Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen

by David Hilfiker

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Introduction

  One - BUILDING THE GHETTO: A HISTORY

  BLUEPRINT FOR THE GHETTO

  IMPOVERISHING THE GHETTO

  THE MYTH OF THE WAR ON POVERTY

  Two - PILLAGING THE GHETTO: OTHER CAUSES OF POVERTY

  “I’M NOT PREJUDICED, BUT…”

  AMERICAN APARTHEID

  PUNISHING THE CHILDREN

  SICK AND POOR

  A SECOND GHETTO: PRISON

  WORKING—AND POOR

  Three - THE USUAL SUSPECTS

  “GHETTO-RELATED BEHAVIORS” AS CAUSES OF POVERTY

  SINGLE-PARENTHOOD: FAMILIES ON HALF A POVERTY INCOME

  UNEMPLOYED AND INVISIBLE

  DESCENT INTO HELL

  “WHY DON’T THEY JUST GET JOBS?”

  VICTIMS TO BLAME

  Four - WELFARE IN MODERN AMERICA

  WHAT IS “POVERTY”?

  WHAT (AND WHY) IS “WELFARE”?

  OFF ON THE WRONG FOOT

  PARTIAL SOLUTIONS

  WAR ON WELFARE

  THE MYTH OF THE WELFARE QUEEN

  THE END OF WELFARE

  HAS WELFARE REFORM BEEN A GOOD THING OR NOT?

  A TATTERED SAFETY NET

  Five - WELFARE ELSEWHERE

  MAKING WELFARE WORK: A FINNISH EXAMPLE

  Six - ENDING POVERTY AS WE KNOW IT

  AS LONG AS THERE ARE GHETTOS…

  MENDING THE SAFETY NET

  AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

  Acknowledgements

  Annotated Bibliography

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  Foreword

  Seventeen years ago, three-year-old Anthony and four-year-old Maurice died in Dade County, Florida. Their mother worked to support her family but her income was too low to pay for child care. Since she qualified for government help she was put on Florida’s long waiting list for child care assistance, a list with 22,000 names. While waiting she relied on friends and relatives to care for the children. Some days those arrangements fell through and the boys were left alone while she went to work. On one such day, Maurice and Anthony climbed into the clothes dryer to look at a magazine in a seemingly cozy place, closed the door, and tumbled and burned to death. The Miami Herald wrote, “There are hundreds, maybe thousands more tragedies waiting to happen in Dade County alone, in every home where young children are left to fend for themselves. They’re not latchkey kids, they’re lockup kids, locked inside for the day by parents who can’t afford day care, can’t afford not to work and can’t get government assistance. Anthony and Maurice might be alive today if affordable care had been available.”

  Years later, in another American city, Antonio was born to Maria, a young mother who was sent home with him the day he was born. Only she didn’t have a home. She was a single parent with no extended family support. She loved her baby and within the limits of public assistance was able to find a small room to rent. When Antonio was about three months old, Maria called a health clinic to report her baby was sick. The nurse told Maria to bring him in. Maria said she didn’t have transportation. The nurse asked for the baby’s symptoms and, after hearing Antonio had suffered diarrhea for two days, concluded he had a flu virus and advised Maria to keep the baby hydrated. “Feed the baby liquids every hour; Pedialyte or apple juice is good.” Maria went to her refrigerator. She didn’t have Pedialyte or apple juice or even ice. But in her cupboard she did have tomato sauce, so she filled the baby’s bottle with it and stayed up all night feeding him every hour on the hour. The sodium content of the tomato sauce accelerated the baby’s dehydration and by morning his tiny body was lifeless.

  Anthony, Maurice, and Antonio died from poverty in the wealthiest nation on earth. Should Anthony and Maurice have died because their mother could not afford child care when she had to go to work to support them? Did Antonio need to die because his mother lacked transportation, adequate access to health care, and food? These were three real children, each a sacred gift of God, and a member of our American and human family. We could have prevented their deaths and thousands of other child deaths like theirs; we still have the opportunity to alleviate the daily terrors and perils millions of other poor children and families face by making more just choices in our rich, powerful nation.

  Our nation’s current budget choices favor powerful corporate interests and the wealthiest taxpayers over poor children and families’ urgent needs. The gap between rich and poor is at its largest recorded point in more than thirty years. While thousands of children, parents, and grandparents stand in unemployment and soup kitchen and homeless shelter lines waiting for food and a stable place to live all across America, lobbyists for powerful corporations and rich individuals and special interests line up inside Congress and the White House and state houses to get hundreds of billions of dollars in new tax breaks and government handouts.

  Follow the money and you find out what we truly care about and stand for as a nation. Budgets represent moral and social choices, not just economic ones. They are a test of what we value as a people. Our budget priorities say we do not value our children and poor families. Poor children, families, and individuals cannot eat promises, be sheltered from the cold by photo-ops, or escape poverty through eloquent speeches about compassion with crumbs from America’s table of plenty.

