AMERICAN HISTORICAL NOVELS discussion
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We Hope for Better Things
Recognizing Privilege
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Coming from a white, middle class family with roots in Detroit, we always had nice cars. We even had a couple classic cars—a black 1955 Thunderbird convertible and a red 1972 Corvette Stingray T-top—and spent a lot of my childhood at or in classic car shows. At one point, we had five cars and only three drivers in my family. We never bought new cars, but we always bought nice cars. My first car was a Cadillac, a hand-me-down from my father. Because I grew up that way, it felt normal. Clearly it is not. I take having a car for granted. It wasn’t until I moved to a city where a lot of people take public transportation, and started going to a church where a lot of people need rides to get to church or to doctors’ appointments, that I recognized that reliable transportation is not something everyone has—to say nothing of having extra cars that are just for fun. Cars are expensive, both to buy and to own—insurance, gas, maintenance, repair. I am never more nervous to make a mistake than when buying a car. I worry more about buying a used car than I did about buying our house!
We have just about always bought brand new cars. We kept them until they were paid off and then some. A couple we bought for cash. We bought my wife's pickup used. It had about 60,000 miles on it. She put another 20,000 on it in about 20 years. We were so sad when it died!
We were quite happy with our used Explorer. 82k on it when we bought it. Over 250k on it when some chick texting in a Yukon totaled it last year! :( We would have kept it going as long as we could. It was a great car.
We once bought a Fiat. That company has been around longer than Ford and has built aircraft, machineguns, and armored vehicles. So I thought, what the heck? It turned out to be a lemon. The problem was, nobody here used metric tools back then, unless you wanted to go to the Jaguar dealership and pay $$$.
As these characters’ worlds collide, we see an ever clearer picture of the fault lines that were running through Detroit in the Sixties. Because while racism was not institutionalized in the North as it was in the South, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there and it doesn’t mean it didn’t affect people’s lives and families for generations. Though Detroit paid African American workers better than anywhere else in the nation, that didn’t mean all of them prospered. They were victims of racist housing policies that kept them out of certain neighborhoods, de facto segregated schools that meant less money was spent on black students, and discriminatory admissions and hiring practices.
It takes Nora a while to see these things because she has grown up as a member of a privileged class.
Can you think of a time you first recognized something about your life that you had taken for granted? Something you thought everyone had or experienced just because you did?
I’ll start us off in the comments. Remember, when you comment you’re entered to win one of three signed copies of We Hope for Better Things on Friday!