There Is Nothing for You Here, page 14
There were very few Black graduate students like Tom at Harvard in the 1990s. Although the undergraduate student body was rapidly diversifying, racial tensions were rife on and around the campus. A few years later I was a resident tutor in Cabot House, one of the Harvard undergraduate dorms. Two Black students were taking a computer from the dorm to get fixed at Harvard’s nearby computer lab. They were stopped by the Harvard police and accused of stealing it. I was one of the people who had to intervene. I got to see at first hand what I had missed in the UK in the 1980s. The United States was not what I had expected when it came to race and equality of opportunity for all Americans. This was a house divided in multiple ways.
In America, as I quickly learned at Harvard, race exacerbates the obstacles to social mobility I had experienced. It functions as an immutable factor in constraining opportunity. Place, class, and accent counted as obstacles to opportunity where I was from—and also gender, which would loom large throughout my career in the U.S. But I had left “place” behind when I moved to St. Andrews. By coming to Harvard, I had also left class behind. Unless I encountered other Brits, like Tony Blair in Aspen, I found that no one had any idea about my accent. Americans were tuned into their own dialects and regional accents, and also to “foreign accents” and unfamiliar speech patterns, but they were clueless about the geographic origins of mine and what it signified in terms of social class, likely income level, and educational attainment. My accent seemed like generic English for most people, although some discerning listeners would notice that it was distinct in some way. They assumed I was Australian, or maybe even from South Africa. Perhaps I might be Irish or Scottish, which has a certain cachet in the United States. At the same time that I was horrified by the new forms of discrimination that I was seeing in the United States, I also reveled in the fact that I no longer automatically came with the “common northerner” label stuck on my forehead.
In the United States, race puts class, place, income status, gender, and everything else that divides and categorizes people in an entirely different frame. As a white British student at Harvard, I was immediately elevated up the social ladder. In contrast to Tom, I got a pass into a whole new realm simply because of the color of my skin. I blended right in without doing anything much at all apart from showing up. This held true for women as well. I faced gender discrimination, but Black women were doubly disadvantaged by gender and race, as I learned though the experience of Black female undergraduates at Harvard and a close colleague in the U.S. government, Danica Starks. Danica was one of the top women experts on Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia and one of the very few Black and minority women in Russian affairs. She spent two decades building a career in the national security and economic arena at the Department of Commerce and covered every critical policy issue in the region. As she moved through the ranks, Danica had to contend with all kinds of assumptions based entirely on her race, not her résumé. She had grown up in Washington, D.C., in the suburbs, and attended a largely Black public high school before university. Her parents were well educated and solidly middle-class. Yet, she quipped, everyone always presumed that because she was Black, she must be “from the hood” and a low-income background. When people looked at me, because I was white, they thought the opposite.
Danica followed the same path as every other high-performing U.S. national security professional I worked with in government. She learned languages and studied abroad in several European countries, she had internships at prestigious places. Once in the Commerce Department, she acquired additional skills and qualifications, with stints on Capitol Hill, assignments to different agencies, and graduate courses at the National Defense University. But being a Black woman always put her in uncomfortable situations. One meeting at the Department of State summed everything up. It was a large meeting. Men dominated the speaker roster and the participant list. A tiny handful of women ended up seated together at a small table at the back of the room. Danica took in the scene and casually commented on it: “Here we go again, just us.” One of the other women at the table looked surprised: “What do you mean? You’re not like us. You’re Black!” Danica wasn’t even allowed to be a woman in that moment. Her Blackness ejected her from the sisterhood.
As Tom’s and Danica’s experiences underscore, race in the United States creates a hierarchy, a fixed caste system that those within it can never fully escape. Irrespective of their educational and professional achievements and income, they are still seen to belong on the bottom rung.
