Is It Time to Admit There Really Are Two Americas?

 

This is a reworked and updated article first published in June 2026 by The Commerce Dispatch, now The Missouri Stream.

I was sixteen years old when I first began to suspect that the America we pledge allegiance to and the America many people actually experience are not always the same place. Like millions of children, I grew up reciting the words, "with liberty and justice for all." I believed them because every institution around me reinforced them as fact. Teachers taught it and textbooks repeated it. Public officials invoked it. The idea that two citizens could encounter the same system and walk away with entirely different experiences seemed impossible.

Then came a summer night in 2003.

A couple of friends and I were driving the backroads, smoking marijuana and making the sort of questionable decisions teenagers often mistake for innocent adventure. When the blue lights appeared behind us, we pulled over. The officer approached our vehicle and immediately detected the odor of marijuana, despite how much cologne we had sprayed before rolling down the windows. My two friends in the front seat, both Black, were ordered out of the vehicle. The officers spoke to them in raised voices, issuing demands in an angry tone. I remained in the back seat, listening and afraid to move. Eventually, I was asked to get out, too. When I did, both of my friends were lying face down on the ground in handcuffs.

I was not. I was never handcuffed or forced to the ground, and I was never yelled at. I was firmly but politely instructed to stand near the patrol car while the officers searched the vehicle. They found a small amount of marijuana, and my friend, who owned the car, admitted it was his and was arrested. I received a handshake and advice to make better choices about who my friends were.

At sixteen, I lacked the vocabulary to understand what I had witnessed. I had not yet studied and debated systemic inequality, but I knew three teenagers had been sitting in the same vehicle, engaged in the same conduct, and were treated differently. For years, I explained it away. Maybe I had misunderstood, or maybe the officers knew something I didn't. Those possibilities allowed me to believe that night was an exception.

Then the years passed, and the stories kept coming. Trayvon Martin was killed while walking home. Eric Garner died repeating the words, "I can't breathe." Michael Brown was shot and killed in Ferguson, less than three hours from where I sit today. Lloyd Gilmore died in police custody, and many questions about how he died remain unanswered.

The arguments stayed the same. One side saw a deeper problem and the other saw isolated incidents. What confused me was how often Americans seemed to be watching entirely different realities unfold on the same television screen.

Cape Girardeau has been having a difficult conversation lately about violence, particularly in and around downtown. There have been shootings, fights and arrests, along with growing demands for a stronger police presence. There has also been debate about whether the attention surrounding these incidents is fair to the city. When I spoke with business owners, I was struck by how differently some of them described the same place. One owner, whose business is several blocks north of downtown, seemed shocked by reports of violence and questioned whether someone was trying to make Cape Girardeau look bad. Every city has crime, the owner argued, and the attention being given to these incidents was disproportionate.

Other owners described a very different experience. One practically begged for more police presence, specifically officers on foot and bicycle patrols who could interact with people before situations escalated. That owner described an evening when the police chief came downtown, spoke with the owner and then approached people openly carrying alcohol in the street. According to the account, the chief told them to dispose of the alcohol and move inside a downtown establishment if they wanted to continue drinking. Several other owners corroborated the account and said it was one of the quietest nights they had seen downtown in some time. Those owners also described weekend nights when 100 or sometimes 200 people congregate downtown and how difficult those evenings can become.

Neither group is lying. Their businesses sit in different places, and they see different people. People working in the same city can come away with different understandings of what is happening around them. The same can be true of America. We do not all travel the same streets or receive the same treatment. 

I grew up in a family with older, deeply ingrained racial attitudes. I was taught that the south side of Cape Girardeau was where Black people lived and that I should stay away. Goodhope Street and parts of Bloomfield and Jefferson were among the roads I was warned against when I first started driving. The message was straightforward: those were Black neighborhoods, and they were dangerous. Some of those areas do experience more violence than other parts of Cape, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I have firsthand experience with some of those dangers, and I know people who have experienced them as well. But there is a difference between acknowledging that certain neighborhoods struggle with crime and deciding that the people who live there are the problem.

I had some racist tendencies myself. I am not proud of that, but I am not going to rewrite my history to make myself look better. I never really fit in with my family in that regard, and my willingness to accept people who were different from me was something many of them struggled to understand. My time in the Navy helped change my perspective. It gave me opportunities to know Black people beyond the limited experiences I had growing up. I had Black friends before then, but friendship alone had not erased everything I had absorbed.

Then I met a woman in Texas who changed my life. I don't remember her name anymore, and that bothers me. I remember what she did and how profoundly the experience changed me. I cannot remember something as simple as her name. I had made a stupid mistake and been kicked out of the home where I was living in Texas. I had no family there and no friends I could rely on. I was from Missouri, fourteen hours from anyone who might have helped me, but I did have a job. I figured that if I could make it through a couple of paychecks, I would be able to get an apartment and begin putting my life back together. Everything I owned that I could carry was stuffed into my Navy sea bag. I also had my Alvarez acoustic guitar. Every night after work, I walked a little less than a mile to an overpass and slept underneath it. Along the way, I stopped at a gas station for food and cooked it over a small fire. 

