Reimagining Equality Read online

  REIMAGINING EQUALITY

  Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home

  Anita Hill

  BEACON PRESS BOSTON

  To Chuck,

  and to all the women and men

  who have struggled to make

  a home in our country.

  Home:

  A place that provides access

  to every opportunity

  America has to offer.

  —A.H.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1. Home: Survival and the Land

  Chapter 2. Belonging to the New Land

  Chapter 3. Gender and Race at Home in America

  Chapter 4. Lorraine’s Vision: A Better Place to Live

  Chapter 5. Blame It on the Sun

  Chapter 6. Lessons from a Survivor: Anjanette’s Story

  Chapter 7. Home in Crisis: Americans on the Outside of the Dream

  Chapter 8. Home at Last: Toward an Inclusive Democracy

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Introduction

  Home: The place of one’s dwelling or nurturing,

  with the conditions, circumstances, and feelings which naturally attach to it

  and are associated with it . . . not merely “place” but also “state.”

  The Oxford English Dictionary

  This is a book about home.

  As the first decade of the new millennium came to a close, the country was still reeling from a housing crisis that caused both physical and psychological distress. The centrality of home to individuals of all stripes was never more apparent. Millions of Americans, male and female, of all races, had been set adrift as a result of reckless personal and institutional financial behavior, the precipitous decline of manufacturing industries, and in the case of Hurricane Katrina, an unprecedented natural disaster. And whether as a place or as a state of being, the significance of home to neighborhood, city, and national well-being was becoming clear. Moreover, the crisis raised questions about whether our country is indeed a welcoming location of endless possibility to those seeking the American Dream. Our national identity was being challenged by the home ownership crisis.

  Many have lost faith in homeownership, a bedrock of the American Dream. This loss is further complicated by the role of the home in defining equality and democracy—a role that is often overlooked, even though where one lives determines school assignments, voting opportunities, and often the availability of jobs, goods, and services. Yet little attention is paid to the complicated interrelationship between where one calls home, what happens inside the home, and equality outside the home.

  I plan to examine home as a place and a state of being by interweaving discussions of law, literature, and culture with stories of individuals, focusing on women, and African Americans, in search of equality. These stories reflect each woman’s experience in finding and shaping a home where she could achieve some measure of equality for herself and her family. Beginning with my own story, I invite readers to think about their experiences and yearning for home, even as they read of others whose experiences are different but who share a desire to be equal participants in our democracy. The women featured and I have learned over the course of our lives that home, as well as equality, need to be reconceived as our worlds change.

  These stories of gender, race, and finding home guide us through a history of imagining and reimagining equality. They also address issues that have long been neglected in this country but must be grappled with in order to ensure that every American has the opportunity to achieve the sense of belonging that comes from being at home. As black women have come to head the majority of black households, they have become the primary “homebuilders.” They have also become dominant forces as community builders in African American neighborhoods. Their determination to build their lives, their families, and their communities, despite harsh perceptions of them, is evidence of their belief in the promise of America, even in times when that promise may seem irreparably broken. Their struggle points to an important lesson: we may have reached the limits of current rights legislation’s ability to assure liberty and equality for all. For these women and others who have yet to be perfectly at home in our nation, we need to find other strategies.

  Black women know what it means physically, socially, and economically to possess a gender and a race.1 They know that race and gender equality must both be realized if either is to be achieved. Like other women, they struggle to balance work and family obligations, and they suffer from violence in their homes and on the streets of their communities. Along with African American men in many racially isolated neighborhoods, they endure crime, inadequate schools, and a lack of public and private amenities. With all women and black men, they face limited employment and educational opportunities, as well as underrepresentation in political arenas. We have passed many laws to try to address these inequities, to level the playing field, and yet we have not finished the work. They struggle, as millions do, to find home in America.

  How one conceives of home is deeply personal. As the poet T. S. Eliot wrote, “Home is where one starts from.”2 For me, home is inextricably linked to the story of how my family, in one generation, went from being property to owning property. In the first two chapters, I will explore the beginnings of the meaning I give to home by tracing the path that three generations of my family took to leave behind slavery and its vestiges. Their journeys kept them searching for an attachment to the land, their symbol of survival and belonging.

