White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  The Michigan Civil Rights Commission concluded that a long history of intentionally created racial segregation created the conditions for this racially disparate crisis. It asserted that race was a factor, though it did not find that the individual actors in this drama were intentionally racist. A lack of power and influence by locals, a segregated landscape, and a racialized structure of public policy all amounted to systemic racism.28

  Malignant neglect or prioritizing money over Black health may explain why Black children in the poorest neighborhoods have had some of the highest-recorded blood-lead levels. Exposure is worse where children spend long hours indoors to avoid neighborhood violence. In Baltimore, in the 1990s, even after the adoption of stricter regulations, private landlords and the city’s underresourced public agencies neglected properties in segregated neighborhoods. During that time, Baltimore did not bring a single enforcement action against a landlord, leaving chipped lead paint and dust to be ingested by young bodies. A lead poisoning rate fifteen times the national average has since been lowered dramatically by a crackdown on landlords in Baltimore.29

  A caring government can make a pronounced difference in the lives of vulnerable citizens. An uncaring one can do permanent damage. Families of color may lack resources to mitigate toxins in their homes and neighborhoods, yet the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency proposed steep cuts to testing for lead exposure.30 Similarly, even as descendant families in high-poverty hoods suffer greater exposure to polluted air and higher rates of asthma, the Trump administration stopped enforcing clean air regulations.31

  Neglect can be bipartisan. In overwhelmingly Democratic and ostensibly progressive Washington, DC, the opioid epidemic received an anemic response from Mayor Bowser’s administration, critics argued, because the many older Black Americans dying of overdoses were concentrated in marginalized Black neighborhoods.32 Meanwhile, in 2020, during a pandemic that fell disproportionately on Black lives, the disparity in life expectancy between the richest and poorest neighborhoods of the District of Columbia was twenty-seven years.33

  This is what it means to be a descendant. Aunt Hagar’s children are exposed to concentrated disadvantage and have little or no power to influence public policies that cause or reify their disadvantage. Black Americans, regardless of their socioeconomic status, experience radically more neighborhood disadvantage than others, which, in turn, is the critical mechanism for transmitting and reproducing Black poverty over lives and generations.34

  REJECTING NARRATIVES OF BLAME AND PATHOLOGY

  At this point, some readers are rehearsing well-worn counternarratives that blame descendants for their plight. One can choose not to commit crimes, not to have children you can’t raise, not to get high. One can study hard, be an involved parent, reject “thug life,” cooperate with the police, so the arguments go. Such lectures rarely acknowledge the singular segregation that poor Black people are subjected to or the ways in which the state often makes matters worse through punitive, anti-Black public policies and disinvestment. Worse, the righteous critics of descendants in concentrated poverty often engage in racism. Somehow whites who exhibit social pathology get to be individuals, but a Black person who does represents an entire race.35

  Meanwhile, nonpoor people typically avoid concentrated disadvantage because they can. Affluent parents pay handsomely to insulate their children from poverty and every conceivable disadvantage. Some parents cheat and bribe to buy their child a place at a selective college rather than trusting their offspring to chart their own destiny.36 It is awfully rich to blame people who can’t avoid concentrated poverty for the worse outcomes such environments engender. Such blame assumes that descendants have similar opportunities for social mobility when in fact the state has constructed and maintained a separate and unequal reality for them.

  There are many reasons to resist pathologizing descendants in poor neighborhoods. The first is objective evidence that outcomes for poor Black families can change when they are allowed to move from concentrated poverty to higher ground. The Gatreaux court order that enabled residents of public housing to move to higher-income neighborhoods was replicated in a federal demonstration program known as Moving to Opportunity. Recent research demonstrated that children whose families moved when they were young, under age thirteen, significantly improved college attendance and earnings compared to a control group that stayed in a high-poverty environment. When they became adults, their annual incomes were 31 percent higher than those of non-movers. The youth who moved were also likely to live in better neighborhoods as adults.37 Other researchers found that moving to a low-poverty area “greatly improved the mental health, physical health, and subjective well-being of adults as well as family safety.”38

  Admittedly, the Moving to Opportunity experiment did not change economic outcomes for older children or adults, as was the case for adult Gautreaux movers.39 A person long exposed to concentrated poverty and its disadvantages will have a harder time making their way economically than those less exposed. That young children experience greater rewards from moving underscores that environment matters. When Montgomery County, Maryland, enabled Black and Latinx residents of public housing to move to a middle-class neighborhood and attend middle-class school, the children did much better academically than counterparts left behind in high-poverty schools who were given extra resources.40

  Likewise, a recent longitudinal study by researchers for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that long-term residents and children who are able to stay in gentrifying neighborhoods benefit as opportunity moves to them and poverty declines. They suggested policies to promote affordable housing in high-demand urban areas and mitigate displacement.41 In other words, governments should be promoting policies that stabilize and include.