  It is morally shameful that a child is born into poverty every forty-three seconds, and without health insurance every minute in our nation. Persistent and pervasive poverty and child neglect in our country are not acts of God. They are moral and political choices we make as Americans. We can change them. We have the money. We have the power. We have the know-how. We have the experience. We have the vision. And we have the moral and social responsibility. What we lack is the civic and spiritual engagement of enough citizens, and political, faith, and media leaders to pierce the profound lack of awareness about and indifference to preventable and solvable child and adult suffering. As we seek the spiritual and civic resolve we require, we are hindered by the poisonous politics of self-interest and greed; narrow ideological agendas that reflect the belief that government should help the rich and powerful most and the poor and powerless least; and the political hypocrisy of leaders at all levels of government and in all parties who leave millions of children and families behind while pretending to do otherwise. Anthony’s, Maurice’s, and Antonio’s stories are just the tip of the iceberg of the child suffering that affects millions of children every day and will sink our ship of state and nation’s soul if we do not change course.

  In his fine book, Dr. David Hilfker describes many of the underlying causes of poverty in our nation, especially black urban poverty; explains why past efforts have not eliminated poverty; and shows why and how we can and must do better. For our children’s and nation’s sakes, we need to approach present and future efforts to end child and family poverty with a new level of moral and political commitment, and urgency and vision. Now is the time for all of us to raise our voices and stand together to help America truly honor the ideals of freedom and justice for which it purports to stand. Like the widow in the New Testament parable who pestered the unjust judge, we need to speak up for justice again and again and again until our requests to leave no child or person behind in the richest nation on earth are heard and acted upon. America has been blessed with so much. Let us determine to be a blessing to all the poor in our own nation and around the world.

  MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN

  President, Children’s Defense Fund

  Introduction

  When we Americans want to do something about poverty, we usually set about “improvin
g” poor people. We may offer education or job training, establish programs to develop the parenting skills of young mothers, require addiction treatment as a condition for receiving housing, put a time limit on welfare benefits in order to motivate poor people to work, or refuse additional welfare payments to discourage further childbearing.

  This practice of improving poor people has a long history. Early American reformers traced extreme poverty to intoxication, laziness, and other kinds of unacceptable behavior. They tried to use public policy and philanthropy to elevate poor people’s characters and change their behavior. As the years passed, different sets of behaviors were blamed for poverty and successive methods suggested to improve the poor. Later reformers looked to evangelical religion, temperance legislation, punitive poor houses, the forced breakup of families, and threats of institutionalization—all to improve poor people.

  This approach has rested on the persistent belief that the individual faults of the poor are the primary causes of poverty: ignorance, lack of training, addiction, laziness, defective character, sexual promiscuity, too many children; the list goes on and on. It is not surprising, of course, that a nation so strongly committed to individualism should so often search for the roots of poverty within the poor persons themselves.

  In this short book, I want to consider poverty from a different vantage point. I want to suggest that the primary causes of poverty lie not in individual behavior at all, but in specific social and historical structures, in forces outside any single person’s control. This is not to deny that most poor people’s character could use some improving (as could most of the rest of ours), but it is to suggest that the essential causes of American poverty lie elsewhere: in the paucity of jobs on which someone might support a family, in inadequate access to health care and child care, in meager educational resources, in specific government policies, in nonexistent vocational training, in the workings of the criminal justice system, and, for African Americans, in a painful history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination.

  The American stereotype of poverty has become the single-parent, black, inner-city family. And, indeed, African Americans are three times more likely to be poor than whites. In the 2000 Census,1 however, almost half (46.8 percent) of America’s poor were white, close to another quarter (23.0 percent) were Hispanic, and 6.2 percent were Native American, Asian, and Pacific Islander. Only just over one-quarter (26.2 percent) were African Americans. Of those poor Americans, almost a quarter (22.0 percent) lived in rural areas and more than a third (36.4 percent) in suburbs. Of African Americans in poverty, less than half live in the urban ghettos that have come to be the almost exclusive definition of poverty in the American mind.

  This book is largely about those black Americans, only about 12 percent of all our poor people, who do live in the inner-city ghettos. Many other books could be (and have been) written about white poverty, about Hispanic poverty, about Native American poverty, about poverty in general. Why, then, is this white, middle-class physician writing about black, urban poverty?

  The simplest answer is that it’s what I know about.

  In 1983, after seven years as a rural physician in northeastern Minnesota, I moved to Washington, D.C., to practice medicine in two small inner-city clinics. African Americans are Washington’s predominant population and—aside from immigrant groups that have recently been expanding—the poor here are overwhelmingly black. For five years, my family and I lived in Christ House, a medical recovery shelter for homeless men. In 1990, we started Joseph’s House, a community and hospice for formerly homeless men dying with AIDS, where we lived for three years. For almost two decades, then, I have lived and worked among the black, urban poor. Their plight has been my primary professional concern.

