White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  White conservatives, particularly Republicans, are much more likely to deny obstacles and discrimination against Black Americans in a land where obstacles to descendants are abundant. White conservatives, especially evangelicals, are more likely to perceive discrimination against whites, that is themselves, than to acknowledge racial discrimination against Black people.123 Social scientists find that racial resentments drive whites who harbor them to repudiate government interventions because they attribute racial inequality to personal behavior and not systemic discrimination. Racial resentment, which is not the same as racism, remains the strongest predictor of white attitudes toward policies to redress racial inequality and has been since the 1980s.124

  The characteristics that some whites attribute to Blacks as the reasons for their failings—lack of good role models, lack of motivation to work hard, and lack of family stability—mirror ghetto myths and reinforce a social order that prioritizes affluent whites. Widespread denial of anti-Black discrimination and pathologizing of poor Black people explains why it is so difficult to dismantle or mitigate concentrated poverty. Resistance to facts among a political minority, coupled with racial and political gerrymandering, and an electoral college that accords disproportionate power to states where racial conservatives dominate, entrenches an unacceptable status quo: gross economic and racial inequality and a broken social contract. In a society premised on separation and hoarding in advantaged places and containment of descendants elsewhere, only an advantaged few can win.

  CHAPTER 5

  OPPORTUNITY HOARDING

  Overinvest and Exclude, Disinvest and Contain

  On an April afternoon in Philadelphia, 2018, another urban opera unfolded. Entrepreneurs Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson sat down in a Starbucks coffeehouse to wait for another local businessman to arrive. They were both twenty-three-years young, friends since grade school, and excited to be pursuing their dreams and a potential real estate deal. Nelson asked to use the restroom as they waited and a barista declined, telling him that only patrons could use it, if they wished to order anything. The men informed her that they were waiting for someone to begin a meeting. Minutes later, police officers arrived and told Nelson and Robinson to leave, immediately. They refused, in a low-key way. Melissa DePino, a white customer and citizen-journalist in that moment, posted a video on Twitter that traveled the globe. Woke viewers saw two calm Black men acquiescing in being handcuffed and arrested, as seven police officers crowded a fabricated crime scene.1

  Rittenhouse Square, the highest-income neighborhood in Philadelphia, is also more than 80 percent white. It gained some notoriety as the locale where Nelson and Robinson were arrested for “waiting while Black.” Elijah Anderson, the sociologist and leading urban ethnographer, refers to such turf as “white space” as does legal scholar, Elise Boddie, in her theory of racial territoriality.2

  Despite the civil rights movement, Anderson writes, American society “is still replete with overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, restaurants, schools, universities, workplaces, churches and other associations, courthouses, and cemeteries, a situation that reinforces a normative sensibility in settings in which black people are typically absent, not expected, or marginalized when present.” Anderson argues that where Black and white homogeneous spaces appear on opposite sides of a line, this exacerbates society’s association of Black skin with “the iconic ghetto.” The ghetto and the idea that all Blacks come from it, he argues, “justify the normative sensibility of the white space” that excludes Blacks or requires an explanation when they are present.3

  Anderson observed a west Philadelphia neighborhood becoming whiter and less economically diverse as it gentrified. In his framing, “white space” is necessarily richer than Black space, and people engaged in exclusion get their ideas about Blackness from real or imagined notions of what transpires in high-poverty Black neighborhoods.4 It is affluent white space that is most practiced in the art of excluding Blacks and hoarding opportunity from all people who live elsewhere. Wealthy neighborhoods and the people who live in them are at the top of an American caste system at the intersection of geography, race, and class. Anderson’s intuitions about the role of physical lines of division are apt. Exclusive and exclusionary white space could not exist without a constructed ghetto that concentrates poverty elsewhere.

  So it is with Rittenhouse Square. The Philadelphia visitors’ bureau describes it as “the heart of Center City’s most expensive and exclusive neighborhood.” Center City covers the original boundaries of the city, before it was merged with Philadelphia County. Any visitor familiar with the ways of modern American segregation would read this profile of the Rittenhouse neighborhood and expect to enter a bastion of upper-class whiteness: “With a bevy of high-rise residences filled with top-end luxury apartments, and some of the best fine dining experiences in the city, residents can marvel at their options, while also enjoying the luxury retail shopping in the area, all of which help surrounds [sic] the handsome tree-filled park.”5

  Rittenhouse Square and other nearby very white spaces are part of the old Seventh Ward that W. E. B. Du Bois chronicled in The Philadelphia Negro, though Black Americans are now a tiny minority. True to Anderson’s instincts, the neighborhood surrounding Rittenhouse Square, and Center City generally, have become more affluent since 2000 even as many other neighborhoods in Philadelphia and adjacent Camden, New Jersey, became much poorer. Maps tell the story better than words. Paul Jargowsky describes an “architecture of segregation” in which the number of people living in concentrated poverty climbed by 91 percent in the first decade and a half of the new millennium. He produced side-by-side color-coded maps of this change in several metropolitan areas, the first map a snapshot of economic segregation in 2000, the second showing segregation patterns by about 2013. They illustrate the dramatic expansion of poor space and bulwarking of affluent space in favored suburbs and newly desirable city centers.6

