Memory, Identity, and Reconciliation in the Heartland
By Sara Jex
I grew up on a campground in rural Michigan. My mom was a camp director and my dad taught at the local high school. Camp felt limitless as my sister and I roamed through the forests and beach, sports fields, and dusty wooden cabins. I loved playing basketball on the hot black asphalt and jumping the chain-link fence to the small playground next to our house. I would often hide under the park’s willow tree, my small body pressed to the dirt, peacefully concealed by a cover of drooping green leaves.
I spent countless summer hours riding my childhood bike, red and scrappy, fixed up from the free pile at a garage sale. I remember standing tall on its plastic pedals, dusty sandaled feet slipping from their tattered edges, attempting to pop wheelies with my sister as we ripped down our long gravel driveway.
Upon entering kindergarten, school administrators forced me to exchange my dirty shorts and shirts for a Catholic school jumper dress. I could not pinpoint why I hated wearing the dresses so much, but I knew that I felt deeply uncomfortable and unlike myself.
Eventually, my gracious parents relented to my tearful morning protests and ordered me the white collared polos and dark slacks reserved for boys at school. I ran freely through the playground at recess, proud to wear my new uniform, feeling at home in my body again.
In third grade, my family moved to the suburbs. A small section of trees in our mowed backyard replaced the endless forests of camp, but the change of scenery did not deter my desire to explore outdoors.
My best friend Ren and I became self-titled environmentalists, fishing for clumps of leaves with long sticks in the lawn trough to free up the slow trickle of water between gutters. We built forts with fallen branches and created worlds in the woods. Not once did I stop to think about who I was – I just was. Ren made me feel at home.
Ren and I grew apart with time and, by late high school, I felt eager to leave my hometown. The interviewers for a local college scholarship asked me how I planned to stay true to my “hometown values” after moving to the University of Michigan: The Big University in the Big City of Ann Arbor (which, in truth, is a small city with a population of just over 100,000). I was taken aback by the resentful rural-urban divide underlying their question, worrying if my core values of empathy, responsibility, equity, and justice were so tied to my hometown that leaving would entirely disrupt my sense of self. In any case, I was not confident that my values were the “hometown values” they had in mind.
During my first semester at school, I took courses that interrogated systemic racial and socioeconomic inequity in the United States. I felt hurt and frustrated to realize that spatial inequalities played out around me, in my hometown, without my noticing.
I learned about the history of Detroit and how overt racism, redlining, industrial disinvestment, urban renewal, and other harmful planning initiatives, lending practices, policies, and beliefs prompted white flight into the suburbs of Southeast Michigan. My hometown, a suburban beneficiary of this demographic shift, remains racially and economically segregated. Although both high schools in my town belong to the same school district, my predominantly white high school on the north side provides a wider array of extracurricular activities, advanced courses, and academic resources than its south side counterpart, which serves twice the proportion of students of color and low-income students.
I resented the thought of returning to a place steeped in racial inequity and conservative politics. Every visit home felt like a battle to undo my previous understandings of racism and systemic inequities. Ignorance was a privilege I desperately wanted to reject, and I felt a continued urgency to expose and unlearn the false truths I assumed from my teachers, parents, and peers growing up.
Riding horses as a young person exposed me to a majority-white, politically conservative rural community through which I found friendship, mentorship, and belonging. The 2020 Black Lives Matter Movement — which included my hometown’s first protest for racial justice in recent memory — ignited intensely emotional conflicts with my childhood mentors as I tried to rectify their hateful, racist views with the genuine care, resilience, and generosity they showed myself and others. This reconciliation process is ongoing. In reflecting on the lessons of dedication and selflessness that I learned within this tight-knit community, however, I have come to resist conceptually minimizing rural and suburban whites as an unchanging conservative monolith.
The longer I live on the East Coast, the more often I find myself irritated by generalizations I hear about people living in the Midwest. True, I have witnessed pain, hate, and ignorance in my conservative hometown. But I have also witnessed strength, compassion, and solidarity. Rural and suburban America historically privileges whiteness and perpetuates racial inequity, yet these spaces are home to racially and economically diverse communities with the power to resist systems of oppression. I am committed to envisioning and believing in a liberated future beyond current political divides — even and especially in the Midwest.
Planning prompts us to interrogate our feelings of home, and there has not been a day since beginning my city planning degree at MIT that Michigan is not on my mind. Home is an ever-present consideration in every lecture, every assignment, every conversation. For the first time in a long time, I feel homesick.
I was not sure if I could ever reconcile my feelings of deep resentment and rejection around home, but people like Ren give me hope. Today, Ren is a trans/gender nonconforming artist who co-founded a LGBTQ+ community center in our politically conservative hometown. They are building something we both desperately needed as young queer people, gifting a sense of community and care to the next generation. Ren inspires me to be creative, bold, kind, and true. They show me that reconciliation, acceptance, and love are radical acts in a world of deep injustice and pain.
Sara Jex (she/they) is a Master’s in City Planning candidate at MIT with a concentration in Housing, Community, and Economic Development. She is dedicated to advancing racial and socioeconomic justice through community wealth-building, transit-oriented development, and affordable housing.