Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen

by David Hilfiker

  SIDEL, RUTH. Women and Children Last: The Plight of Poor Women in Affluent America. Penguin USA, New York, 1992, and Keeping Women and Children Last: America’s War on the Poor. Penguin USA, New York, 1998. The feminization of poverty in the United States and the ways in which the status of women has affected poverty in the country. The second book is not just an updated reprint but a new book entirely.

  SIMON, DAVID AND BURNS, EDWARD. The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. Broadway Books, New York, 1998. A chronicle of the life on a few blocks in the inner city of Baltimore over a twelve-month period during 1993. It is essentially a story of how drug addiction dominates lives and how an open-air drug market dominates a particular Baltimore neighborhood. The writers spent a year and one half in the neighborhood, apparently earned the trust of the residents, and tell an amazing story. Although a work of journalism, it reads like a novel. It’s a chilling look at life in the depths of the ghetto.

  SKLAR, HOLLY; MYKYTA, LARYSSA; AND WEFALD, SUSAN. Raise the Floor: Wages and Policies that Work for All of Us. Ms. Foundation for Women, New York, 2001. A cogent and well-reasoned argument for raising the minimum wage to $8.00 an hour, (approximately what it was in constant dollars in 1968), supported by a treasure trove of statistics and argument. The authors develop a “minimum needs budget” (as opposed to the usually used but inadequate “poverty level”) that would mandate, among other things, an increased minimum wage indexed to inflation.

  WEIL, ALAN AND FINEGOLD, KENNETH, eds. Welfare Reform: The Next Act. The Urban Institute Press, Washington, D.C., 2002. In preparation for the debates reauthorizing the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (Welfare Reform), the Urban Institute has summarized its data on the effects of Welfare Reform so far. Since 1996 the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research and policy think tank, has sponsored the Assessing the New Federalism project, gathering and analyzing data on state policy choices and its effects on low-income people. In addition to reviewing these studies, they make specific policy recommendations for the reauthorization debate.

  WILSON, WILLIAM JULIUS: Wilson is an eminent sociologist currently teaching and doing research at Harvard. His books were the first by a liberal to take an honest look at the sorts of “ghettorelated behaviors” that result from the oppression of the inner city.

  The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990. Its primary thesis is that the rising rate of single mothers in the ghettos is due to the declining numbers of males who can find jobs to support families, but this is also a good general look at urban poverty from a sociological point of view. Lots of statistics.

  When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. Vintage Books, New York, 1997. This is a clear and compelling, if academic, picture of poverty in the inner city of Chicago. Wilson’s books are a little difficult to read, but his theoretical grasp of the subject is superb and his statistics impressive. He is especially clear about the relationship between declining job prospects and the rise of ghetto-related behaviors.

  In addition to the books mentioned above, there are several Web sites that have an impressive range of up-to-date information about American poverty. All allow unlimited downloading gratis. Some of the ones I relied upon most heavily are:

  THE CENSUS BUREAU. www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty.html. The government census bureau, of course, has the most complete demographic statistics available, but I have been surprised at how available and well formatted the information is. The Web site is easy to navigate, and I have had little trouble finding the information I wanted. By the time this book is printed, the analysis of the 2000 census should be complete.

  THE CENTER FOR BUDGET AND POLICY PRIORITIES. www.cbpp.org. CBPP is an amazingly prolific organization dedicated to writing policy papers on aspects of federal and state budgetary policy that impinge upon social welfare. They are a nonpartisan organization that provides extensive and up-to-date data and analysis.

  THE CHILDREN’S DEFENSE FUND. www.childrensdefensefund.org. Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund has had a single-minded focus on the well-being of American children, especially poor children, for more than twenty-five years. It is an activist organization that provides excellent analysis along with many ways to get involved in advocacy for children.

  THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF JUSTICE. www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/welcome.html. The Bureau of Justice has data on incarceration and sentencing, both federally and state-by-state.

  THE INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH ON POVERTY. www.ssc.wisc.edu/irp/. A site at the University of Wisconsin that has some basic information on poverty statistics and also sponsors its own research.

  THE JOINT CENTER FOR POVERTY RESEARCH. www.jcpr.org. Funded by the United States Department of Health and Human Services. In addition to its own information, it has a page of extensive links, www.jcpr.org/links.html, to many other helpful Web sites.

  THE SENTENCING PROJECT. www.sentencingproject.org. The Sentencing Project is an advocacy organization working against the huge increase in incarceration rates over the last twenty years. In addition to statistics, they have good analysis.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1 Statistics in this paragraph and the next calculated by the author from Joseph Dalaker, Poverty in the United States: 2000, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, Series P60-214 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001). This table can also be found at www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p60-214.pdf.