  A congeries of intangibles comprises opportunity or the lack thereof. Researchers have developed an aggregate measure of neighborhood assets and stressors that they call the Child Opportunity Index, based on nineteen indicators relevant to child development. Not surprisingly, based on these indicators, neighborhoods rate very differently, from very low to very high opportunity. And Black and Latinx children are much more likely to live in the lowest-opportunity neighborhoods than are white children.

  Forty percent of Black children and 32 percent of Latinx children live in the one-fifth of neighborhoods that rank lowest in opportunity, compared to only 9 percent of white children. Nearly 60 percent of poor Black children live in the lowest-opportunity settings. Inequities in neighborhood opportunity are most pronounced in metropolitan areas with high levels of segregation.42

  According to the developers of the Child Opportunity Index, “Segregated schools are perhaps the most powerful pathways through which segregated neighborhoods affect children.”43 This implicates another reason for rejecting narratives of blame. Society tells descendant children to get an education and pull themselves up but often relegates them to grossly inferior schools.

  Schools with large numbers of Black and brown students often have more novice teachers, more teachers with less academic preparation and no teacher certification, higher teacher turnover, larger class sizes, and higher poverty levels in the student body.44 Decades of social science demonstrate that high poverty in a school creates educational challenges.45 More than 60 percent of Black and Latinx children attend high-poverty schools where more than half the population is poor. The typical white or Asian child in public school attends a school where most of the children live above the poverty line.46

  Segregation shapes future educational outcomes, as does integration, when it is achieved. Long-term studies of Black students found better outcomes for those who attended integrated schools: higher achievement and attendance at more selective colleges, higher incomes, better jobs, lower incarceration, and superior long-term health. Desegregation reduced violent crime by young Black men by as much as one-third.47 Other children benefit from, and are not harmed by, school integration. Children of all races and incomes
who attend integrated schools improve their critical thinking skills, are less apt to accept stereotypes as truth, lead more integrated lives as adults, and are more civically engaged. Racial minorities in integrated schools also achieve at higher levels, with no detriment to the learning of white students.48 We let pervasive stereotypes and fear obscure such truths.

  In addition to segregating poor Black and brown kids into separate and unequal schools, several states take a carceral, punitive approach to kids trapped in concentrated disadvantage. With the introduction of zero-tolerance policies in the 1990s, inner-city schools became places where minor infractions that might be overlooked in a middle-class school were policed as crimes that sent children into the criminal justice system.49 Regarding the narrative of blame, whatever violent crime or disruptive social behavior a small minority of descendants in high-poverty neighborhoods commit, the response of the state has been overly punitive and racially disparate, making matters worse, not better. As Patrick Sharkey has argued, since the 1960s, “the dominant approach to dealing with the challenges of urban poverty and violent crime has been to disinvest in low-income communities and to invest in the police and the criminal justice system—a strategy of abandonment and punishment.”50

  Common sense tells us that concentrated poverty and social isolation will lead to social ills. It happens in poor Black space.51 It happens in poor white space.52 But poor whites, statistically are more likely to live in middle-class surroundings than concentrated poverty. Poor Blacks are typecast as dangerous and unworthy of such inclusion.

  Again, environment matters. An analysis of the resegregation of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, schools found that poor Black males were 15 percent more likely to be arrested for a crime if they were assigned to a school with 60 percent students of color than a school with 40 percent students of color. Its authors speculated that placing high numbers of those most vulnerable to crime together raised the probability of negative peer influences.53

  We should expect some people to succumb to a deprived, dangerous environment. In Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect, Robert Sampson demonstrated that concentrated disadvantage powerfully affects individual outcomes and rates of behavior across neighborhoods, a phenomenon he called “neighborhood effect.” Not every individual succumbs to the undertow of the hood but among the neighborhood effects of concentrated disadvantage are joblessness, poverty, single-parent families, violence, incarceration, and reduced collective efficacy.54

  The narrative of pathology blames the people who lost the neighborhood lottery for these neighborhood effects and masks a legacy of intentional state discrimination in creating ghettos. American government has thrown billions at segregating and caging poor Black people and those who pathologize them expect them to be superhuman and leap over the many structural barriers and negative conditions placed in their way. We shall have overcome when descendants are not required to be superheroes to escape the hood, when they are treated as just human. Ordinary people ride the bus rather than spread their arms to fly. To succeed, they need that bus to arrive on time and a realistic route to prosperity.

  The narrative of pathology paints too broadly. Most violent crime is committed in “hot spots” by “a tiny group of people who are linked together in a tight network of victims and offenders.”55 In Boston, for example, young gang members in high-risk neighborhoods comprise only 3 percent of the youth population of those neighborhoods and only 1 percent of the city’s total youth population, but 60 percent of youth homicides involving guns or knives are attributable to gangs.56 The vast majority of young Black men and descendants do not commit violent crime, though far too many Americans righteously and falsely assert that they do.

