May the (Insidious) Force Be With You

detroit alter rd.jpg
Google Earth pic to the left of the boundary between Detroit and suburban Grosse Pointe Park, MI. Alter Road (cutting from upper left to lower right) is the boundary between the two. Take note of the differences in vacant land between Detroit (on the left) and Grosse Pointe Park (on the right).

Too many people think today’s “de facto” segregation in metro areas is the result of personal preferences expressed by individuals, when the fact is that public policy has created the conditions we live with today.  In fact, I see the demise of Jim Crow through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act corresponding with the immediate rise of an insidious, “non-racist” racism that shapes our metros today.  Our metro areas have never dealt with this.

In the aftermath of the Donald Sterling controversy (which, if you aren’t aware of, you truly are under a rock), the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates posted an on-spot critique of how racism is viewed and how racism is really working in today’s society.  It is a truly beautiful piece on the perception of racism versus its realities — the perception being that racism is the purview of dunces like Sterling (and Cliven Bundy before him) who get caught making inelegant statements that shed light on their true feelings, and a reality that is far more insidious and receives far less attention.  Coates describes how “elegant racism”, that insidious force, shapes where we live, what jobs are available to us, how we’re educated, and who is incarcerated and who isn’t:

“Elegant racism is invisible, supple, and enduring. It disguises itself in the national vocabulary, avoids epithets and didacticism. Grace is the singular marker of elegant racism. One should never underestimate the touch needed to, say, injure the voting rights of black people without ever saying their names. Elegant racism lives at the border of white shame. Elegant racism was the poll tax. Elegant racism is voter-ID laws.”

And to better describe how “elegant racism” works, he cites Chicago as its key implementer:

“Throughout the 20th century—and perhaps even in the 21st—there was no more practiced advocate of housing segregation than the city of Chicago. Its mayors and aldermen razed neighborhoods and segregated public housing. Its businessmen lobbied for racial zoning. Its realtors block-busted whole neighborhoods, flipping them from black to white and then pocketing the profit. Its white citizens embraced racial covenants—in the ’50s, no city had more covenants in place than Chicago.

If you sought to advantage one group of Americans and disadvantage another, you could scarcely choose a more graceful method than housing discrimination. Housing determines access to transportation, green spaces, decent schools, decent food, decent jobs, and decent services. Housing affects your chances of being robbed and shot as well as your chances of being stopped and frisked. And housing discrimination is as quiet as it is deadly. It can be pursued through violence and terrorism, but it doesn’t need it. Housing discrimination is hard to detect, hard to prove, and hard to prosecute. Even today most people believe that Chicago is the work of organic sorting, as opposed segregationist social engineering. Housing segregation is the weapon that mortally injures, but does not bruise.”

(Let’s parenthetically stop here for a second; the symbolism in that last sentence is incredible.  The implication is that victims of elegant racism “die” from internal injuries, which are often believed to be sustained from a lifetime of poor personal choices.  But elegant racism made those choices for them.  Absolutely incredible).

I don’t know if Chicago was the innovator of this type of racism, but I do believe it was something created in Northern industrial cities — i.e., the Rust Belt.  I suspect it has its seeds in the antebellum North, whose cities had small African-American populations prior to the Civil War and immediately afterwards.  I imagine at that time, when blacks comprised maybe less than five percent of, say, Buffalo’s population, it was relatively easy to isolate blacks without necessarily singling them out, as in the Jim Crow South.

But the Great Migration changed everything.  The need for industrial labor in the North, and rapidly declining conditions in the Jim Crow South, pushed African-Americans into Northern cities.  Once there they encountered competition for jobs and housing from both longtime “nativists” and more recent European immigrants.  The ten years from 1910-1920 were fraught with racial conflicts in Northern cities, culminating with the Red Summer of 1919.

