Hack America
Field Notes from the Road
For the past 10 days I’ve been riding on an old 80s tour bus that use to belong to country singer Barbara Mandrell. I’ve been traveling through American cities and towns poised for reinvention — from New Orleans to Greenville, South Carolina and from Pittsburgh to Detroit, Baltimore and Kansas City. With my fellow motley crew of BLK SHP (“black sheep”) we’ve been exploring a few simple questions:
- What narratives about America feel true to you? What narratives or stories that we tell ourselves are expired and in need of change?
- What are the ingredients for a rebirth of civic culture? How do we transition from an identity built around consumerism to an identity built around citizenship and engagement in public life?
We’re still on the road for another week, but here are a few initial observations:
American Hospitality is Strong
As my fellow bus rider Chris Chavez noted, “Everything about this tour speaks hospitality. Not just hospitality of place, but hospitality of heart and mind.” We’ve stayed with an Amish family in Indiana, bunked in an old mill property in South Carolina, slept at family members houses and parked our bus and camped out with strangers. Nearly everyone we met had something to say about our country and had ideas about the future they wanted to inhabit.
National Rhetoric is removed from Local Experience
If you listen to the news, you’d think most people in America are polarized in disagreement. But the more people we spoke with the more we realized how many points of connection there are between diverse communities in the U.S. Nearly everyone we spoke with were trying to create communities and a sense of home that was safe for their children to grow up in or that would tempt their children to move back home.
And the issues people are concerned about are real simple: You shouldn’t have to walk 2 miles to get a carton of milk because you live in a food desert. We should invest in skills building programs that teach entrepreneurship and vocational subjects that prepare young people to start companies or work in a trade or craft. Real estate speculation is out of control. We have to create the conditions for local, affordable housing.
There are Two Americas
I’d read the statistics on growing inequality in the U.S. (the top 10% of earners take home more than half of the country’s overall income), but I’d also grown up with a father who was a total Horatio Alger story, being raised in a household that survived on less than $1/day on a small farm in Missouri, he had made his way to Harvard on scholarship. I’d always valued the idea of America as a place where anyone could make it. I never had the naïve notion that the country was a meritocracy, but I had a sense that there was a common fabric that held Americans together, that you could start a conversation with virtually anyone and that determination and hard work could get you somewhere. But the more people I met, the more I had to admit that there are two Americas — one poor, one rich. I came to agree with our host in Baltimore, Meryam Bouadjemi, who told me emphatically, “The game is rigged.”
Entrepreneurs Don’t Mix
In Raleigh-Durham, through the eyes of Christopher Gergen and his Bull City Forward initiative we came to see two innovation ecosystems — the former Black Wall Street in East Durham, which was host to struggling small businesses, and the incubator, American Underground (a tech hub with 6 companies recently being acquired for over $1 billion). Again and again on our tour, we were faced with the informal entrepreneurship of the streets and drug dealing, on the one hand, and the high tech entrepreneurship of co-working and incubator spaces, on the other, which begs the question: can’t we do a better job of connecting entrepreneurial populations from low-income communities with the high tech resources and start-up training that characterize innovation hotspots?
Changing a Small Town is Like Navigating Corporate Politics
I’ve spent a lot of time advising change agents within companies so called “intrapreneurs” on how to game the politics of their organizations, but I never thought that the environment of small towns would be akin to the corporate cubicle. In Mobile, Alabama I realized that a passionate group of grassroots innovators were coming up against incumbent power systems in ways that mimicked the bureaucratic push-back I’d seen in companies. If we are to reinvent our cities and towns, we need to create enabling environments for local innovators. Local governments have to give space for those disenfranchised by the system to bring their solutions and perspectives to the fore. And grassroots innovators have to learn how to “pitch” their initiatives so they can more readily be adopted and embraced by the old guard.
Don’t be Afraid of Your Outsider Status
I’d always stayed away from Detroit, not wanting to add to the cliché narrative of being part of the perceived salvation of a city by increasing the demand for chai lattes or drip coffee. Everyone in Europe talks of Detroit as a new exotic Berlin, a city framed as a barren land, waiting for its phoenix moment, which may come in the form of underground electronic dance clubs or an urban guerilla garden. From this perspective, I’ve always been extremely sensitive and self-aware of myself as a potential agent of gentrification. But what I’ve realized in visiting rust belt cities across the U.S., many of which have been devastated by the collapse of manufacturing jobs, is that it’s not worth being paralyzed by my “outsider status.” In fact, being an outsider can do a lot of good.
Here are a few contributions that outsiders can make:
- Outsiders can help to destabilize entrenched power systems or ways of doing things and breathe fresh life and optimism into cities devastated by economic collapse or cities strangled by traditions and expired narratives. Too often, “this is the way we do things” becomes a defense mechanism for not wrestling with complex and traumatic histories.
- Outsiders can be like therapists, helping to spark conversations that might otherwise just sit dormant in the subconscious of a place. So many conversations are poised for eruption — inequality and racial politics are at a breaking point.
- Outsiders can offer points of connection between local innovators, artists, and makers with resources from the coastal cities. Sometimes external recognition and a national spotlight can be all that someone needs to help move the needle in their local neighborhood or town.
- Outsiders are modern day merchant traders, helping to pollinate a town with new ideas and models from elsewhere and rooting them in local soil. While it’s important to work with local communities who understand a culture and the politics of a place, that shouldn’t prevent outsiders from rolling up their sleeves. We need more Johnny Appleseed-types who are able to harvest good ideas and spread them widely to see where they might take root.
Part of the American psyche is about being an outsider, and that provides the basis for a shared identity, built on difference. But even still, many of us struggle with the America we hold in our heart vs. the America that is. As fellow bus rider and jazz musician Harold O’Neal says, “I’m angry at the flag.”
We’ve embarked on this journey as much to confront our own blocks and expectations for America, partially motivated by a nostalgia about an America that never was, partially to figure out whether this empire in decline has a future. Stay tuned, as we continue to explore and discover the underbelly of America.