  Researchers have sought to understand why it is that some poor Black neighborhoods are worse than others in terms of violent crime. That poor hoods vary suggests, again, that descendants are not inherently violent. Social scientists have established a relationship between poor Black neighborhoods and violent crime, but recent research suggests that cities can disrupt that connection. Black elected officials, civilian review boards of police departments, and a liberal voter base are among the factors that moderate the relationship between Black neighborhoods and violence. Black segregation does not automatically predict neighborhood violence. Examining a representative sample of census tracts from large US cities and violent crime data, researchers concluded that increased percentage Blackness in a neighborhood correlated with increased violence “only in cities with limited black political opportunities.”57 This study also found that in cities with high levels of grassroots advocacy and protest on behalf of communities of color, including riots, the positive association between percentage Black and violence was disrupted.58

  Yes, violence occurs even in Black neighborhoods of cities with Black political incorporation and grassroots advocacy. When the tiny minority shoots and kills, descendants bleed, mothers cry in anguish, communities suffer the consequences of living with violence. But studies about the variability in violence across neighborhoods and cities suggest something about power relations between the state and poor Black neighborhoods and the lens through which descendants are seen. Seeing descendants as citizens worthy of political incorporation and engagement, as potential assets with the ability, if empowered, to reduce violence and improve conditions in their neighborhoods, could produce different, more positive neighborhood effects. That would require rejecting persistent cultural stereotypes and investing more in inclusion and the civic infrastructure of poor Black neighborhoods.59

  Lakia Barnett received a housing choice voucher but lost the neighborhood lottery. Black boys fare best in neighborhoods with low poverty, high rates of father presence among Blacks, and low levels of racial bias among whites.60 In my own life, my husband and I—Black American professionals with resources and six college and advanced degrees between us—carefully chose such a neighborhood in which to raise our twin sons. We were confident that our culturally dexterous neighbors in Shepherd Park would not feel threatened by Black teenagers horsing around and that they would call us rather than the police in any unexplained situation.61 As I labored on this book, we moved to integrated Crestwood to live in my husband’s lovingly restored childhood home. Some comments on the Crestwood neighborhood listserv made us less sanguine, but we are heartened by the many yard signs attesting that Black Lives Matter and the ordinary kindnesses neighbors bestow on each other. Less than 5 percent of Black children grow up in optimal environments rich with Black fathers and low in poverty and anti-Black prejudice.62 One can try to blame Black people for the absence of Black fathers, a story that leaves out the role of deindustrialization and mass incarceration in reducing the pool of marriageable Black men.63 One could also examine why the Barnetts and other descendant families could not find housing, or acceptance, in affluent neighborhoods like Lincoln Park.

  CHAPTER 8

  SURVEILLANCE

  Black Lives Matter

  Rayshard Brooks.

  George Floyd. Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor.

  Atatiana Jefferson.

  Philando Castile. Alton Sterling. Sandra Bland.

  Freddie Gray. Walter Scott.

  Akai Gurley. Laquan McDonald.

  Tamir Rice. Michael Brown. Eric Garner.

  Trayvon Martin. Rekia Boyd.

  Oscar Grant.

  These are some of the names we say, those of Black people who were loved by their families and should not have died senselessly. There are many more names we have forgotten or never heard. Police are more than twice as likely to kill a Black person than a white person.1 Hate criminals kill Black Americans at higher rates than any other racial group in the United States.2 There is another story to engage you, yet again, with an ancient problem of American caste. Fortunately, this tale does not end in murder.

  Darryl Atwell drove a silver Toyota Prius, though his buddies ribbed him for it. It was not the peacock car that a cardiothoracic anesthesiologis
t and son of Howard University might have chosen to reward himself or to impress women. Atwell preferred to spend his money on art. For him, collecting was an act of cultural preservation. He lent works to museums, showing African Americans as “productive people doing everyday things,” he told me. On an October evening in 2018, two police officers who stopped Atwell in Washington, DC, may have seen him differently.

  He had been visiting his friend Ellington Robinson, an artist who regularly fed the souls and stomachs of a hip Black crowd. Atwell, a teetotaler, didn’t need anything more to feel good. On a Saturday evening at Robinson’s house, the talk could turn from art to politics to basketball. Atwell could spend time with the art on his friend’s walls or just eat and listen to the music and a cross section of Black strivers, solving the world’s problems through banter. The occasion for that evening may have been a send-off party for someone moving from the DC diaspora to the African continent from which all Blackness sprang. Atwell looked at his watch and remembered he had promised to visit his friend Rosalyn, who lived downtown. “Atwell, where are you going, we’re just getting started,” Robinson had said. These soirees regularly extended past midnight. Atwell felt pulled by the fun but also his other social commitment. He promised to return and left with every intention of doing so.