But Northern cities did something that Southern ones did not.  They sought to limit and stigmatize the places where blacks lived, instead of limiting or stigmatizing the people themselves.  Out of this a whole set of policies emerged.  Racial covenants.  Redlining emerges during the New Deal.  Blockbusting came about as a tool to clear room for a growing black population, accelerate suburban expansion, and enrich real estate speculators.  Public housing was concentrated where blacks lived, and infrastructure investments ground to a halt.  Investments in education fell behind that of suburban schools, or couldn’t keep up with growing social challenges.  “Tough-on-crime” measures like mandatory sentencing and the “War on Drugs” were effective in removing potential workers from the workforce, reducing competition.  Taken together, these “non-racist” racist policies, often grounded in sound, rational economic thinking, created deeply ingrained patterns within metros that shape them today.

This position is further buffeted by research done by Nancy DiTomaso, a business professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey.  In her book, The American Non-Dilemma: Racial Inequality Without Racism, she says this:

“Because whites disproportionately hold jobs with more authority, higher pay, more opportunities for skill development and training, and more links to other jobs, they can benefit from racial inequality without being racists and without discriminating against blacks and other nonwhites. In fact, I argue that the ultimate white privilege is the privilege not to be racist and still benefit from racial inequality.”

There are other strong claims made by DiTomaso in that interview; it (and the book, which I loved) is worth your attention.

In my opinion the practice was perfected in the Rust Belt but has spread everywhere.  Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is doing a series on political segregation in southeastern Wisconsin, and found that its roots are in the state’s residential segregation legacy.  Lee Atwater’s famous quote about the abstraction of racial policies, uttered in 1981, possibly signaled to Southern metros that there was a way to accomplish the separation that Jim Crow had earlier provided.  I see a correlation between the number of blacks within a metro area, and the impact of insidious policies on residential and job patterns.  In some metros, the impact, while there, is not as strong (New York, Boston), because of lower relative numbers of blacks.  In some Sun Belt metros, Jim Crow likely enforced similar patterns but subsequent post-War growth and the new policies altered things a little (Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville).  In other Sun Belt metros with more recent growth the numbers of blacks has hardly been enough for full-on “elegant racism” implementation (Phoenix, Las Vegas).  But insidious racism is a critical feature of today’s Rust Belt cities.

This is in part why I’m skeptical of new calls from urbanists to increase affordable housing in cities, when I see vast neighborhoods that have suffered from policies that simply removed them from the consciousness of the majority of the housing market.  I’d prefer to address yesterday’s mistakes before creating new ones.

Plus, I keep thinking about that saying that the only thing necessary for evil to prosper is for good people to do nothing…

This post originally appeared in Corner Side Yard on May 9, 2014.

Pete Saunders is a Detroit native who has worked as a public and private sector urban planner in the Chicago area for more than twenty years.  He is also the author of "The Corner Side Yard," an urban planning blog that focuses on the redevelopment and revitalization of Rust Belt cities.



















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The first likely event is a moving van - instant classic quote

Then there is THIS point of view, just published:

http://townhall.com/columnists/markdavis/2014/05/16/the-myth-of-segregat...

".....A school’s halls should be filled with the sounds of kids who live nearby, whether they are all black, all white, all Hispanic, all Asian, all Eskimo or any combination thereof.....

".......the marketplace works.

But that marketplace is an offense to the busybodies who cannot fathom the notion that circumstance and actual freedom of choice may land large racial groups alongside each other in neighborhoods they choose to live in.

Freed from the marionette strings of forced busing, families are sending their kids to neighborhood schools again, which means that diverse neighborhoods sprout diverse student bodies, and neighborhoods dominated by a single race will see those numbers reflected in the schools.

To the UCLA “researchers,” this is not merely a landscape of choices they do not approve of, it is the de facto return of segregation. This is a preposterous attempt to paint us as a nation still stuck in the bigotries of past generations, curable only by the benevolent theories of, well, the Civil Rights Project and its ilk.

The executive summary of their report laments that increasing numbers of black kids and Hispanic kids are going to school with other black and Hispanic kids. They hate that the white kids are going to school with each other as well (alongside the Asian kids), noting that the White and Asian schools tend to be upper- and middle-class while the minority black and Hispanic schools are crumbling and plagued with many societal ills.