A Black woman in her 40s had recently started working at the same place. It was perhaps her third day on the job when she noticed me carrying my bags in every morning. One day, as I was getting off work several hours before her, she asked why I always carried them. I was embarrassed, but I told her the truth, that I was sleeping outside. She told me she didn't have much to offer, but she had a couch and couldn't let me sleep outside when she had a place where I could stay. She told me I had to come home with her.

I didn't want to at first. Accepting help can be difficult when you're already ashamed of where life has taken you. You don't want someone to see your circumstances or feel like a burden. But a couch and a shower sounded pretty good, so eventually I agreed. I had no idea what I was walking into. This was Beaumont, Texas, in a part of town where the dangers were very different from the ones I had known in Missouri. The neighborhood was rough, with gangs connected to Houston. She lived in a deteriorating Section 8 house, and the refrigerator was so covered in roaches that they didn't use it. She had almost nothing, and she gave me everything she had. Her 19-year-old son had recently gotten out of jail. He was around six-foot-three and 230 pounds. When I needed to walk to the corner store to get something to drink, he would go with me and repeatedly warn me not to go alone. People in the neighborhood didn't know I was with them, he explained, and walking around by myself could end badly. He was looking out for me.

I spent roughly a month there, as far as I can remember, during one of several short stretches of instability that marked those years of my life. My boss was a deacon at a church. I knew white people who had the means to help me, people who could have offered me a place to sleep or helped me get back on my feet. Instead, it was a struggling Black woman who had known me for only a few days who opened her door. She saw someone who needed help, and she helped him. It was the first time someone outside my family had shown me unconditional love, and it changed how I saw people. I remember the condition of that house, her kindness and her son walking me to the store because he didn't want something to happen to me. They treated me with more humanity than people who could have helped me and chose not to.

My experiences with poverty, addiction and homelessness were different from those of many people who struggle with them. I made bad choices. I struggled with addiction and did things to sustain those addictions that I am not proud of. I was arrested repeatedly, and there were periods when I was living so close to the edge that I could barely think beyond the next day. For about a week during my mid-20s, I slept in bathrooms around Cape Girardeau, moving between them at night so I wouldn't attract attention or be forced to leave. I have been robbed, shot at and threatened to be and almost stabbed multiple times. I experienced withdrawal in jail and spent stretches in both the Cape Girardeau City Jail and the county jail. Twice, I served 45-day stretches. 

During one stay, another inmate made a homemade shiv and tried to corner me in a bathroom at the recycling center while we were on work release. Another inmate warned the guards, who intercepted the man as he rushed toward me with the weapon. I remember looking up and seeing a large man coming toward me with a homemade poker before officers tackled him and put him in restraints. It was frightening, and it is one of the experiences that has stayed with me.

I also remember standing before a judge and feeling as though she had no interest in understanding my circumstances. I felt like another petty case in a long line of cases she needed to clear from her docket. I can only tell you how I experienced those encounters. I always believed there was a way someone could have reached me when I was younger that might have worked faster than simply putting me in jail. Eventually, jail did help convince me that I never wanted to return. But I had something that made recovery possible. I had family. When I was ready to stop, they were willing to let me come home to a stable, sober environment where I could recover, work, grow and try to become someone different from the person I had been. I had somewhere safe to go, and I know what an enormous advantage that was. I am also autistic, and I have struggled with executive functioning for much of my life. Organizing my life, making good decisions and thinking through long-term consequences have not always come easily to me. Those difficulties did not excuse my choices. They were part of the circumstances I was trying to manage. My family gave me opportunities to try again when I was ready to take them. I could clean myself up, shave, put on decent clothes from Goodwill and walk into a job interview without anyone knowing what was happening outside the interview room.

I could fit in. I was fortunate enough to have people who gave me that chance.

I believe the criminal justice system can work. I am an example of someone who went through it repeatedly, eventually stopped returning and built a different life. But my recovery depended on support beyond the criminal justice system. What would have happened if my family had refused to take me home? What if I had nowhere safe to go and every attempt to rebuild my life ended with another night in a bathroom or under an overpass? I don't know. I do know I was lucky. Many people in similar circumstances do not have the same opportunities.

My experiences with homelessness were brief compared with what some people endure, and my experiences with addiction do not tell me everything about someone else's struggle. I caught glimpses of circumstances that other people live with for years, and I cannot pretend to know what it is like to experience them for a lifetime.

People have more opportunity to become productive members of society when their basic needs are met. A couch and a shower got me through a month in Beaumont. Housing, food, water, health care, transportation and a safe place to sleep do not guarantee that someone will make good choices. Stability gives people more room to build something. When I was younger and living that way, I rarely thought about the future. My life revolved around finding somewhere to sleep, finding a meal and figuring out how to get through another day. Nobody could ask me where I saw myself in five years and expect a meaningful answer. I was trying to figure out where I would be that night. Once I had stability, something changed. I began thinking beyond survival, making plans and building. I founded and built a digital media organization. Stability made that possible.