Opportunity from a Cereal Box
I was at Harvard for the entirety of the 1990s, studying for graduate degrees and working simultaneously as a tutor in the undergraduate residential houses and at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Along the way I made the decision to stay in the United States, and in 1995, I also got married. As I progressed through my new American life and was absorbed into my husband’s sprawling midwestern family, the United States writ large—not just writ small in Boston—started to look a lot like the United Kingdom that I had left behind. Spatial inequality was an issue in America as well. The United States was not the land of opportunity for everyone in every place. There were plenty of towns and regions that Americans wanted to leave behind.
My American in-laws, Jim and Irma Keen, had never traveled abroad. They did not have passports. Just after we got married, my husband and I thought they should visit my parents in Bishop Auckland and possibly see a bit of the UK—London at least, and some of the more famous parts of the North East, like Hadrian’s Wall.
My in-laws and parents were the same age. They were born in the early 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression. They had a lot in common in terms of life experiences and perspectives, despite the obvious distance. They hit it off at our wedding in Cambridge, and it seemed like they might enjoy spending some more time together. We offered to pay for the flights and make all the arrangements, as the Keens didn’t have a lot of money. My parents would go down to London to meet them, spend a couple of days there in a B&B, and take them back to Bishop Auckland on the train. They would stay at my parents’ house. Mam and Dad still did not have a car, but a family friend offered to drive everyone around. My parents also arranged some bus and train trips, including up to Scotland. Jim and Irma seemed somewhat enthusiastic.
Mr. and Mrs. Keen had grown up in rural South Dakota, in Mr. Keen’s case working the family farm. His father had dropped dead of a heart attack in the fields, having already lost an arm trying to fix a piece of rogue machinery. Mr. Keen was the oldest child. He had to support his mother and his younger siblings. After finishing high school, he decided to continue his education. He wanted to help farmers find new markets for their crops. Mr. Keen grew corn and soybeans for a living and had lots of ideas for novel ways of processing them. So, taking advantage of post–World War II educational grants, he hitchhiked during the day to Dakota Wesleyan University in the nearby town of Mitchell (home of the world’s one and only Corn Palace) to study chemistry. He came back to manage the farm in the evening and at weekends.
When he had his degree, he got his first job right off the back of a cereal box. He did not have any contacts or networks beyond the immediate farming community. It was the early 1950s. No recruiters, apart from the army, had materialized on campus. Pondering his seemingly limited opportunities over his bowl of Cheerios one morning, Jim noticed an address for the food company on the cereal box. So he wrote to General Mills and sent his résumé. They hired him. Jim’s job from the cereal box was his ticket out of South Dakota.
Irma, Mrs. Keen, also wanted to go somewhere other than South Dakota. She met Jim at a local roller rink when she was still in high school and he was already a college student. She was the school valedictorian and the most popular girl in her class, but she was one of six girls. Her father had a hard time keeping steady work. She had no means to go to university. She briefly worked for the telephone company as an operator. Jim had mobility, even if he was of modest means. After they married they packed up and headed east. General Mills moved them to Minneapolis. Jim became a food chemist and found a new job with Corn Products International, which took his growing family to Chicago in the 1960s. Jim and Irma raised twelve children in a small house in the suburbs. Life was more stationary when they got to Chicago. It was hard to travel domestically, let alone abroad, when you had twelve kids in tow, but they had already made a big series of moves.
Dad loved hearing Mr. Keen’s story. This was the American Dream. He thought Jim Keen was like a Jimmy Stewart character, right out of an old Hollywood movie. It was “Mr. Keen Goes to Chicago” instead of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. There was even a slight physical resemblance to the famous actor, and a similar understated personality and distinctive drawl. In his discussions with Jim Keen, Dad was struck by the disparity in their circumstances. Unlike Jim, Alf had traveled abroad as a young man. In his twenties, during the 1950s golden age for Durham miners, he earned good money down the pit. He saved up to travel in Europe during his summer vacations with two friends. But in life he had not moved very far. After he married, Alf lived only eight miles from Roddymoor. His professional trajectory was downwardly mobile. He had traded skilled work in the mines for unskilled auxiliary work in Bishop Auckland General Hospital.
