Authors: Eugene Robinson
From the point of view of the people being displaced, there is a lot not to like about gentrification. It yanks people out of neighborhoods where their families may have had roots for generations. It entices homeowners to sell at prices that are a fraction of what they could demand just a few years later. It completes the shredding of what once were healthy, vibrant communities.
But neighborhoods that become gentrified have, by definition, already disintegrated, which means that the toxic and seemingly inexorable Abandoned pathology has already set in. Research indicates not just that concentrated black poverty is self-sustaining but that the fact of racial segregation may be the most important impediment to turning around a neighborhood’s decline. So to the extent that gentrification breaks up tough knots of Abandoned poverty and scatters people to the winds, including to other areas that might be just as poor but are more racially integrated, the process actually can be beneficial to the displaced—with one big caveat.
The caveat is that the displaced cannot simply be forced
into another all-black ghetto—one that is more remote, with even fewer amenities and services. This is largely what has happened in Washington and some other cities, and the result is that the problem just gets moved, not solved.
By far the best solution—and, yes, it costs money—is to preserve or create low-income housing that allows the Abandoned to stay in place while the neighborhood gentrifies around them. All this is well-known to municipal officials across the nation; the problem is the expense, both in initial outlay and eventual tax receipts. The bursting of the real estate bubble and the implosion of the subprime mortgage industry have not had many positive effects, but the slowing of the gentrification steamroller and the return of property values to more rational levels should provide some breathing room for effective housing policies. An explicit goal should be ameliorating the racial segregation of Abandoned communities, and one way of doing that is to encourage and manage gentrification in ways that create diverse neighborhoods—ones that include not just affluent white newcomers but also low-income black survivors.
A domestic Marshall Plan aimed at Abandoned black America will be expensive, and politically it will be a hard sell. For reasons that I doubt anyone really understands, it seems to be much easier to convince Americans and their elected officials to spend hundreds of billions of dollars for comprehensive nation-building programs in faraway places like Iraq and Afghanistan than to fund comparable initiatives in their own hometowns. We’re willing to pay young men in Kabul to hand over their weapons, to build schools for them so they can learn marketable skills, to create jobs for them so they can stop selling
drugs. We decline to do the same for young men in Kansas City. Someday, perhaps, someone will explain why this is supposed to make sense.
A Marshall Plan to attack entrenched African American poverty, dysfunction, and violence should be framed as a cognate of the original Marshall Plan: a costly, but ultimately profitable, investment in America’s national security. I doubt that it can be sold to the public and to Congress at all unless it is made explicit that the intent is not to give any special advantages to Mainstream black families that most Americans consider to be middle class or even affluent. Even given the nation’s serious burden of deficit and debt, designing and building a bridge to bring the Abandoned into the Mainstream is not beyond our reach. It took just days to come up with nearly a trillion dollars to save the international financial system. The United States spends almost as much on defense as all the other nations of the world combined—an incredible 48 percent of the global total. We can find the money. We just have to find the political will.
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We also have to find the political leadership.
President Obama has taken the position that his initiatives, to the extent that they are aimed at helping the working class and the poor, will inevitably benefit African Americans to a greater degree than most other groups. If black people are less likely to have health insurance, for example, then health-care reform that provides insurance will have a greater impact in black communities; if energy legislation creates thousands of
new “green” jobs and black unemployment is nearly twice as high as white unemployment, then African Americans should see disproportionate rewards.
After a grace period of a year or so, some African American activists and intellectuals began to complain that Obama’s race-neutral approach was not bold enough to address the crisis in Abandoned black America. Perhaps the most visible and voluble of the critics was commentator Tavis Smiley, who convened a Black Agenda Summit in Chicago, Obama’s hometown, to press for more urgent and targeted action. “The bottom line is the president needs to take the issues of black America more seriously because black folks are catching hell, number one,” he said. “Number two: This theory that a rising tide lifting all boats—that theory was soundly dismissed. Thirdly, because black people are suffering disproportionately, it requires a disproportionate response.”
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With equal volume and assertiveness, Obama was defended by a leader whom many people would have expected to be on the other side of the issue: the Reverend Al Sharpton. There was no need, Sharpton said, for Obama to “ballyhoo” a specific black agenda. He argued, in effect, that progressive policies could be targeted to focus on inner-city or rural communities without being specifically labeled as instruments of black uplift.
Sharpton had the keener sense of public relations and the political moment. Polls showed that the most vehement critics of the first African American president—a majority of Tea Party protesters, for example—already believed that Obama’s programs favored black Americans over others. The reality is that some whites were always going to suspect Obama of favoritism, no matter what he said or did. Being a “first black”
anything always involves bending over backward not just to be evenhanded but to demonstrate that evenhandedness.
On substance, though, Smiley has a point. The crisis in Abandoned black America is unique: It is profound, multigenerational, and in some ways worsening. Between 2000 and 2005, the segment of black American households at the bottom, earning less than $15,000 a year, grew from 23.1 percent to 26 percent.
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Any president could make a compelling argument for focused and sustained attention to the plight of the Abandoned. Sharpton is right that labels don’t matter—you could call it an “inner-city agenda” or something like that, and of course you wouldn’t make an all-out assault on black poverty and dysfunction so exclusive that it poured government funds into the mean streets of Compton while totally ignoring the barrios of East Los Angeles. Whatever the label, though, a Marshall Plan for inner-city America is going to involve a lot of resources being directed toward a lot of black people—and for the first black president, there would inevitably be political blowback.
But Obama has an important card that he can play: means testing of affirmative action programs. He can declare that from now on, the black Mainstream should be on its own—in exchange for the political leeway to concentrate money and attention on the Abandoned.
