“We Came Here to Be Different”: The Brown Family and Remapping Detroit

Chapter 1 tells the stories of three generations of the Black women and girls in the Brown family and introduces Janice, the book’s central interlocutor. Tracing the migration and life experiences of the women in the Brown family from the South to Detroit from the late Great Migration to the present charts a new social map of Detroit and narrates the history of low-wage Black women that is typically ignored in mainstream accounts of the city. This chapter also reveals the ways in which the younger generation of Black women, told through the voice of Janice, understand the impact of race, gender, and poverty in the lives of their mothers and aunts and, from this perspective, devise a theory of success and failure that redefines cultural capital.