That should be a concern to everyone. But the solution will never be to uproot kids from their families’ chosen environments and punt them miles down the road in some perverse numbers game.

Such stunts sidestep real solutions, like making sure schools in less affluent neighborhoods are not stiffed in the local school budget, and improving family structures so that they yield fewer kids likely to go to school and tear up the place, and each other.

I’d love to think that even if we achieved these goals, the Civil Rights Projects among us would nod and realize that the skin color of a student body should make no difference, a concept in harmony with the goals of Martin Luther King.

But in an America so racially healed that its most hated man can be a racist NBA owner, oblivious malcontents strive onward, claiming urgent necessity for social engineering.

They decry not just segregation by race, but by poverty, pointing out that the disproportionately high numbers of poor kids of color means that they are more likely to live among each other, resulting in their attendance at the same troubled schools. Here are people with college degrees who have not grasped that people of low income are going to have limited options on where to live.

They also fail to notice that if a poor kid’s family lifts itself up out of poverty, the first likely event is a moving van taking them to another house and another school. Nothing in law or society prevents this upward migration, and evidence of it is everywhere.

But this does not quell the fires of mischief among those who cannot rest unless they are invoking government power over our various choices.

That, more than actual diversity, is their aim. Suggest a voucher program that would give minority kids greater access to better schools (and thus a greater chance of rubbing elbows with white classmates), and they recoil....."

Urban planning has disparate impacts too.

THIS is a very important paper:

http://americandreamcoalition.org/housing/black-whitegap.pdf

Matthew Kahn (2001): "Does Sprawl Reduce the Black/White Housing Consumption Gap"?

The answer seems to be yes.

Nothing is as disparate in its impact as urban planning to decrease sprawl, as Thomas Sowell pointed out in "Green Disparate Impact" and Randall Pozdena pointed out in "The New Segregation".

One of the best academic quotes on the subject in my opinion: from "Land Use Regulation, Innovation, and Growth"

Nicole Garnett, Law Professor, Notre Dame

"....there is something slightly unseemly about dramatically curtailing suburban growth at a time when racial minorities are responsible for most new suburban population gains. It is difficult to avoid concluding that changing the rules of the development game at this time is tantamount to pulling the suburban ladder out from under those who previously were excluded from suburban life by economic circumstance, exclusionary zoning, and intentional discrimination...."

Ties in to the current rage of "white privilege"

Locating public housing exclusively in one area vs. another is a form of discrimination. On that we can agree. We're dealing with that in the city where I live (though not for affordable housing, rather, for the addicted and mentally ill). The city keeps putting this housing in one part of town, rather than distributing it evenly throughout the city, or even as a practical matter, near medical facilities. The reason is wealthy landowners don't want it near them. I call it a case of NIMBY, but it's discriminatory, and I consider it bad policy. It's ironic that this is happening in a town that prides itself on its "tolerance."

However, I disagree that your entire argument constitutes "white privilege," or "elegant racism." I agree with your point about how public housing policy was used in the past, but I think public housing policy has changed. It's not necessarily for the better, but the discrimination taking place today is not the same kind as it once was. There are now many black families who are homeowners in wealthy districts, and that's a good thing.

Voter ID laws in my mind are also not compatible with this idea you are advancing, because it's the same for everybody. There is not one kind of ID for minorities vs. another one for whites. Having it doesn't segregate people. It's something that people can get easily, and it's not something that is just used for voting.

With regard to public education, and how it's financed, that's been an issue for a very long time, with and without racial segregation. As I think conservatives have correctly pointed out many times over the years, quality education doesn't always have to do with money. A significant factor in education quality is whether the community around the schools values education. If it does not, you can have all the money in the world going into the schools, as we are proving with our own largesse (I believe it's said we spend more on education than anyone else in the world), and children will still be poorly educated.

As for valuing education, this is something that communities have to work out for themselves. People can invite members of the community to value it, and there are some trying to do that (I'm thinking of people like Geoffrey Canada), but it can't be imposed. We've tried imposing it through enforced national standards, and it's resulted in repeated failures. It's time to return to local control.