Jim suggested that it was probably easier to move and find a new job in the United States than in the United Kingdom. The memory of just packing up and heading off somewhere else was still fresh for the Keens and their extended families. They weren’t rooted in centuries of history and generations growing up in the same region. Their grandparents had emigrated from Europe in the late nineteenth century and gone out West to farm, settling alongside people who had gone to the Great Plains as homesteaders in covered wagons and lived in sod huts. Jim’s maternal grandfather had moved from Belgium in his sixties with some of his children, leaving several others and his wife back in the home country (the Keens always seemed to have huge families). They started farming from scratch in South Dakota. One grandmother was even a mail-order bride from Sweden! Jim Keen pointed out that when he was growing up in the United States, especially after World War II, there was an expectation of geographic, economic, and social mobility. Even if you grew up on the family farm, you figured you and your children would have the opportunity to go to university or do something else. Not everyone had to stay on the farm.
Dad noted, regretfully, that there was no such expectation in the North East of England—beyond following your father’s footsteps down the pit. He recounted how he had considered emigrating to America in the 1960s, when his coal mine closed. It was clear that the writing was on the wall for the other local pits. Former Durham miners who had moved to West Virginia and Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley after World War II sent recruitment notices back home that the Durham Miners’ Association circulated. Dad investigated both options and seriously pursued the Pennsylvania prospects. Some relatives also headed out to Australia and New Zealand under the so-called Ten Pound Poms scheme, when the postwar governments were suffering from labor shortages. They offered subsidized flights and temporary relocation payments for UK industrial workers who could line themselves up with a job and commit to stay for at least two years. Tens of thousands of working-class British families took advantage of these opportunities. Dad wanted to go but discovered he could not take his parents along as dependents. Granny Hill was distraught at the thought of him leaving. There was no one to look after Granny and Grandad in his absence. In contrast, Jim Keen was from a large family. His younger brother took over for him when he left, looking after both the farm and their mother. Jim moved on. Dad stayed put.
When Jim and Irma came home, I eagerly asked them how the trip had been. Jim said that he thought Bishop Auckland was like his hometown in South Dakota, not somewhere you wanted to stick around. “It’s a good place to be from,” he said. “So did you not like your trip to England then?” I inquired, wondering if this had all been a bad idea. “We had a lovely time with your parents,” Irma said tactfully. “We really enjoyed London.” In fact, if fate had taken a different turn, there would have been no trip for the Keens to the UK. Dad could have found himself living in small-town USA, which would soon have lost its own primary industries. I could have grown up in Pennsylvania . . . But then again, Dad might not have met Mam without the porter’s job in Bishop Auckland General Hospital. I might not have been born at all.
Carbon County
At Harvard, I made friends with Susan Lazorchick, another Russian studies student whose family was from one of those small Pennsylvania coal-mining towns, Nesquehoning. Susan’s family were Slavs who emigrated from the Austro-Hungarian empire in the early 1900s. Her paternal grandfather was killed in a mining accident in 1945. Susan’s father was drafted into the navy at age eighteen and was then able to go to college, thanks to the GI Bill, at the University of Pittsburgh before studying at Dickinson School of Law in Carlisle, now part of Pennsylvania State University. He was the first generation out of the mines. He had a small law practice in Lansford, just up the hill from Nesquehoning, until he died of cancer when Susan was eleven. We were always surprised by the similarity of our families’ experiences, the slight chance that we could have been neighbors, and the fact that we had both ended up at Harvard. Later, when I began work at the Brookings Institution, a colleague, Emily Alinikoff, recounted a similar immigrant experience in a small town between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her family also emigrated from the Austro-Hungarian empire in the late 1800s, when coal was king in Pennsylvania. They became part of a small Jewish working-class community in town—one part of her family opened a kosher butcher shop, and another opened a children’s clothing store that survived for seventy-five years before it closed in the 1990s. Like Susan, Emily described the ups and the long down in the town’s fortunes and her family’s difficult journey. One grandparent initially lived above the town brothel before buying a house. They put all their money into educating the next generations of their children in the hope of ensuring greater mobility. It turned out that it wasn’t always so easy making it in America, but Emily and I both made quite a set of moves. We coincidentally ended up working at the White House together, in her case in the Office of Management and Budget.