  Mollie Elliott, one of my maternal great-grandmothers, was seventeen years old and a slave in 1864, when she gave birth to my maternal grandfather in Little River County, Arkansas. That son, Henry Elliott, went on to homestead eighty acres of land at the turn of the century, only to lose them. Nevertheless, he and his wife, Ida, summoned the courage to move, along with seven of their children, to Oklahoma. They settled very near the farm on which I and my twelve siblings were raised by Erma, their youngest daughter, and her husband, Albert Hill. From the bucolic vantage point of the small, rural community of Lone Tree, our family experienced sweeping social change—from Jim Crow to the civil rights era. My parents remained on the farm well into the 1990s, beyond the time when many Americans had left rural life for a more promising, urban existence. But being well into their sixties by the time the law’s protections began to take hold, they saw the promises of equality not so much for change in their lives, but for the potential to transform the lives of their children. In particular, the advances ushered in by the civil rights and women’s rights movements offered women born in the 1950s and ’60s the kind of independence that Erma Hill could never fully imagine, much less realize. But this much she knew: neither the land, nor a house full of children, nor even a husband would define the place or the state of her daughter’s home.

  With the rights movements, my path to equality followed an entirely different trajectory from my mother’s. Yet in 1973, Erma Hill approached my departure for college with optimism and with little thought of the challenges inherent in imagining a life not only outside rural confines, but also without the constraints of overt discrimination. And why not? The country was on the verge of a new day. A generation of children was making its way into the world to live out America’s promise of equality, and she would enjoy a front-row seat knowing that she had prepared me to be a part of it.

  As personal as the concept of home is, within its contours are principles with universal application. In chapter 3, I explore the history of how home became a preponderant symbol of race and gender advancement in the United States, simultaneously denoting
belonging and independence. In 1776, likening the tyranny of husbands in the home to the tyranny of King George over the colonies, Abigail Adams implored her husband, John, to “Remember the Ladies” by including protections for them in the “new Code of Laws.”3 At the turn of the twentieth century, the African American leader Booker T. Washington urged fellow former slaves to abandon the “hovel” and establish respectable homes as evidence that they had earned the right to be recognized as citizens.4 Washington’s contemporary Nannie Helen Burroughs established a school for working-class African American girls, using the home as the foundation for their intellectual and economic enterprises. Renouncing both gender and race subservience, she encouraged her students to be wage earners and “professional” homemakers.5

  To Adams, Washington, and Burroughs, home stood as a reference point from which equality and civic and economic participation sprang. Piercing the veil between the public and private spheres, Adams imagined women’s equality as safety at home, which could be secured only by recognition in the Constitution. For Washington, African Americans’ citizenship would emanate from their ability to establish homes that would affirm them as neighbors in the word’s fullest and most meaningful sense. The keys to Washington’s ideas for equality were community and interconnectedness. In Burroughs’s vision, the economic recognition of work that women did in the home rightly established their social and political worth outside the home. In a society dominated by men, Burroughs saw and advocated the dignity and value in women’s contributions and in women themselves. Home, a critical component of the American Dream, was at the heart of the quest for an inclusive democracy as pursued by women and people of color.

  Through the stories of Adams, Washington, Burroughs, and others, I hope to show how home became a positive symbol of advancement. Advocates of equality took a concept that had represented gender and racial oppression and transformed it into a means of empowerment. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century activists argued that liberation required society to reimagine the home, and that the freedom to choose where and how one lives was a vital component of a free society. Moreover, they laid the groundwork for aligning the interests of women and blacks with those of the entire society. Their ideas and their work would take root and develop into twentieth-century migration patterns and equal rights movements.

  Nothing better represents the twisted path to racial and gender equality in America than the search for home as a place of refuge, financial security, and expression. At the end of the Civil War and well into the twentieth century, for African American families, the search for roots that had been lost to slavery became a search for land, a place where they could earn a living and escape the vestiges of bondage and the brutality of Jim Crow laws. Beginning in about 1915, during what is known in American history as the Great Migration, black men and women began to leave the rural South and make their way to northern industrial cities to find work and a new home. Despite racial restrictions in the North, the bright lines drawn by segregationists were starting to blur. Black women who were domestic workers started to form enclaves in rental housing in affluent neighborhoods. As the number of blacks in the North grew, the demand for housing began to exceed the supply of homes unencumbered by racially restrictive covenants. The idea of challenging those covenants by buying homes in white neighborhoods took hold; purchasing a home in a racially restricted neighborhood became a symbol of racial equality, a way for blacks to realize the desire of all Americans to find a place to belong. Litigation in the 1930s and forms of civil resistance to discrimination ultimately led Congress to pass equality-promising, antidiscrimination legislation in the 1960s.

  But playwright Lorraine Hansberry complicated this view of the path to equality. Her real-life story of being a child caught in a landmark civil rights case, as well as her 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, exposed the complexity of relying on the home as the fulfillment of racial justice. In chapter 4, I present Hansberry’s experience as a story of race, gender, and commitment to a dream. Lorraine Hansberry was eight years old when her family moved into a white neighborhood in a Chicago suburb. Her father, Carl Hansberry, had won a 1940 Supreme Court case giving him the right to purchase the home in what had been a racially restricted community; but despite this victory, the family was harassed and their home vandalized. Lorraine Hansberry loosely based A Raisin in the Sun on her family’s experience.6 At the end of Raisin, the Younger family moves into a home over the protests of their new white neighbors. The conclusion is hopeful, but the complicated twists and turns the Younger family’s story takes to reach that ending signal that their victory, like the Hansberrys’, will be short-lived.

