplights, a city hall, a mayor, a police force, and more than one post office. But the university campus was the hub of my experience; because I didn’t own a car, I knew very little of what went on beyond the university’s sprawling acreage.
On the day I left for Oklahoma State, my belongings—notebooks, paper and pens, a few sets of twin sheets, a popcorn popper, and a new hi-fi record player, all graduation gifts—fit into a few boxes that my brother Bill and I loaded onto the back of a pickup. My neatly pressed clothes were packed in the luggage that bore the initials of my benefactor, Iola B. Young, a retired schoolteacher who was the most educated black woman in Lone Tree. Her friends, my mother among them, knew her as I. B. To my generation, she was Miss Young.
In dividing her possessions among her friends, Miss Young decided that the luggage was something that I could use. It was worn, but I was happy to have it. It was, after all, a matching set, and I needed something to put my clothes in. Miss Young, unlike the other women in our community, had escaped the manual labor of farm work and earned her living with her mind; I was determined to do the same. The wear on the suitcases suggested that they were well traveled. Had I been looking for a sign of my own long journey ahead, I might have found it there, but much of the gift’s import was lost on me then. Years later, I would begin to understand why my mother accepted it with mixed emotions.