He would need support, however, from other black leaders and opinion-makers—from members of the Congressional Black Caucus, for example, as well as big-city mayors, the major civil rights organizations, and other important actors. For African American officeholders, this would require considerable courage. The district of Congressman James Clyburn,
for example, includes areas with some of the worst rural and urban poverty in South Carolina. But he also represents Mainstream communities whose residents are more likely to vote and who are in a better position to give campaign contributions than his Abandoned constituents.
A new generation of black political leadership at the municipal level is already trying variations of the Marshall Plan approach. When Newark mayor Cory Booker—a Stanford University and Yale Law School graduate, as well as a Rhodes scholar—first ran for the city’s top job in 2002, he was derided as “not black enough” by longtime incumbent Sharpe James. Booker lost that race, but ran again in 2006 and won. Booker has made a point of living in the city’s Abandoned neighborhoods throughout his public career: While he was campaigning in 2006, he was one of the last remaining tenants in Brick Towers, a crime-ridden, drug-infested housing project that since has been torn down. On taking office, Booker made safe streets a top priority, overhauling the police department, installing a system of surveillance cameras, and sometimes going out on late-night patrols himself. Between 2006 and 2008, murders in Newark fell by 36 percent, shootings by 41 percent, rapes by 30 percent, and car thefts by 26 percent, according to a glowing 2009 profile in
Time
magazine. In March 2010, Newark had its first murder-free month in forty-four years.
Booker doubled the amount of affordable housing under development, slashed the city’s budget deficit in half, attracted more than $100 million in private philanthropic funding to support school reform and other initiatives, and cut his own salary twice. He turned down an offer from President Obama to be the new administration’s urban policy czar, deciding instead to continue the work he had begun in Newark. That
work is still far from done—more than 28 percent of Newark’s residents live below the poverty line. But in a city whose population has been declining since 1960—at times gradually, at times precipitously—the 2010 census was expected to show a slight increase.
In Washington, Mayor Adrian Fenty staked his political future on an all-out attempt to repair and reform the broken public school system. His abrasive schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, steamrolled the powerful teachers’ union and won permission, basically, to reshape the schools however she wanted. But the teaching profession is a Mainstream sacred cow; there was a time, not long ago, when education was one of the few career options available to African Americans who today would likely become investment bankers, lobbyists, or architects. Some of the political damage that Fenty suffered was self-inflicted, but the upshot is that he achieved a modest gain for the Abandoned while losing much of his Mainstream support.
Maybe that’s the way it has to be, however. Maybe some politicians are going to have to fall on their swords. The one unacceptable course of action is to do nothing, to try nothing new, to tolerate the intolerable status quo—and doom the Abandoned to fall even further behind.
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ow that disintegration has cleaved one black America into four, will we still nod to each other when we pass on the street?
It has been the custom for as long as I can remember: When a black person is walking down the sidewalk, particularly in a mostly white environment—the business district of a city like Denver, say, or a trendy shopping strip in Santa Monica—and meets another black person walking in the opposite direction, it is natural for these strangers to acknowledge each other with a small gesture or a mumbled greeting as they pass. We don’t go out of our way for these encounters, and there’s certainly nothing obligatory about them. Often they barely even register, although I’d guess I may have as many as a dozen in the course of a day. Usually, at least for me, all that’s involved is the making of eye contact followed by a quick nod of the head. The whole thing isn’t much more than a reflex, but it feels satisfying. If I had to explain, I’d say it was an affirmation of something shared, something remembered, something understood, something cherished. It is an acknowledgment
that even as total strangers, what we have in common is our racial identity.
But I have to wonder if that is still true. I have to ask whether black Americans, divided as they are by the process of disintegration, still have enough shared experiences, values, hopes, fears, and dreams that they define and claim a single racial identity—and feel a racial solidarity powerful enough to connect, if only for an instant, strangers who may never see each other again.
I give the little nod without even thinking about it. Is it my imagination, or are fewer people nodding back?
* * *
We now know that in terms of biology, race means nothing. This has long been intuitively obvious, at least to non-racists, but now we have proof. The deciphering of the genetic code shows that external features such as skin color and hair texture indicate nothing about a person’s nature, intelligence, or capabilities, and that it would make just as much sense to group people by any other arbitrarily chosen markers—blood type, say, or ability to whistle.
Human beings are one species, and what we call race is really just a crude marker for proximity. People who live near one another tend to share genetic material, and this tendency was much more pronounced throughout the eons of human evolution when groups were settled and the only means of transportation was walking. Thus it follows that people whose ancestors lived closer together are more likely to share genetic traits—skin color, for example—than people whose ancestors lived far apart. Notions of there being precisely three major
“races” of people whom we classify as white, black, and yellow—or perhaps five with the addition of red people and brown people—are eighteenth-century rationalizations for the brutal use of European technology in the colonial subjugation of populations that lacked firearms, sailing ships, and horses. People who lived a thousand years ago would have thought this classification system absurd; people who live a thousand years from now will surely think it barbaric.
But we also know that whatever characteristics we use to define and assign “race” tell us even less about black people than about other “races.” Because Africa is the landmass where
Homo sapiens
evolved, and where humans remained for most of our existence, Africans (and the diaspora, including African Americans) display an extraordinarily wide range of genetic diversity. Of all the DNA mutations that found their way into the human genome over the eons that our distant ancestors spent confined to the mother continent, only some were carried to other parts of the globe by the small groups of wanderers who left Africa and eventually populated Asia, Europe, Australia, and the Americas. As a result, two individuals who are both considered black might easily be more dissimilar to each other, at the genetic level, than either is to a person who belongs to another “race.” Imagine an African American couple on their first date, dining at a restaurant called Luigi’s. Either or both of them might have more in common with the Italian American waiter who brings them their pasta, as measured by common DNA sequences, than they do with each other.
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