It seemed obvious that the country’s social contract had been broken in the cities we’d abandoned and the rural outposts we’d forgotten. It never occurred to me that the heart of the problem might instead lie in the tidy ranch houses and solid SAT scores of places like my hometown. Still blind to the suburbs’ role in that story, I struck out for everywhere else, reporting from the boarded-up blocks of North Philly and the wide-open ranges of western New Mexico, from weary tumble-down buildings on the South Side of Chicago and the rutted sweet potato farms of central Mississippi. Like so many others before me, I became obsessed with the ways our education system so often seemed to widen that gap, especially for families of color. It was in Philadelphia that I found work as a journalist, writing about the spaces between this country’s promises and its realities. Driven by a dread I didn’t understand, I resolved to escape from suburbia as fast as possible. Were they an order to be followed? A secret to be kept? I remained paralyzed with uncertainty right up until the end of high school, when I decided my dad had been trying to warn me. Then his attention would snap back to the Steelers game or whatever backyard do-it-yourself project he was fixated on that month, leaving me alone to puzzle over his words. I just don’t want you to end up stuck like me, my father might blurt out during a commercial or while I was helping him in the garage. I was born into my American dream in a suburb called Penn Hills.īut growing up on a quiet street ten miles east of downtown Pittsburgh, in a middle-class white family that had no trouble accessing suburbia’s bounty, especially from public schools that delivered hundreds of kids like me to state colleges each year, I often found myself on the receiving end of a cryptic message. –Lewis Mumford, The City in History, 1961 Thus the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion.” “In the suburb, one might live and die without marring the image of an innocent world, except when some shadow of evil fell over a column in the newspaper.
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