  Jargowsky’s side-by-side maps of Philadelphia appear as Map 5.1 in the insert. Rittenhouse Square is located in the lower left quadrant of affluent Center City, which straddles I-676 and is bounded to the west and east by rivers and interstate highways. The maps show that between 2000 and 2013 concentrated poverty was virtually eliminated from Center City as it exploded elsewhere.7

  Philadelphia is just one example. I viewed Jargowsky’s maps of thirty-two sample regions, from Akron, Ohio, to Washington, DC, and the overwhelming pattern was one of intensifying poverty-free areas separated from expanding poverty-concentrated areas, often with a street or highway demarcating the boundary between the two. The maps depict startling geographic shifts that occurred in less than fifteen years.

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, experienced a revival in the 2000s, driven in part by its more than sixty robotics and self-driving-car startup companies and tech firms, like Uber and Google. In Jargowsky’s companion maps of this city at the confluence of three rivers, with hundreds of bridges that cross them, virtually all the poverty areas that were once scattered in 2000 were eliminated from the southern and western parts of the city, below and west of interstates, by 2013. And poor folks became extremely concentrated in the east, in and around the Hill District of playwright August Wilson’s boyhood, a hilly area perched above downtown and sequestered by two rivers.

  Wilson, in his ten-play cycle, touches on the plunder and pain descendants in the Hill District endured in each decade of the twentieth century, as well as their joy and genius. His mystical character and sage, Aunt Ester, lived at 1839 Wylie Avenue and at over three hundred years old was symbolic ancestor to all descendants of slavery. In real life, Wylie Avenue was once dense with nightclubs where jazz giants like Earl Hines, Art Blakey, Billy Eckstine, and Mary Lou Williams held forth. As a child, Wilson lived at 1727 Bedford Avenue, in two rooms above and behind a storefront. It has been restored as a landmark and community arts center. Across the street was Bedford Dwellings, the city’s oldest public-housing complex, which has been redeveloped into mixed-
income housing. With vision, this corridor of historic Black segregation, not far from white space, could redevelop inclusively and preserve rather than displace the Black American culture that Wilson chronicled.8

  The Hill District was one place in Pittsburgh that great migrants were conscribed to. It, too, received HOLC’s D rating, marking a gem of creativity red and “hazardous.” Negroes there were also removed by urban renewal. Wilson wrote about it in his play Two Trains Running. Set in 1969, a year after riots, the owner and inhabitants of a soul food café are forced to contend with impending condemnation by the city and external forces weighing down on them. Instead of contesting removal, the owner, Memphis, fights for just compensation.

  Jargowsky also mapped Houston. West Houston was scrubbed of any concentrated poverty while Ward Five in the east, bounded by two interstates, became intensely poor. Ward Five had been and continues to be very Black and poor, surrounded by Houstonians who speak 145 languages. Concentrated poverty also spread to the Houston suburbs as the western half of the city center became the place for affluent movers. In Dallas, poverty concentrated in the southeast quadrant inside the beltway; north Dallas above I-30 is its affluent opposite, though a fair housing organization, the Inclusive Communities Project, has made inroads in locating some low-income people in high-opportunity areas.9

  Areas coded red for greater than 40 percent poverty overwhelmed some of the cities that Jargowsky mapped. The hearts of cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Fresno, Gary, Milwaukee, Rochester, East St. Louis, and Syracuse hemorrhaged deep red as concentrated poverty expanded in all directions. Other researchers document similar patterns. Across fifty-one cities, one study found nearly three times as many high-poverty areas in 2010 than in 1970. In the wake of the civil rights movement, precious few “ghettoes” were transformed. Instead, many more majority-Black high-poverty areas were added.10

  Of course, individual cities vary and there are a range of types of people and neighborhoods that inhabit them. Geographer Elizabeth Delmelle, in a comprehensive study of neighborhood change between 1990 and 2010 in America’s fifty largest cities, found that neighborhoods of concentrated Black poverty remained the most persistent type, followed by those of concentrated white and Asian affluence. These neighborhoods at polar extremes increased in spatial concentration while more moderate-income multiethnic neighborhoods became more fragmented, showing more possibilities for racial and economic mixture.11

  Stark lines shape local politics. The Philadelphia city council deadlocked over a proposal to require developers in Center City, University City (home to the University of Pennsylvania and other educational institutions), and other dense areas to include affordable units in their new residential buildings—a policy known as mandatory inclusionary zoning. Instead a watered-down bill was passed giving developers who wanted to build taller buildings the choice whether, in exchange for more density, to build affordable housing on-site or to make payments to the city’s affordable housing trust fund.12 Segregation precipitates a zero-sum politics with distinct winners and losers. Society tends to overvalue white space and the needs of the people who live there and devalue Black neighborhoods and their residents’ concerns. It is the concentration of affluence, intentionally separated from neighborhoods where concentrated poverty persists or expands, that fuels the divided American City.13

