One of the things I have come to appreciate about the United States is something that sounds pretty simple: You can live where you want to live, assuming you have the means to live there.
I don't think I always understood how significant that was.
I grew up in North St. Louis. When I was bused to school on the South Side—first to Mason for grade school and later to Gateway Tech for high school—I remember looking out at the houses as we traveled across the city.
I was fascinated by them.
Some seemed enormous to me. Others were simply different from anything I knew.
Of course, our view of homes and their stature is often shaped by our age and stage of life. What looks like a mansion to a child may look fairly ordinary to the adult that child eventually becomes.
But even today, I can drive through places like St. Ann and still find myself admiring certain homes. I appreciate their simplicity. Their yards. Their streets. Sometimes I think I am still seeing them through the eyes of the little boy riding across St. Louis wondering what life was like on the other side of town.
As an adult, my own geography expanded.
I have lived in Florissant, Hazelwood, and North St. Louis City. I have owned property in South St. Louis and Creve Coeur. Eventually, I moved farther west into Wildwood.
And Wildwood taught me something I did not expect.
I had spent much of my childhood looking at neighborhoods that seemed better than mine. Then, years later, I found myself living in an environment that, by many of the measures I had absorbed growing up, represented an even greater step up.
But my circumstances had changed faster than some of my internal wiring.
I remember walking through my neighborhood and, when a white person approached from the opposite direction, stepping off the sidewalk to let them pass.
Think about that.
I lived there.
I had purchased a home there.
Nobody had told me I didn't belong there. And yet some part of me still behaved as though I was visiting somebody else's space. It took me a while to recognize what I was doing. Some of it was connected to my upbringing in foster care and not always feeling completely grounded in where I belonged. Some of it was connected to the historical distinction I had absorbed between where Black people lived, where white people lived, and what those places supposedly said about the people who occupied them.
And some of it was even more basic. I had grown up, whether anyone explicitly told me so or not, with the expectation that white was better.
Those messages don't always arrive as sentences. Sometimes they arrive through geography.
You notice which neighborhoods people praise.
You notice where investment seems to go.
You notice where people move when they "make it."
You notice which communities people warn you about.
And before long, a map can become a hierarchy in your head.
I had to unlearn some of that.
I had gained access to a place before I had fully given myself permission to belong there.
Eventually, I stopped stepping off the sidewalk. Not because I needed to prove anything to anyone else. I stopped because I finally understood something about myself: I belonged there too.
That realization has stayed with me. There are still very real differences between neighborhoods. There are differences in wealth, opportunity, education, investment, and history. Pretending those differences do not exist would be foolish. But there is another question beneath all of that: What places have we quietly decided are not for us?
Sometimes the barrier is financial.
Sometimes it is structural.
Sometimes someone really is trying to keep you out.
It is inside us.
I think about that little boy riding across St. Louis admiring houses. I wish I could tell him:
Keep looking.
Keep dreaming.
But don't confuse admiration with inferiority.
Those people are not better than you because of where they live. And if life eventually carries you into neighborhoods, rooms, organizations, or opportunities you once admired from a distance, you do not have to step off the sidewalk.