  More important, what I know about and what concerns me the most unfortunately fits all too well with both public and media stereotypes of poverty. When most Americans think about poverty, or see the poor on television, or read about them in the newspapers, the images are of poor black men hanging around the street corner, poor black teenagers selling drugs, poor black single mothers living on welfare, poor black inner-city schools failing their children. In spite of the statistics, in our country poverty has become synonymous with black, urban poverty. Since the late 1960s, when President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty ended in “failure,” poverty has been almost a code word for the inner-city black ghetto, its drugs and its crime. If, then, we are going to face the larger questions of what to do about poverty in America, there’s really no way to go but through the ghetto—both as it really exists and as most Americans imagine it.

  Finally, I’m writing about poverty and the ghetto because the reasons for their existence and the links between them are not at all mysterious but lie clearly in history. It’s nowhere near as hard as most of us imagine to grasp the causes of black, urban poverty (or, for that matter, white, rural poverty), and it’s important not to attribute those causes simply to slavery. If we were to decide to put our minds, our energy, and some of our nation’s resources to work, there are solutions we could choose. Right now.

  Yes, most of us tend to ascribe poverty to the behavior of the poor themselves, and yet, if we were honest, we would admit to at least some puzzlement over, say, why young black children are four times more likely to be poor than their white counterparts, or even why the black ghetto exists in the first place.

  I am no stranger to the individual weaknesses of the poor and black in America. It’s the nature of a doctor’s work to see people who are in trouble one at a time, and it has often seemed to me that the immediate causes of my patients’ poverty did lie in their own behavior. For some, addictions consumed their time and energy. Others would not (or could not) cooperate with my medical treatment plans. Still others lacked parenting skills or discernible job skills. Or all of the above. And some just didn’t seem to want to work.

  But the more time I spent with even the most troubled of my patients, the more obvious it became that virtually all of them were doing close enough to the best they could in the overwhelmingly difficult environment they inhabited. The odds against which they struggle, however, are massive. If you haven’t lived it or even seen it firsthand, there’s almost no way to imagine it. Living in the ghetto, one faces problems with public housing, family violence, drug and alcohol abuse, the drug trade, negligent landlords, criminals, illness, guns, isolation, hunger, ethnic antagonisms, racism, and other obviously negative forces. Even forces that might seem positive in other circumstances—the law, the media, government, neighbors, police—can, in the ghetto context, make life miserable for the poor. And one has to contend with all of these forces—any one of which might be overwhelming—all at once, without a break. Turn to deal with one problem, and three attack you from behind. Experience a little unexpected bad luck, and you find yourself instantly drowning. The cumulative effect of the “surround”2 is more than the sum of any of these individual forces. There is simply no space to breathe.

  When I first arrived in Washington, I was already familiar with many of the structural causes of poverty. But like so many of us, I was convinced that if the individual could be strengthened enough, he or she could make it out of the ghetto, and if enough people could be strengthened, the ghetto itself would collapse. I have spent the better part of a professional career trying to strengthen individual poor people. While that may have been a positive endeavor, I no longer believe that individual efforts to improve individual poor people will substantially reduce poverty.

  The argument that inner-city poverty comes primarily from the personal weaknesses of poor people simply cannot be sustained. Among African-American children under the age of six, half live in poverty. Among African-American males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four in the city of Washington, half are in the criminal justice system.3 There are only two possible explanations for these and many similar statistics. Either African Americans are genetically predisposed to poverty, or specific forces in their environm
ent have kept large numbers poor!

  For centuries, whites have consciously or unconsciously found the explanation in theories of racial inferiority.4

  In this book, I will argue what has long been evident to African Americans and should long since have been obvious to everyone else: something awful has been done to the black poor in this country. Allowing for that monumental injustice, however, how does one explain the individual behavioral deficiencies that seem so prevalent among poor African Americans (and other groups of Americans in poverty)? How can one account for the extraordinarily high rates of single parenthood, widespread substance abuse, problematic parenting, and criminal behavior within the black ghettos? If the reason is not some genetic inferiority, what does cause these problems in the first place? And why do they persist?

  Even after a decade of practicing medicine in the inner city, I found I couldn’t answer those questions in ways that satisfied me. This proved so frustrating that, in a foolhardy moment, I volunteered to teach a course on the causes of urban poverty. It was undoubtedly my way of putting myself on a collision course with what I felt I still needed to learn. In search of answers, I plunged into an extensive, often impressive, and remarkably consistent library of books and articles of all sorts on the nature, causes, and consequences of urban poverty. I was often shocked at how little I had known.5