Back to the Future: Suburban idealism and race collide in Jason Diamond’s “The Sprawl”

Jason Diamond | The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs | Coffeehouse Press | August 2020 | 256 Pages

The moment I picked up my copy of Jason Diamond’s forthcoming book, The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, coincided with the recent worldwide Black Lives Matter movement’s protests for justice, police reform, and a wider reckoning not only in the political realm, but in an assortment of fields from architecture to publishing.  

At the same time, a cascade of articles has been released about the role of cities, density, and housing conditions in the coronavirus pandemic’s spread. Eventually, as more demographic data comes out, it is becoming clearer that race is a driving factor in the disproportionate death rates and the geographies of the outbreak. 

While cities, including Seattle, Chicago, and New York, were marked early on as regional epicenters, we now know that suburban and rural communities have risk factors of their own (at times exacerbated by apartment-dwelling urbanites seeking refuge in the homes and open spaces there). These factors range from the quality of available housing to the number of people per household, which, in areas where affordable living options are scarce, led to stark socioeconomic and racial disparities as the outbreak spread.

For these reasons, I read Diamond’s book as one relevant to this moment. After all, the “weirdness” he uses as its foundation centers on the suburbs’ enduring role in American idealism—ideals which are in many ways now up for debate. 

The book opens with a tour of Lyon Estates, Marty McFly’s suburban neighborhood in the film Back to the Future. It, alongside Diamond’s references to other classics including Edward Scissorhands, The Virgin Suicides, and Pretty in Pink, drive home Americans’ broad familiarity with the ethos of comfort-in-conformity and liberty-in-land-ownership that has made mass-produced suburbs so attractive from their inception. 

Diamond explores similar themes in music, but these films drive home the disconnect between the utopian vision for the suburbs as a physical construct and the lived experience of those inside the plain, boxy homes we know so well. He examines our fascination with angsty teenagers looking to shake the dust of Pleasantville from their heels and the sinister voyeurism typified in films like The Truman Show or Blue Velvet, all while questioning the source of our interest in the first place. 

Using pop culture as a lens through which to view the suburbs is a revealing tactic for two reasons. First, the culture that was, and largely continues to be, popularized is predominantly white. Like most elements of American cultural life, this is not an accident—it is the result of deliberate design.

Diamond acknowledges upfront the history of most suburbs, namely Levittown, Pennsylvania, as specially-designed, middle-class enclaves that excluded other ethnicities (namely African Americans and Jews). At first, this particular form of racial prohibition was etched into law. Later, it endured informally through practices such as exclusionary lending and handshake agreements.

The engineered whiteness of the suburbs is likewise inseparable from the notion of utopia with which it was marketed—leading to the films, music, literature, and media produced by and about it over ensuing generations. Ironically, this is perhaps what drives our fascination with them in the first place. A community is designed to be idyllic due to its inhabits being “a certain type” of individual or nuclear family. Yet, by peeling back the rooflines and peering inside, we glimpse the very disaffections and perversions the suburbs were designed to eradicate. 

To Diamond’s credit, The Sprawl includes the stories of African American rappers moving into majority-white neighborhoods in the North Side of Chicago and techno music’s origins in Detroit, among others. These illustrate not only the hardships faced by these individuals at the hands of their neighbors, but the contributions they made to American pop culture alongside them.

Additionally, underlying the book’s journey through various Midwestern, Floridian, and Northeastern suburbs is the author’s personal experiences of life in those places. Coupled with the narrative’s focus on films and music, this geographical diversity makes a book about suburbia, and the “most boring places” in America, a far more interesting read.  

As a person of color who grew up in the suburbs, there’s much in Diamond’s writing that I can relate to. However, there is much about the suburbs today that is fundamentally at odds with the perceptions pop culture perpetuates. 

This leads to the second revealing product of Diamond’s pop vantage point: We need more books by authors of color about the intent, lived experiences, and cultural products of suburban America.

To illustrate this, let’s return to the Black Lives Matter protests for a moment. As the movement grew in late May, a black-and-white photograph taken by Dalton Carper of a young black girl raising her fist and looking up toward the sky went viral. The image is powerful in and of itself, but one element of the background quickly caught my attention. Behind the girl is a sign for a Crossroads Mall and a board underneath that has “New location opening soon” written in lights. The location? 72nd Street and Dodge near Walnut Hill, a suburb in Omaha, Nebraska. 

Walnut Hill is hardly the place one would think of in connection to the worldwide movement for Black lives. Yet, as Diamond acknowledges and demographic data shows, the suburbs are becoming increasingly diverse, a trend popular belief has yet to reckon with. 

While that young girl may have seen, or may one day view, any of the John Hughes films referenced throughout Diamond’s book, her experience and what advocacy entails in her community is likely markedly different from the Nod Road, Connecticut community the author follows near The Sprawl’s conclusion. There, residents banded together and succeeded in preventing a housing development from being erected near a golf course on the outskirts of town. 

I won’t go so far as to say Diamond should be faulted for this juxtaposition. I give him due credit for noting that while de jure racial discrimination is no longer in practice, “it happened enough that Americans developed an idea of who does and doesn’t live in the suburbs.” It’s a narrative that persists to this day, and a reason why we might be surprised that an iconic photo of a young Black girl came out of Omaha.

There are elements of suburban life that certainly resonate across demographics. In point of fact, Diamond writes the following about traveling to research the book: 

I could go to a suburban McDonald’s or Barnes & Noble and it was the same if I were outside Portland, Oregon, or in the Florida panhandle. It became sort of a pastime of mine, getting out of the city and going to grocery stores just to browse the aisles, looking at the paint color samples at Lowe’s, or eating a couple of bean burritos at Taco Bell. 

However, Diamond’s surroundings may be broadly familiar to readers, his experiences, while valid and thankfully self-aware, are not representative of the 52% of Americans who live in the suburbs today.

The commonalities of suburban strip malls and cookie-cutter homes are, to me, a point of departure for future architectural, political, or cultural criticism of the suburbs—not ends in themselves. The prevailing view of the suburbs as equalizing and, if not statistically white, color-blind communities papers over the diversity of lived experiences inside them. 

However, for the average reader who wants an introduction to the suburbs, how they came to be, and why they have such a deep physical and psychological hold on America, I would happily recommend The Sprawl. With that said, the black and brown fists raised up across housing developments and small towns today reflect a wealth of cultural vitality that is significantly underexplored in books such as Diamond’s.  

One looks at those fists today and can’t help but wonder: Where are the books written by those same hands? They do exist, though they often receive far less attention and critical acclaim than they deserve. However, just as often, future authors, artists, filmmakers, and cultural icons are never given a chance at a platform in the first place as their experiences are deemed “not representative enough.” Yet it seems, now more than ever thanks to anti-racism reading lists, that we are still searching for the authors who grew up in Marty McFly’s America but witnessed a vastly different side of it.