  2 In New American Blues, an impressionistic study of the many faces of American poverty, writer and philosopher Earl Shorris describes what he calls the “surround of force” confronting poor people.

  3 Eric Lotke, Hobbling a Generation: Young African-American Men in D.C.’s’s Criminal Justice System Five Years Later, a report from the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, August 1997. This report can be found at www.igc.org/ncia/hobb.html. Cited in Cheryl Thompson, “Washington, D.C., Young Blacks Entangled in Legal System,” Washington Post, August 26, 1997, p. B1.

  4 Conservative social scientist Charles Murray’s arguments in The Bell Curve— that economic success is largely due to IQ, that the IQ of African Americans averages fifteen points less than Caucasians, and that education has little effect on either—are a recent example. But response to Murray’s work from the scientific community was overwhelmingly critical. Science provides no support for the notion of black genetic inferiority.

  5 The annotated bibliography on page 133 provides brief descriptions of some of the most important sources in this literature.

  6 Dalaker, Poverty in the United States: 2000, Table A-2. This table can also be found at www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p60-214.pdf.

  7 Ibid.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1 In 1910, the average African-American resident in northern cities lived in a ward that was less than 10 percent black. There has been no comparable study of southern cities, but “there is little evidence of a distinctive black ghetto in southern cities in the nineteenth century,” either. See Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton in American Apartheid (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 24-25.

  2 The word ghetto means different things to different people. Sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, in their definitive study of American segregation, American Apartheid, define the term as “a set of neighborhoods that are exclusively inhabited by members of one group, and within which virtually all members of that group live.” (pp. 18-19) By this definition, none of these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrant communities (including the African-American communities) were remotely close to being ghettos. In fact, “by this definition, no ethnic or racial group in the history of the United States, except one [African Americans] has ever experienced ghettoization, even briefly.” (p. 19)

  3 Joe William Trotter, Blacks in the Urban North: The “Underclass Question” in Historical Perspective in The Underclass Debate, edited by Mic
hael B. Katz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 60.

  4 Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 120.

  5 Michael Katz, The Price of Citizenship (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), p. 40.

  6 The black exodus rarely led to real residential integration, however, since whites generally chose to leave the newly integrated areas, creating new, affluent black suburban ghettos.

  7 Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, America Divided (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 199.

  8 Ibid., p. 111.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1 William Julius Wilson’s The Urban Poverty and Family Life Study is summarized in his book When Work Disappears (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997).

  2 “Inner-city black job seekers with limited work experience and little familiarity with the white, middle-class world are also likely to have difficulty in the typical job interview. A spotty work record will have to be justified; misunderstanding and suspicion may undermine rapport and hamper communication. However qualified they are for the job, inner-city black applicants are more likely to fail subjective ‘tests’ of [future] productivity during the interview.” When Work Disappears, pp. 132-33.

  3 Reported in Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, p. 95.

  4 Ibid., p. 9. Massey and Denton also write: “The effect of segregation on black well-being is structural, not individual. Residential segregation lies beyond the ability of any individual to change; it constrains black life chances irrespective of personal traits, individual motivations, or private achievements.” pp. 2-3.

  5 Ibid. “The highest isolation index ever recorded for any ethnic group in any American city was 56 percent (for Milwaukee’s Italians in 1910), but by 1970 the lowest level of spatial isolation observed for blacks anywhere, north or south, was 56 percent (in San Francisco).” p. 49.

  6 Ibid. “Unlike black ghettos, immigrant enclaves were never homogeneous, and always contained a wide variety of nationalities, even if they were publicly associated with a particular national origin group.… A second crucial distinction is that most European ethnics [of a given city] did not live in immigrant ‘ghettos,’ as ethnically diluted as they were.” p. 32.

  7 Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995), p. 41.

  8 Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, p. 91. Massey and Denton quote studies showing that by “large majorities, blacks support the ideal of integration and express a preference for integrated living, and 95 percent are willing to live in neighborhoods that are anywhere between 15 percent and 70 percent black.”

  9 To simplify, assume a small community of 1,000 people—900 whites and 100 blacks. Assume further that 90 of the whites and 20 of the blacks are poor—an average rate of poverty of 11 percent (110 of 1,000). If black and white, rich and poor were evenly distributed (“perfect integration”), therefore, everyone would live in a neighborhood that has a poverty rate of 11 percent. If African Americans become completely segregated, however, their segregated neighborhood in the community now has a poverty rate of 20 out of 100, or 20 percent. Whites, on the other hand, now live in neighborhoods with a poverty rate of 90 out of 900, or 10 percent. Segregation has concentrated an average community poverty rate that was 11 percent so that all black people now live in a neighborhood with a 20-percent poverty rate. The following table gives the same data:

  10 Massey and Denton, American Apartheid: “To the extent that property owners perceive a decline as possible or likely, they have little incentive to invest in upkeep and improvements on their own buildings, because money put into neighborhoods that are declining is unlikely to be recouped in the form of high rents or greater home equity.…At some point a threshold is crossed beyond which the pattern becomes self-reinforcing and irreversible.” pp. 131-32.

