Reflections on a Road Trip: Part 1: Equality and Inequality

Where did May and June go? I know, work, wrapping up the kids' school, more work, etc. But here we are now, halfway through July, and I have been on a road trip en famille, visiting the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain West.

We meandered through Pennsylvania and Ohio, stopping to wander in the Firelands, and to visit little Ohio towns named after their counterparts in Fairfield County, Connecticut. It was great to stop in Norwalk, Ohio. It is home to the finest small town museum I have seen. In my opinion. The care and the effort that the curator and the town have lavished in showcasing the history of their little town are wonderful to behold. Ohio's landscape may be one of bleak de-industrialization but here and there there are these great flashes of determined cultural effort and striving. Long may those dolls, doilies and that awesome gun collection live on in the Firelands Museum.

Besides little delights like the afore-mentioned museum, one sociological pattern caught my eye: the further west you go, the less race-segregated work becomes. Let me clarify this: do I mean that racism lessens as you go into the Midwest? No, it doesn't. But when it comes to labor, especially in small towns, there are just as many whites doing menial jobs like cleaning bathrooms and sweeping out restaurants as there are minorities. That I was startled enough to notice this made me realize how differently race stratification works in the East Coast and in cities like Chicago, from upper Midwestern parts like Minnesota and South Dakota. For example, in the East house cleaning seems to be primarily a Hispanic and Polish monopoly, with some African American variation here and there. Poor whites in the midwest do exactly the same jobs as poor minorities in the East but comprise some of the first class racists of the country. Poor minorities perform menial labor everywhere and end up being despised anyway.  I wouldn't go so far as to call the mid-western pattern "equality" but it did make me stop to consider how complicated the politics of race are.

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