July 30, 2007
Private: The Ongoing Significance of Race in America
Among the discussions at this weekend's Fifth Annual ACS Convention, the plenary session on "Race and the Constitution" included a compelling exchange about the ongoing significance of race as a dimension of inequality. Streaming video and downloadable audio of that session -- and all other speeches, plenary panels and breakout sessions at the Convention -- will be made available in the coming weeks.
Writing in The Washington Post, Ohio State University History Professor Kevin Boyle reflects upon the 40th anniversary of the Detroit Race Riots of 1967, noting in The Fire Last Time that "the urban crisis still smolders" in ways visible along both class and racial lines.
He writes:
In retrospect, Americans should have seen the riot coming. Since the 1920s, not just Detroit but all of the nation's major cities had restricted blacks to the oldest, most decrepit neighborhoods available. Segregation inevitably spawned discrimination: Schools in African American areas were overcrowded and underfunded; city services were delivered sporadically; policing was frighteningly oppressive.
Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, the urban black economy tumbled into crisis, as decent-paying factory work started to disappear. From 1947 to 1967, Detroit alone lost 120,000 manufacturing jobs. In the city's ghetto, unemployment skyrocketed. Poverty intensified. And under the strain of it all, life on the streets became more dangerous. . . .
For a few years, policymakers tried -- imperfectly, half-heartedly, sometimes stupidly -- to break down the ghettos' walls. Congress passed legislation that banned discrimination in housing. The Supreme Court ordered city school systems to desegregate, even if that meant busing kids from one end of town to another. And the Nixon White House took a small, innovative program called affirmative action and extended it nationwide. It wasn't enough, not close to enough, to pull the urban poor into the mainstream of American society. But it was a start. The percentage of Americans living below the poverty line declined in the early 1970s. And partly because of affirmative action, the black middle class began to expand, a transformation of profound importance.
Then, in the late 1970s and '80s, the national commitment to the urban poor unraveled, destroyed by a furious white backlash and a resurgent conservatism that vilified big government and sanctified the free market. With that shift in American politics, hope gave way to neglect. It has been 30 years since the federal government really invested in America's inner cities. The only time anyone talks about segregation is when the Supreme Court prohibits another school district from employing the mildest of racial remedies. The welfare state has been eviscerated, not expanded. Even progressives prefer to focus more on the needs of the middle class than on the burdens of the poor.
And on the streets of Detroit and in other urban cores, life grows inexorably grimmer. . . .
Detroit now has an unemployment rate higher than any other major metropolitan area, with joblessness exceeding 50 percent in its poorest sections. One-third of Detroit's people -- and half of its children -- live below the poverty line. Its infant-mortality rate is only a bit better than that of the West Bank. Despite the continuing success of the African American middle class, neighborhoods are still profoundly segregated, far closer to apartheid than to anything approaching racial balance. The school system is almost completely segregated and frighteningly ineffective: Only 22 percent of Detroit's kids graduate from high school. The drug trade flourishes, fueled by young men who see it as the best (and maybe only) entree into America's consumer paradise. And the body count climbs. More than 20,000 Detroiters have been killed since the summer of '67, 203 of them in the first half of this year.
Inner-city Detroit isn't alone in its misery. Cleveland's poverty rate is higher. Memphis's infant-mortality rate is worse. Though Detroit is the most segregated city in the United States, Milwaukee, Newark and New York don't trail far behind. Public schools in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington -- in most major cities, in fact -- remain largely segregated, Washington's at a rate comparable to that of Detroit. And after a decline in the late 1990s, the brutal, senseless violence that policymakers pledged to stop 40 years ago is again on the rise in poor neighborhoods across urban America.