Cute Clothes, Ugly Houses

When I was a kid growing up in Northern Ohio during the eighties, I never knew anyone with a nice house. The houses of African-Americans I knew were small detached houses with four floors, an attic, two stories and a basement. The houses were ugly, but the people that lived in them often had nice clothes and either a BMW or a Cadillac. If you were lower middle class you may have had a Buick.

I went to private school, so this was my first look at how the other side lived. If an African-American family was doing really, really, well they would have a larger house with raised ceilings you had to push your neck back to see, chandeliers, two flights of steps across from each other where you could look through the house to see all of the floors. These houses were twice, or three times the size of houses other African-Americans I knew.

I had the privilege to walk into the homes of families that had a circular driveway with like 18 rooms. I remember this one house just had a lot of empty, unused rooms. We hooked up an Intellivision in one room and played to our hearts content. But the house did not belong to an African-American family, and I was on the wrong side of town. In fact I’m not sure how things have changed since then but there weren’t any African-Americans in that neighborhood at all.

Looking back on it those were my early life lessons in the disparity of wealth; if we had something, we had nice clothes, a BMW, a Cadillac, and a decent sized house in our own part of town. If they had something, it was a Mercedes Benz, Polo Ralph Lauren before it was popular, and a house 12 times the size of anything we had ever dreamed of owning. These days when you see and hear stories of African-Americans making it the emphasis is on the South. The media would have you to think that the only representation of wealth these days is in Atlanta. Take the Real Housewives of Atlanta, for example. Black women who are independent, and in the case of Nene and Lisa, Black families have homes that look at though they cost at least a few million dollars. If there was an African-American whose home actually cost a million dollars in my small part of Northeast Ohio, just one, not a few million; this would have been nice to know.