  11 In Savage Inequalities (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991) educator Jonathan Kozol graphically describes his visits to schools in poor areas across the country and his discussions with teachers and students. In an East St. Louis junior high school, Kozol asks about Martin Luther King, Jr., and a young student, Christopher, remarks,“Don’t tell students in this school about ‘the dream.’ Go and look into a toilet here if you would like to know what life is like for students in this city.”

  Before I leave, I do as Christopher asked and enter a boys’ bathroom. Four of the six toilets do not work. The toilet stalls, which are eaten away by red and brown corrosion, have no doors. The toilets have no seats. One has a rotted wooden stump. There are no paper towels and no soap. Near the door there is a loop of wire with an empty toilet-paper roll.

  “This,” says Sister Julia, “is the best school that we have in East St. Louis.”…

  Almost anyone who visits in the schools of East St. Louis, even for a short time, comes away profoundly shaken. These are innocent children, after all. They have done nothing wrong. They have committed no crime. They are too young to have offended us in any way at all. One searches for some way to understand why a society as rich and, frequently, as generous as ours would leave these children in their penury and squalor for so long—and with so little public indignation. Is this just a strange mistake of history? (pp. 36, 40)

  It is no mistake. In such schools, when compared to their non-ghetto counterparts, the physical condition of the buildings, the paucity of equipment and supplies, the quality of instruction, the size of classes, and what is expected of the students, like almost everything else about such schools, cry out for justice.

  12 Jay Greene, High School Graduation Rates in the United States (New York: Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, 2001), Table 8. This study is also available at www.schoolchoiceinfo.org/hot_topics/pdf/67.pdf.

  13 Robert Mills, Health Insurance Coverage: 2000, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2001). This report can also be found at www.census.gov/hhes/www/hlthins.html.

  14 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Poverty and Infant Mortality—United States, 1988,” published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR) 44 (1995):922-27. Cited in Dennis Andrulis, The Urban Health Penalty: New Dimensions and Directions in Inner-City Health Care (American College of Physicians: American Society of Internal Medicine, Division of Governmental Affairs and Public Policy, 2011 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Suite 800, Washington, D.C. 10006). This review of the literature, with its citations, can be found at www.acponline.org/hpp/pospaper/andrulis.htm.

  15 S. Oakie, “Study Links Cancer, Poverty: Blacks’ Higher Rates are Tied to Income,” Washington Post, April 17, 1991. This study, based on a National Cancer Institute study in three major cities, indicated that poverty had a much greater influence on cancer rates than did race or culture. Cited in Andrulis, The Urban Health Penalty.

  16 O. Fein, “The Influence of Social Class on Health Status: American and British Research on Health Inequalities,” Journal of General Internal Medicine 10(1995): 577-86. Cited in Andrulis, The Urban Health Penalty.

  17 R. G. Wilkinson, “Income Distribution and Life Expectancy,” British Medical Journal 304(1992): 165-68.

  18 George Kaplan et al., “Inequality in Income and Mortality in the United States,” British Medical Journal 312(1996): 999-1000.

  19 World Health Organization (WHO), World Health Report 2000, Annex Table 2. This report can be found at www.who.int/whr/2000.

  20 The Nature and Extent of Lead Poisoning in Children in the United States: A Report to Congress (Washington, D.C.: Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, 1988). Cited in Andrulis, The Urban Health Penalty.

  21 “The State of America’s Children,” Children’s Defense Fund Yearbook 2001 (Washington, D.C., 2001), p. 39.

  22 D. M. Mannino; D. M. Homa; C. A. Pertowski et al., “Surveillance for asthma—United States, 1960-1995,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR)/CDC Surveillance Summaries 47(1998):1-27.

  23 Mark Nord et al.
, Household Food Security in the United States, 2000, p. 4. This report can be found at www.ers.usda.gov/publications/fanrr21.

  24 Ibid., p. 11.

  25 Elliott Currie, Crime and Punishment in America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998), p. 49.

  26 “Facts about Prisons and Prisoners,” The Sentencing Project, 2002. The Sentencing Project is located at 514 Tenth Street NW, Suite 1000, Washington, D.C. 20004. A copy of this document can be found at www.sentencingproject.org/brief/pub1035.pdf.