We can debate the cost of providing basic necessities, who should qualify and how programs should be administered. But I have a hard time understanding why we would refuse to consider approaches that help people become healthier, more stable and more capable of contributing to society simply because we worry someone might receive help they don't deserve. The United States has the resources to have a serious conversation about what it takes to give people a reasonable chance at a stable life.

Cape Girardeau has its own divisions. Some are racial, some economic, and many are both. The south side of town is predominantly Black. Some people call it the ghetto. I grew up hearing that language and those assumptions, but when I look at the area today, I also see a part of the city where access to basic services is limited. In the areas I am talking about, residents do not have nearby banks or grocery stores offering the same access to everyday necessities available in other parts of town. People often have to travel elsewhere in Cape to handle ordinary business and buy what they need. If you depend on someone else for transportation, even an ordinary errand can become complicated. Meanwhile, when violence happens downtown, the city argues about its reputation. Business owners worry about their customers and residents worry about safety. People debate whether police are doing enough, while others insist that the attention is exaggerated and unfair to Cape Girardeau. Those concerns are legitimate. Business owners have a right to expect a safe environment for their employees and customers, and residents have a right to use public spaces without fearing violence.

But the wider conversation should not stop there. One person can spend years in Cape Girardeau without encountering problems another person deals with every week. Poverty does not excuse violence, and people are responsible for their own actions. Neighborhood conditions still shape people's lives, and residents across the city should have comparable access to the things that help them build stable futures. We can talk about downtown safety without dismissing the people dealing with difficult conditions elsewhere.

The problem begins when we assume that because we have not experienced something ourselves, the person describing it must be exaggerating. That is the same mistake I made at sixteen. I believed my experience with the police was evidence of how the system worked. It took years before I began to understand that the same encounter could look very different to someone sitting in the same vehicle.

I had experienced one version of America. My friends had experienced another.

For a long time, I thought of Martin Luther King Jr. as a figure from another era. I knew the speeches and famous quotations, along with the broad outline of the civil rights movement. But I had not seriously considered how much of his work was directed at people who believed their country was already living up to its promises. Dr. King challenged the country to confront the distance between its ideals and the lives of people being denied them. In Birmingham in 1963, he wrote from a jail cell to white clergymen who thought he was moving too fast. People comfortable with the existing arrangement could see demands for change as unnecessary or threatening, while the injustice remained invisible to those who did not experience it. The marches, sit-ins and demonstrations of the civil rights movement forced the country to confront realities many Americans had been able to ignore. Those who demanded equal treatment faced violence, arrests and fierce resistance. Dr. King understood that change would not come simply by waiting for everyone to discover injustice on their own. The country had to be made to look at what was happening.

Today, we can watch video of encounters with police, read firsthand accounts from people across the country and hear people describe their experiences in their own words. The internet has made it possible to encounter perspectives far outside our own communities. We still have to evaluate what we see. Videos can lack context, claims can be false and individual accounts can be mistaken. Evidence matters, and the facts of a particular incident must be established before conclusions are drawn. But it is harder to defend the idea that we cannot possibly know what other people experience when they are telling us about it directly. We can listen to Black Americans describe their encounters with police and examine the evidence without deciding that every white American is personally responsible for every injustice in this country. Discussions about racism so often become arguments about personal blame.

I think about the woman in Beaumont who took me into her home. I have spent years wondering how many other people have needed that same kind of help and never received it, and how many people I might have dismissed before I understood what they were going through. I do not know what hardships she had endured or what choices had brought her to that house.

I do not believe every American who disagrees with me is a bad person. People are shaped by their experiences, and those experiences influence how they see the world. If you have always been treated fairly by police, it makes sense that you believe the system is fair. If you have never struggled to find a place to sleep, it can be difficult to understand what that instability does to a person.

A white American who has never witnessed racism is telling the truth about their own life. That cannot establish that racism does not happen to someone else. A Black American who describes an encounter with law enforcement that felt discriminatory deserves to be taken seriously, and the details and evidence still matter. America has always struggled to reconcile its promises with its conduct. We teach children the words "liberty and justice for all," recite them at ceremonies and invoke them when we want to describe what makes this country worth believing in. But those words mean less if we refuse to listen when someone tells us that their experience has fallen short of the promise.

Our country has made progress. Laws have changed, and people have challenged assumptions that once went unquestioned. We've even elected a Black president. We can take pride in that progress while acknowledging that the work is not finished. We are never going to become one nation under God simply by repeating the words. We have to be willing to confront the distance between the promise and the experiences of the people living under it.

It's time for us, as white Americans, to admit that Dr. King was right about that distance.

It's time for us to admit that there really are two Americas.

By Justin Stewart Burns                                 Publisher, The Missouri Stream