  In 1960, within months of Raisin’s debut on Broadway, racial issues in America were being played out with sit-ins and marches in support of integration. Fatal violence in opposition to it soon followed. The battle for America as a welcoming place for African Americans erupted. In a span of just a few months in 1963, the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi, and four African American girls were killed when their church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed by Klansmen. Although civil rights legislation was enacted in 1964, the question remained whether people of all races could live together in the same neighborhoods.

  I first saw the movie version of Raisin on television when I was a child coming of age in the 1960s. It was one of my first images of a black family on television, and it offered me an inside view of the civil rights struggle. Though often overlooked, Lorraine Hansberry’s play also forecast the breakdown in black marriages, intraracial and interracial conflicts, and the impact of social change and materialism on all homes and communities. Raisin served as a contrast to the 1950s view of women and the home that was portrayed on television and in some popular women’s magazines. As women’s opportunities outside the home changed, so did their ideas about home and identity. As part of the women’s movement, they challenged the notions that the home defined a man’s masculinity and success, that women needed only to provide a “happy home” for their husbands and boys to be successful, and that children would reward them by being successes.

  At each juncture, even as progress toward equality was made through the passing of civil rights laws, African American women, who found themselves outside the dream because of gender combined with race, had to develop a new image of equality. In a 1965 prescription to avert the decline of the Negro family, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then the assistant secretary of labor, cited the “matriarchal structure” of black homes as a primary impediment to the achievements of black men and racial progress in American society. To Moynihan, racial equality outside the home could exist only when gender inequality existed in it, a proposition that ignored the fact that the average wages for black men, suppressed by racism, made it necessary for black women to work outside the home as well. Even more important, he ignored black women’s growing educational achievements, which promised even greater opportunity for economic gains at a time when materialism was growing and encroaching on the home.7 Black household income, even with two working adults, simply could not keep up with the image of the American Dream as an ever larger home with bigger and more technically advanced household products.

  Though Moynihan’s prescription for equality was flawed, his prognosis for urban blacks’ existence was on target. Violence and decay in urban neighborhoods were indeed escalating, particularly by the late 1970s. Middle-class and wealthy whites increasingly left urban areas for the predominantly white suburbs, the development of which was subsidized by governments at the local, state, and even federal levels. More women began to work outside the home.

  Women—whether married or single, homemakers or working outside the home—were still primarily responsible for the home and for protecting their children from harm, even as violence found its way into “good” neighborhoods. In chapter 5, I present Marla’s story to show how those responsibilities came together in one home in S
outhern California. As she anguishes over the murder of her son Sam, killed just yards from her doorstep, Marla must confront the limitations of individual effort in combating the growing threats to the sanctity of home. After a lifetime of shaping her home to meet her family’s needs, she must reassess the legacy she leaves to her two surviving children so that they may create the “happy home” she struggles to envision for herself.

  Marla’s story has several morals. First, as a sort of sequel to A Raisin in the Sun, it serves as a warning against making the fragile institution of home the focal point for civil rights advances. Second, as I explore the structural conditions that disadvantage Marla, her story cautions us to consider the limits that individuals face when attempting to withstand the pressures put on home life in modern America. Finally, it shows that when neighborhoods are vulnerable, entire cities are at risk. In 2009, as the housing crisis unfolded, the danger of relying too heavily on access to home ownership as a measurement of progress became even more obvious, especially to black women. But rather than “dry up like a raisin in the sun,” the dream of home ownership for black women flourished.8

  In 1998 I purchased a home for the fourth time, moving from Oklahoma to Massachusetts and buying an 1887 Victorian that I imagined as my dream home. In truth, I didn’t move to New England for the real estate. I was looking for a new intellectual home. After years of hearing from individuals, mostly women, who had suffered various forms of discrimination, I felt I needed to be outside a law school environment to rethink the role of the law. The disconnect between the laws on the books and women’s experiences persuaded me that laws alone were not enough. I was beginning to understand, in fact, that as important as rights are to identifying inequality, true equality for all Americans requires us to consider how it can be expressed in those things that are most familiar and compelling, such as home. I took a position at a public-policy school, hoping that collaboration with academics and practitioners in other disciplines would help me learn what needed to be done to fulfill the promises of equality that I had so strongly believed in when I left Oklahoma for the first time decades earlier.