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 16-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 16 Summary: “We Share the Rain and Not Much Else” by Timothy Egan

Timothy Egan writes about the history of Seattle’s social landscape and remembers a time in the 1980s when he frequently sought part-time work as a dock worker, unloading goods imported from abroad. He worked alongside career longshore workers, an industry practically destroyed in today’s Seattle and replaced by the technology industry, which has brought gentrification. This shift has driven up the cost of living, rent, and home prices in the city, much like in the modern Bay Area described in Rebecca Solnit’s opening essay. According to Egan:

Walking up the hill from the waterfront, past a place that used to have a six-a.m. happy hour and another address that was a refuge for sailors called that Catholic Seaman’s Club, and you find a town with barely a trace of its odiferous past (147).

When politicians visit Seattle now, they are swept away to the homes of wealthy elites rather than giving speeches in working-class settings like the Pike Place Market, Seattle’s historical farmer’s and fish market. Amazon’s presence had replaced the mechanic shops, apartment buildings with reasonable rents, and other working-class businesses.

Egan struggles to make peace with his city’s new façade because he knows that “the gulf between the rich and everybody else grows by the day” (148). Yet Seattle residents look to create a more equitable society, for instance, by being one of the first American urban centers to establish a standard $15 per hour minimum wage. The symbols that give residents a sense of community still exist in Seattle, like its three national parks and the public forest lands that all are free to enjoy. At the same time, the University of Washington, where Egan went to college while working those part-time jobs on the docks, is no longer free as it once was, and college debt prevents upward mobility. Egan laments these losses: “Too bad. I learned as much from the people at one place [the university] as I did from the other [the docks]. And they paid me for the education” (149).

Chapter 17 Summary: “Blood Brother” by Sarah Smarsh

Sarah Smarsh’s essay is about a fictitious “brother,” who is really anyone’s brother, neighbor, or friend. This man is a college graduate, but he has struggled to find employment that pays wages on which he can thrive. He therefore resorts to plasma donation, leaving him with permanent scars in his arm. The story confronts barriers to social mobility, which is no longer guaranteed by a college degree.

Though our “blood brother” is paid between 20 and 50 dollars for his plasma donations, corporate biomedical companies make millions of dollars off the expensive pharmaceuticals that the plasma is used to produce. In 2015, for instance, the industry’s value was $20 billion. Moreover, the industry has an unsavory ethical past. Smarsh asks, “If he knew the history of plasma as a product, would he feel afraid for his health, cheated by an economy?” (153).

The body has become a commodity, and the poor, out of financial desperation, resort to the exploitation of their bodies by rich corporations. Smarsh’s protagonist is the reader’s brother because they “share a country, an economy, a land, a species” (154). The audience is morally obligated to care about the conditions under which our fellow humans toil. How might the readers feel if he were our biological brother with whom we had a long, deep, and meaningful relationship? Smarsh writes, “His blood and all its parts would represent to you something that cannot be assigned a monetary value” (154). As this fictitious blood brother leaves the plasma donation center, he collects his payment in the form of a prepaid debit card, which he needs to afford the very gasoline that gets him to and from the place.

Chapters 16-17 Analysis

Together these chapters address the failures of the American economy and labor systems. Those who once held jobs that provided salaries on which they could not only survive but flourish now fail to do so. College degrees are not the answer to financial success and frequently leave graduates saddled with debt from which they cannot liberate themselves. Working-class and poor people are pushed out of gentrified communities, and some resort to desperate measures to support themselves.

Sarah Smarsh’s imaginary “blood brother” is one such individual. Though fictional, he is a metaphor for a cross-sections of US society. He is a first-generation college graduate with a degree that society does not value. He cannot find work that truly supports him and resorts to selling his plasma. Pharmaceutical companies profit off the desperation of people like this “blood brother” generating millions of dollars in revenue through exploitation of the poor. This problem is not unique to the United States but is a global issue.

Meanwhile, gentrification has overtaken Seattle because of the tech industry; the dockworker jobs that author Timothy Egan once worked no longer afford laborers the socio-economic position that they once enjoyed or the same respect. Egan, unlike Smarsh, ends on a more hopeful note. He does not see corporate America as wholly exploitative. The alternative is for the city to exist as a shell of its former self, like Detroit. He cites the work of organizations like the Gates Foundation as evidence of “some of Seattle’s egalitarian essence in the new” (148). Established by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the foundation’s mission is to decrease poverty and improve standards of living in the developing world. Simultaneously, however, college debt hinders social mobility, something that Smarsh also acknowledges as she centers a college graduate protagonist who lives in poverty.