My husband also lived in Pennsylvania for a while in the early 1990s, just before we got married. Ken worked for a company with industrial operations in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey. He lived in Conshohocken close to one of the plants. One long weekend we took a trip to the nearby Pocono Mountains, with plans to hike in the scenic Lehigh Gorge State Park. We ended up in a bed-and-breakfast in Jim Thorpe—the former Mauch Chunk (a Native American name for “Bear Place”). It was a company town created by the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, right next to Nesquehoning. Susan had recommended it, but I had not expected such a shock of familiarity. The strikingly rugged local scenery aside, Jim Thorpe could have been any town in County Durham transplanted to Pennsylvania. Every tourist site in town was linked to coal mining or the railroads or the industrialists who shaped the region’s development and grew rich from local seams of anthracite. Anthracite was “hard coal,” the most valuable variety for powering industry and heating homes, with low levels of impurities and a high carbon content. Jim Thorpe was the center of Carbon County.
County Durham was the North East of England’s equivalent of Carbon County. The exploitation of rich seams of anthracite coal put my home region and Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley on the map. The timescale of Jim Thorpe’s development as an industrial center closely tracked Bishop Auckland’s, although Jim Thorpe was far smaller in size and population. Mauch Chunk had been established in the early 1800s and then gone into sharp decline after the Second World War, when the mines began to close. In the 1950s the town presented itself as the resting place and living memorial of the celebrated Native American Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe (who went to school and started running in Carlisle, Pennsylvania). The town took on his name as part of an effort to transform itself into a tourist destination. When I related the trip and what I had seen to Dad, he grew excited. He was sure that Jim Thorpe’s number 9 mine, which had closed in 1972 (and much later became a museum), was one of the Pennsylvania mines he had considered in the early 1960s. He remembered the connection with “the Indian runner.” Dad’s American dream, it seemed, was in the Poconos. And his dream wouldn’t have lasted all that long; within a decade he would have been looking for other opportunities. The Lehigh Valley was another of Mr. Keen’s good places to be from when the mines closed down.
The Hard Budget Constraint
In this time period at Harvard, I decided to take some courses in economics to try to put everything I was observing in a larger context. This was a major deficiency in my formal education. I had studied economic history as an undergraduate and plowed through turgid tomes like Karl Marx’s Das Kapital until late at night in the St. Andrews library, but I had had no opportunity to study economics as a discipline. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what the discipline entailed.
At school we had economics classes that focused on basic finances, and home economics, which tried to set us up to run a household. This was straightforward enough and obviously useful. In terms of financial and monetary issues, I managed to grasp the idea of interest and compound interest—in theory, at least. As a child, however, the concept of banks lending out money for anything more than a mortgage was quite alien. Granny and Grandad didn’t have a bank account. They kept what little money they had in a biscuit tin in the kitchen cupboard. Everyone else had a basic bank account. As far as we knew (and hoped), our money was just parked there, in the bank where no one could steal it, until we needed to pay the mortgage and our bills. We did not know anyone who had their own business beyond a corner shop, a home-care service, or a plumbing, electrical, or construction business—and all that on a very small scale. No one in the family had any assets, liquid or otherwise, to be used as collateral for a personal loan. In fact, everyone was terrified of falling into debt. If you needed some money for an emergency, you borrowed from family and close friends and paid it back as quickly as you could.