  GEOGRAPHY BEGETS CASTE

  In pre-civil-rights America, we had a caste system based mainly on race in which those who could claim whiteness were accorded social and legal privileges of citizenship and those who could not, especially Black Americans, were denied. Isabel Wilkerson, in her best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, describes caste as a system of power relations in which ancestry or immutable traits are used to construct a rigid social hierarchy premised on the alleged supremacy of one group and the presumed inferiority of other groups. She powerfully illuminates the endurance of social caste in the United States and India. I agree with her that caste is “the infrastructure of our divisions.”14 Here I illuminate the centrality of geography to American caste, its mechanisms for distributing benefits and burdens and shaping racial perceptions about who is deserving. As sociologist Robert Sampson demonstrates in his important book Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, there is a spatial logic to inequality and “differentiation by neighborhood is not only everywhere to be seen . . . it has durable properties—with cultural and social mechanisms of reproduction” that affect the allocation of social advantage and disadvantage and of resources.15 Patrick Sharkey also underscores that because of rigid segregation and severe disinvestment in poor Black neighborhoods, place—where one lives—is a crucial mechanism for producing racial inequality.16

  I begin with the concentration of affluence. Segregation by income is most extreme for those in the ninetieth or higher percentile of the income scale. The affluent are the least exposed to poverty and their segregation increases with the size of the metropolis they live in.17 In large cities, regular folk can easily call out neighborhoods occupied by rich people: Georgetown in Washington, DC, the Gold Coast in Chicago, the Upper East Side in Manhattan, Buckhead in Atlanta, and Pacific Heights in San Francisco, to name a few. Wherever affluence is concentrated, the neighborhood is usually very white. Nationally, whites and Asians are less likely to be exposed to poverty and more likely to live in middle-class settings than Black and Latinx people. The majority of whites and Asians live in neighborhoods with a poverty rate below 14 percent.18

  My theory of American caste is tied to how geography reifies power and opportunity for those in a few rich neighborhoods and contributes to powerlessness and permanence of poverty for descendants. The segregation of affluence facilitates opportunity hoarding, whereby the most affluent neighborhoods enjoy the best public services, environmental quality, and private, public, and natural amenities, while all other communities are left with fewer, poorer-quality resources.19 Segregated affluence occurs not only within cities but increasingly between them, as entire localities have become preserves of the wealthy. Segregation of the highly educated has increased even faster than that of the affluent. In the 2000s, only seventeen counties in America had a population in which more than half are college educated. College graduates living in America’s most highly educated metro areas are more residentially isolated than Black Americans.20

  In any given American metropolis, most people know where the poor are concentrated, especially the hoods that people with choices avoid. At the highest and lowest ends of the real estate spectrum, the role of geography in constructing American caste is fairly transparent, if not an article of faith. Widespread segregation enables insulation from people we fear. It also facilitates a tarnished but persistent myth of an American Dream that increasingly belongs only to those who can buy their way into poverty-free havens.21

  Residents of high-opportunity neighborhoods rise on the benefits of exceptional schools and social networks. Favored places confer intangibles—the habits of success you observe and emulate, the people and ideas you are exposed to, the books you are motivated to read, the selective schools and jobs you learn about. At the other end of the spectrum, neighborhoods with high poverty, limited employment, underperforming schools, distressed housing, and violent crime depress life outcomes. I discuss these harsh effects of the hood in chapter 7. Here I address the consequences of concentrated affluence. Using the phraseology of social scientist Charles Tilly and others, I argue that segregation facilitates three phenomena that contribute to American residential caste: social distancing, boundary maintenance, and opportunity hoarding.22

  BOUNDARY MAINTENANCE

  Individual choices, particularly avoidance of Black areas, contribute to boundary maintenance. When it comes to choosing where to live, many non-Black people are wary of living in close proximity to Black Americans, and whites are the wariest of all. Whites tend to prefer majority-white neighborhoods that are less than 20 percent Black and often resist moving to spaces wi
th more than a smattering of nonwhite people.23 While most whites accept integration in principle, many still express strong preferences to remain socially distant from nonwhites, particularly Black Americans.24

  Beyond individual preferences, collective action and state-sanctioned policies play a critical role. The affluent maintain boundaries through exclusionary or restrictive zoning or simply using their political power to oppose development that they don’t want. Author Richard Reeves calls it “inverse ghettoization”—local rules, regulations, or NIMBYism that badly distort real estate markets.25 Exclusive suburbs created and maintained their exclusivity through a phalanx of zoning requirements that ensured that only expensive and expansive single-family homes on large lots were built along with only the most desirable, environmentally pristine, tax-revenue producing uses of land. No or few apartments, much less low-income or affordable ones, were allowed.26 Recent research indicates that suburban white enclaves still actively segregate through restrictive zoning and anti-Black prejudice.27

  Within cities, habits of segregation begun in the twentieth century continue into the twenty-first, though the policies and practices that sustain segregation may be less visible and the boundaries of affluent white space may shift. What happens or doesn’t happen on the ground in neighborhoods reflects who has power to influence decision makers. A mandatory inclusionary zoning ordinance may be tabled, as happened in Philadelphia.