The Future of the American Ghetto

The past is the past and, as Hard Determinism would have it, could have happened no differently. The construction of the ghetto was entirely inevitable. Stephen King put this in another way in a mantra appearing throughout his novel Insomnia, "done bun can't be undone." We'll never change the fact that this was done. All this means, and it is a lot of meaning, is that the past can be used as instruction, as a way of gauging what the results of future courses of action are likely to be. Regret and, its kissing cousin, Guilt are common enough human emotions, but they tend to obstruct this process of learning from the past and applying what we have learned to the future. For instance, in the Polish rail-worker movie we watched, the truth about what had happened was so hard to find due to the guilt of different parties involved. We could ask ourselves by movie's end, whether conditions would change on the railway. My thinking is no, because the guilt persisted, and every interested party wanted to get away from the whole fiasco; this was typified by the stuffy room and sweaty armpits. Hard Determinism and Stephen King offer one way out of this cycle of guilt, a release, so that we can begin to understand, and perhaps deal with, the urban ghetto on our terms instead of our parent's or grandparent's (the past's) terms.

While the black ghetto in urban America was being consolidated in the 1930's, interestingly at a time of increased social strife commonly called the Great Depression (which I'll get back to later), The "initial impetus for ghetto formation came from a wave of racial violence" directed at blacks "between 1900 and 1920."[1] These included intimidation in the form of threats, mob violence[2], and bombings. Predictably this violence caused blacks to seek shelter in racially homogenous communities within the urban areas they lived.[3] Lack of police protection from this violence only contributed to the trend. This would only prove to be a reaction of fear and not a solution to the problem, as the edges of the forming ghettos were still being attacked for being to close to white settlements.

As whites made their feelings known through violence, which increasingly became unacceptable, institutional actors looked for other ways of keeping blacks in their place. This wasn't difficult to do through governmental channels, as no closed off minority can hope to attain political representation in the mainstream. Citizen actors were still doing their part however, both through declining violence against blacks and neighborhood improvement associations. The latter were designed so that whites could control who entered or moved in next door by lobbying city officials and economically threatening business actors such as real estate agents and hotels. Restrictive covenants came into vogue and were a constitutionally valid means of enforcing "the color line until 1948."[4] These allowed white property owners to assure that no blacks would move in to the neighborhood, and they made it easier to enforce this rule on other whites, who otherwise would not have minded sharing a neighborhood with blacks. This is much like the Nazi era when otherwise passively racist, and non-racist, Germans were dragged silently down the path toward concentration camps by a large and vocal minority of racists.

The last paragraph, you may have noticed, contained a few passive statements on the use of restrictive covenants and neighborhood improvement associations, because I had not yet cracked the cover of our other, most excellent, text. The National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) used racist propaganda to create and stimulate "a market for the buying and selling of housing."[5] With racial homogeneity cited as the prerequisite for the protection of "property values and neighborhood stability," homes in all-White neighborhoods would become more expensive, and the vacated homes of Whites in mixed neighborhoods could be obtained for very low prices by realtors.[6] The policy of not mixing neighborhoods would become NAREB policy in 1924. Attaching home location to status would prove to be a big moneymaker, adding much value to homes that didn't require extra material inputs by developers. Covenants and associations would be largely created by real-estate developers to maintain what otherwise could have been just another consumer fad.

While these, citizen-directed methods of residentially segregating blacks were explicit (implicitly market-centered), the federal actions, lobbied for by NAREB, were devious and perhaps more damaging in the long run. Institutional actors were taking their lead here though from their primary constituency on social matters, middle-class, white Americans. The Home Owner's Loan Corporation (HOLC) was devised by the federal government in the 1930's, and it nationalized a handy, color-coded system to determine what properties were eligible for mortgage loans. Two of the keywords denoting the most eligible properties for loans were 'new' and 'homogenous'.[7] This meant that long established neighborhoods that weren't white neighborhoods got looked over when it came to money for improvement, which is rather ironic considering that older buildings are the ones in most need of improvement. As Massey notes, this wasn't a new idea, it was the result of practices by citizens come to fruition and become institutional.

By 1949, when Congress passed the first Housing Act, few whites of upper and middle class standing would remain in most cities. However, since these elites who remained comprised the economic constituency of the federal, state, and local governments, they had the pull necessary to make sure blacks remained in their place away from the homes and businesses of upstanding white folk. Slum clearance began after the Act was passed to make way for "decent home[s] and suitable living environment[s]."[8] As Kirk notes, "more public housing units were torn down than built under the act," and public housing was disproportionately a feature of life for blacks. The act became an excellent tool for white policy-makers and citizens, who would lobby against the building of public housing near "their" neighborhoods, for reinforcing and expanding the rate of residential isolation for blacks. "Done bun can't be undone."

