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

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2017

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 4

Chapters 5-7

Chapters 8-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Chapters 16-17

Chapters 18-20

Chapters 21-23

Chapters 24-28

Chapters 29-32

Chapters 33-36

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 10 Summary: “Mobility” by Julia Alvarez

Julia Alvarez recounts her experience being stranded overnight in the Atlanta airport, one of the largest airports in the United States and one that acts as a hub for travelers to various destinations within the country and abroad. The airport thus becomes the scene for interrogating socio-economic differences. Airports bring diverse groups together and act as “a cross-section of America, if not the world” (91). Simultaneously, the people alongside Alvarez represent the 90 percent of Americans who are not rich; the top one percent of Americans hold as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Even the airport reflects this partitioning, with wealthier travelers dining in airline clubs rather than the food court in which Alvarez and her husband sit.

After their flight back to their home in Vermont is delayed and later canceled, Alvarez and her spouse find themselves enmeshed in a kind of airport subculture. She wonders about the lives of the overworked airline representatives who deal with upset travelers and rebook flights. A woman with two children and an ailing, elderly father needs a hotel room for the night, while privileged corporate travelers quickly book them, giving no thought to the people around them. The airline refuses to allow stranded passengers use of their club facilities for overnight stay. The situation highlights class privilege and the structural inequality that exists everywhere in the United States.

Alverez soon meets a young Mexican woman, traveling by air for the first time to visit her boyfriend in Oklahoma. She, too, is stranded, unable to call her boyfriend waiting in Tulsa, and ill-equipped to deal with her circumstances. Alvarez translates for the young woman at the airline counter, observing that the demographics of the night-shift workers all over the airport “had become increasingly darker” (97). Finally, the young woman from Mexico gets a new flight for the following day. The story ends with Alvarez and her husband sleeping on the floor of the airport, surrounded by fellow passengers of diverse backgrounds but bound together by their shared experience and what the author calls “a kindred care and kindness” (99). Her essay ends on a positive note: “Even though Easter was two days away, I felt a resurrection of hope. Please don’t tell the airlines, but I was glad for what happened” (99).

Chapter 11 Summary: “Youth From Every Quarter” by Kirstin Valdez Quade

Kirstin Valdez Quade reflects on her time as a summer teacher at Elliot Academy, a boarding school in New England from which she graduated. Here she met Ana, a Hispanic teen from Oregon who won a scholarship to attend. Quade sees herself in Ana and empathizes with the difficulty she has acclimating to the mostly white, wealthy student body. Moreover, Ana struggles in a mathematics course and believes her only option is to leave the school in disappointment. So, Quade approaches the dean for help.

The dean refuses to move Ana to a different course or provide any additional support services, like tutoring. The dean fails to understand what this scholarship and opportunity mean to an underprivileged student like Ana, but Quade knows its significance well because for her, too, Elliot Academy meant “escape, welcome, possibility” (104). Ana leaves the boarding school, and Quade reflects on the anger she feels 10 years later at the hypocrisy of the boarding school’s goal to bring in young people from what they call “every quarter.”

Chapter 12 Summary: “Outside” By Kiese Laymon

While employed as an underpaid and contingent faculty member at Vassar College in New York State, Kiese Laymon meets Dave Melton. Dave is an unemployed Black man who has been in and out of prison for drug offences. He is soon arrested for crossing state lines into Maryland while on parole. He was going to Maryland to visit his daughter.

People of color face numerous injustices under the American legal system. Melton was arrested and imprisoned because he was black and poor, while one of Laymon’s students, rich and white, was arrested for selling hard drugs and using heroin, was not imprisoned, and went on to earn his degree. The author sends books to Melton and gives him money to buy items from the prison’s commissary, though Laymon is also financially struggling. He writes, “Dave had neither the money nor the power to fight his arrest. I was the wealthiest, most powerful person he knew, and I had sixty-seven dollars in my bank account” (110).

White colleagues insinuate that Laymon is fortunate to be a scholar rather than an imprisoned Black man, like Dave. His white coworkers, however, are the lucky ones, not just because of the privileges their whiteness affords them, but because they get to work alongside academics like him, who know that one’s “academic excellence” is not “a stand-in for innocence” (111).

Chapters 10-12 Analysis

Chapters 10 through 12 highlight structural inequality’s negative impact on poor, non-white Americans. These structural inequalities appear in educational institutions and the prison system. The Atlanta airport acts as a microcosm for viewing these inequalities.

Both Kirsten Valdez Quade and Kiese Laymon critique institutional and systemic racism and show how this bigotry causes rampant inequality. Quade’s reflection on her time teaching summer school at Elliot Academy highlights how inequality is engrained in education and the way that white educators’ unconscious biases inform decision making.

Laymon’s account provides insight into the racial discrimination inherent in the American justice system. In both essays, individuals are punished for things that their white counterparts are not. Quade’s Ana is forced to withdraw from summer school when the academy’s dean denies her additional support that might allow her to flourish, while Laymon’s friend Dave is imprisoned for minor drug offences. Laymon teaches a white student who commits a similar offense but who faces none of the same consequences. These scenarios exemplify systemic racism and structural inequality.

Similar inequality appears in Julia Alvarez’s story of being stranded overnight in Atlanta’s airport, where she crosses paths with the privileged and disadvantaged alike. Corporate travelers quickly book hotel rooms for the evening, while others, many of them non-white travelers, resort to sleeping on the airport’s floor. They are unable to afford the extra cost of a hotel room for the night and excluded from accessing the airline club because they are not elite passengers. Instead, these travelers are bound together in their shared experience, one that Alvarez values since it led to the creation of an unexpected, if short-lived, community.

Each contribution paints a similar picture. Many people benefit from and fail to recognize their racial and class privileges, like the dean in Quade’s essay. She denies Ana any extra support, dismissing Ana’s experience; she even tells Quade, “Not everyone belongs at Elliot” (104). Others, like Ana and Laymon’s friend Dave, live behind the barriers that the privileged construct. America is not the same for everyone. It is a moral imperative that individuals and institutions work to unravel structural inequality, something the dean failed to acknowledge in Quade’s story, and which she was complicit in maintaining. These authors thus encourage their readers to reject this complicity.