Okie Bookshelf:
Anita Hill on Finding Home
“In August 1973, three weeks past my seventeenth birthday, I packed my clothes in three hand-me-down Samsonite suitcases and left the only place I had ever called home.”
Anita Hill looks at the meaning of home in this series of stories that trace a journey from her family’s move to the “promised land” of Oklahoma to today’s sub-prime mortgage crisis. In Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race and Finding Home, Hill demonstrates how this search for a better place—a place to call home—has been stymied for far too long for many of our citizens by “institutional incentives that encourage separation.”
The search for home, of course, goes beyond the four walls—to the neighborhood, the community, and even the nation where we feel we belong. Our search begins with ourselves and our own family history:
When I began to explore my family history, I was in search of the perfect past. What I found were surprises and a messy, complicated reality that forced me to abandon the myths that filled my head about family, progress, and success.”
Hill discovers that the system established following slavery, to correct slavery’s depravities, had failed her ancestors. And yet, Hill’s ancestors “dared to imagine” a better place for themselves and their children.
This need for home runs deep in the American soul. From the first Euro-American settlers, to Abigail Adam’s arguments for women’s legal protections in their own homes, to commerce secretary Herbert Hoover’s Own Your Own Home campaign, to the twentieth century migration of blacks to the North, to George W. Bush’s Ownership Society, it is a need that has framed our national conversation.
Hill’s stories synthesize this history and conversation with personal reflections from herself and others, race and gender issues, government policies, and our enduring dreams for a better life.
After establishing the links among home, belonging, achievement and success, Hill calls for a new vision amidst the current housing crisis that has brought a great nation to its knees. This vision can take inspiration from the social networking communities that are being embraced, especially by younger citizens, as well as the story of President Obama, who’s “fervent search for home brought him to the presidency…”
The vision? “…not of movement, but one of place; not one of tolerance, but one of belonging; not just of rights, but also of community—a community of equals” Such a vision, Hill argues, could make an inclusive American Democracy where all of us feel at home.
This is a beautifully written, hopeful book.
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Comments
Dear Professor Connie:
I have to say that your question (and our subsequent offline conversation) has given me a whole new appreciation of this book. It sent me scrambling on the web to find out what Aristole, Plato, etc. meant by “community of equals.”
Although there is no reference in Hill’s book to earlier philosophical considerations of this idea, I think it’s safe to say the idea is ingrained in our ideal of America, and it has been expanded in our time beyond the ideas of the Greek philosophers, who probably meant “community” for certain individuals who were supported by a working “class” who could not share in that community.
For Hill, Home is “a place that provides access to every opportunity America has to offer.”
She is using the current housing crisis to comment on the concept of home beyond the four walls that so many people have lost or are losing in the housing bubble and recession.
While the dream of home ownership has been harder for women and minorities, Hill believes the current crisis is making it so bad, that it “threatens our country’s belief in its promises of fairness and prosperity for generations to come.”
“At the heart of the crisis,” she writes, “is the ideological disconnect between home as a basic element of the Amercan Dream and pathway to equality, and home as a market product.” This is not new, she notes, but perhaps it is becoming increasingly evident.
I think, ultimately, Hill’s book is a call for dialogue on this idea, and she lists questions at the end of the book that can start us on this exploration.
I hope this helps answer your question. I must say, if we had talked about this earlier, I probably would have put up a much better review of the book.
Thanks!
[...] I had to throw this up because 1) it features a bona-fide Okie; and, 2) it relates to a previous post on Okie Reads. [...]
[...] I had to throw this up because 1) it features a bona-fide Okie; and, 2) it relates to a previous post on Okie Reads. [...]
Bill–in Hill’s description of a “community of equals,” is she espousing a “utopian” type society that Plato, Thomas More, Hobbes, and Karl Marx envisioned?