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

“America is broken. You don’t need a fistful of statistics to know this. You just need eyes and ears and stories. Walk around any American city and evidence of the shattered compact with citizens will present itself. There you will see broken roads, overloaded schools, police forces on edge, clusters and sometimes whole tent cities of homeless people camped in eyeshot of shopping districts that are beginning to resemble ramparts of wealth rather than stores for all.”

In his introduction to Tales of Two Americas, Freeman identifies a litany of problems that the contemporary United States faces. He notes that the audience does not need statistical data to prove that the country’s infrastructure, social welfare programs, and system of public education are in various states of failure. These problems are visible to readers in their own towns and cities. The divisions between haves and have-nots appear in American cities as homeless encampments exist short distances from the places where the wealthy spend extraneous cash.

“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