Underclass and Positive Feedback Loops

In information coming out of the time just before the attacks of September 11, 2001 we find some rather nasty statistics that dovetail with what we know of the underclass. Blacks are poor in comparison to whites as a group. Their families' median net worth is one-tenth of white families' net worth. Thirty per cent of the black population is under the tender care of our criminal justice system. One in three black males has been convicted of a felony, which has led to widespread disenfranchisement on the state and national levels, as all states with significant black populations take away the right to vote for felons for life. In six of Chicago's "very predominantly black neighborhoods...more than 40 per cent of the children were deeply poor," or living at less than half the federal poverty level.[9]

Although it wasn't broken down by race, we can suspect with a fair degree of certainty that blacks suffer disproportionately from the "highest death rate among the nation's 60 largest cities" in Memphis.[10] One reason for this is inadequate healthcare due to a lack of full-time employment with affordable benefits. Another is Not In My Back Yard or NIMBY by which polluting facilities are located in those communities that are least represented, because the communities that can, will fight to make sure whatever it is, sewage treatment plants maybe, will not be located near their homes. A good case is the North Hollywood Dump, which was "one of Tennessee's first toxic Superfund sites."[11] The fact of pollution and the lack of healthcare are made all the worse by poor nutritional choices found in the ghetto. Typically grocery stores are not available, only convenience stores. The heavily processed food, which is often the only affordable food for a family living at the poverty level, is devoid of the minerals and vitamins needed to grow a healthy human. Malnourished children don't develop properly. They have weaker immune systems (thus requiring more of that inadequate healthcare throughout life) and lower cognitive capabilities (thus requiring more attention from the educational system, which is not available due to the funding mechanisms for public schooling).

In terms of business needs, the underclass plays a vital role in staffing the absolute worst jobs such as butchers in factory farms, providing a human buffer for the most polluting industries, and distributing drugs the CIA would use to raise money for covert wars when Congress wasn't forthcoming with the funds.[12] For political purposes, society's ills can be blamed on "welfare queens" or blacks convening "mobs of white-hating rioters."[13] For the purposes of increasing the power of our security state (more prisons, more cops, tougher sentences), the culture of the ghetto can be pointed out as a not a spawn of the ghetto but a product of black people. The ghetto-culture is something to eradicate in and of itself without recourse to the prevailing living conditions. At the same time, law students at the University of Texas mock this culture for entertainment purposes (without thought to why it is, how it came to be, or what they could possibly do to change it) at a "ghetto-fabulous" party.[14]

The culture of the ghetto, however we may define it, includes within it a sub-culture of those that grew up with it and desperately want out. Unfortunately, as we have seen, there is little chance of escaping the fact of residential segregation. As Audre Lorde put it a couple of decades ago, "the scars of oppression...lead us to war against ourselves in each other rather than against our enemies."[15] When the lives of blacks were devalued for generations, blacks as a group couldn't help but to begin to mirror this devaluation. Even though it seems to go against common sense, we know from research on the topic, that the children of abusers are more likely to abuse their own children. The oppressed are more likely to become oppressors when put in any situation of dominance, which most likely is within the family for black parents, as they have no power in the public sphere. Thus we get the cyclical nature of the ghetto, still being reinforced and furthered by a racist society dominated by whites. However, and here's the lingering hope, "continuity does not happen automatically, nor is it a passive process."[16] Nothing in the future is inevitable.

[1] Massey, Douglas. American Apartheid, P 34.

[2] In the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas we find the lynching of John Carter. The 38 year old man was hung from a telephone pole and shot. His body was then dragged by a mob in automobiles to the center of the black business district in Little Rock, intersection of 9^th and Broadway, where some 5,000 whites took to rioting. This occurred in May of 1927.

http://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=2289

[3] In Tales by LeRoi Jones we find a later example of this need to be amongst one's own for protection from violence. From the short story Screamers, "Lynn thought further, and made to destroy the ghetto....Five or six hundred hopped-up woogies tumbled out into Belmont Avenue....We screamed and screamed at the image of ourselves as we always should be. Ecstatic, completed, involved in a secret communal expression....We marched all the way to Spruce, weaving among the stalled cars, laughing at the dazed white men who sat behind the wheels....The paddy wagons and cruisers pulled in from both sides, and sticks and billies started flying, heavy streams of water splattering the marchers up and down the street....America's responsible immigrants were doing her light work again." Sheer numbers would not be protection enough.

[4] Massey, p.36

[5] Gotham, Kevin Fox. Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development. P. 34

[6] ibid.

[7] Massey. p.51

[8] Kirk, John. "Race, Urban Development, and Little Rock's Gillam Park, 1934-2004" p.275

[9] Street, Paul. "The Repair of Broken Societies Begins at Home." http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2006-10/13street.cfm

All the preceding figures are from this article as well.

[10] Edmondson, Aimee. "The Birth of Hope."

[11] Edmondson, Aimee. "Born To Die- 38108 The infant death capital."

[12] For more information on the crack-cocaine drug explosion in America's ghettos, and government involvement, see: Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series of articles that appeared in the San Jose Mercury News, 1996. http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/webb.html

[13] Malkin, Michelle. "Cincinatti Under Siege: Yawning at Black-On-White Violence." Capitalism Magazine, April 14, 2001. http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=473

[14] Jensen, Robert. "University response to 'ghetto-fabulous' party is less than fabulous." Oct. 17, 2006.

[15] Lorde, Audre. "Learning From the 60's." February, 1982. p.455 This piece was found in an anthology entitled The Woman That I Am: The Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color, edited by D. Soyini Madison. St.Martin's Press, 1994.

[16] Ibid. p.456