Why the Poor Stay Poor

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/books/review/Ford-t.html?scp=92&sq=&st=nyt

By RICHARD THOMPSON FORD
Published: March 6, 2009

When the nation’s first black president took the oath of office, surrounded by the grandeur of the National Mall, it was easy to forget that one of the country’s most isolated and impoverished black ghettos was a few short blocks away. The poverty, violence and hopelessness in America’s inner cities have become increasingly dire in the four decades since the height of the civil rights movement. But as Barack Obama’s victory suggests, racial prejudice is less severe today than ever before. Why haven’t the problems of the ghettos improved along with race relations generally?

MORE THAN JUST RACE
Being Black and Poor in the Inner City
By William Julius Wilson
190 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95
Conservatives have a ready answer. Racism is not the problem; instead, a pervasive culture of instant gratification, violence and loose morals — think gangsta rap — keeps poor blacks from enjoying the American dream, not white racists. Liberals have a more charitable, but unfortunately more obscure, rejoinder. Poor blacks today suffer from covert racism, unconscious racism, institutional racism, environmental racism and a host of other theoretically abstruse “racisms” that don’t involve cross-burning white supremacists or crude Archie Bunker-style bigots — and may not even involve racial animus or discrimination. Each side has little patience for the claims of the other. Conservatives reject the idea of structural and institutional racism as an intellectual’s way of playing the race card. Liberals attack any emphasis on the dysfunctional culture of the poor as “blaming the victim.”
In “More Than Just Race,” the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson recaps his own important research over the past 20 years as well as some of the best urban sociology of his peers to make a convincing case that both institutional and systemic impediments and cultural deficiencies keep poor blacks from escaping poverty and the ghetto.
The systemic impediments include both the legacy of racism and dramatic economic changes that have fallen with disproportionate severity on poor blacks. State-enforced racial discrimination created the ghetto: in the early 20th century local governments separated the races into segregated neighborhoods by force of law, and later, whites used private agreements and violent intimidation to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods. Worst, and most surprising of all, the federal government played a major role in encouraging the racism of private actors and state governments. Until the 1960s, federal housing agencies engaged in racial red­lining, refusing to guarantee mortgages in inner-city neighborhoods; private lenders quickly followed suit.
Meanwhile, economic and demographic changes that had nothing to do with race aggravated the problems of the ghetto. Encouraged by recently built highways and inexpensive real estate, middle-class residents and industry left the inner city to relocate to roomier and less costly digs in the suburbs during the ’60s and ’70s. Those jobs that remained available to urban blacks further dwindled as companies replaced well-paid and unionized American workers with automation and cheaper overseas labor. The new economy produced most of its jobs at the two poles of the wage scale: high-paying jobs for the well educated and acculturated (lawyers, bankers, management consultants) and low-paying jobs for those with little education or skills (fast food, telemarketing, janitorial services).
And, as Wilson argued in an earlier book, “The Declining Significance of Race,”the success of the civil rights movement inadvertently made things worse for the most disadvantaged. After federal law prohibited housing discrimination, successful blacks began to leave the inner city for many of the same reasons whites did: in search of better schools, less crime, lower taxes and a leafier landscape. This left the least well off behind in ghettos that were both more socially isolated and more economically depressed than ever.
Today many ghetto residents have almost no contact with mainstream American society or the normal job market. As a result, they have developed distinctive and often dysfunctional social norms. The work ethic, investment in the future and deferred gratification make no sense in an environment in which legitimate employment at a living wage is impossible to find and crime is an everyday hazard (and temptation). Men, unable to support their families, abandon them; women become resigned to single motherhood; children suffer from broken homes and from the bad examples set by both peers and adults. And this dysfunctional behavior reinforces negative racial stereotypes, making it all the harder for poor blacks to find decent jobs.
Wilson criticizes the liberals and black power activists who attacked as racist Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prescient report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” (1965). According to Wilson, the vitriolic condemnation of the Moynihan Report effectively closed off a serious academic focus on the culture of poverty for decades, robbing policy makers of a complete and nuanced account of the causes of ghetto poverty. But he argues that the legacy of racism and ­changes in the economy matter more than the dysfunctional culture of the ghetto. And he rejects the argument that the black poor are responsible for their predicament, insisting that an aggressive public policy response is necessary to break the cycle of poverty.
“More Than Just Race” is somewhat ponderous and academic in style; too often the book details an important and fascinating question only to end inconclusively, with a call for “further research.” But this is more than made up for by its considerable substantive virtues: it is straightforward, accessible and sensible, free of the ideological cant and posturing that often mar even serious academic studies of racial issues.
At heart, Wilson is a Great Society liberal, so it’s easy to understand why conservatives might resist his analysis. But his suggestion that racism is less to blame for black poverty than are race-neutral changes in the labor market and his attempt to rehabilitate the study of the culture of poverty have made him a controversial figure in liberal academic and civil rights circles. As Wilson notes, some on the left reject any cultural explanation of black poverty — even one as sympathetic as that in the Moynihan Report or Wilson’s own — as blaming the victim. And the accusation of racism turns heads and grabs headlines, whereas Wilson’s complex and multifaceted investigation requires a book-length exposition.
Moreover, racism, unlike a complicated web of economic, demographic and cultural forces, triggers a legal response: instead of persuading recalcitrant legislators and voters to support policy reform, liberals can simply insist that the black poor, as victims of race discrimination, have a right to redress that courts must enforce, regardless of popular opposition. But the law’s arm is not long enough to reach bigotry that occurred in the past, nor can it get a grip on the economic and demographic changes that have hollowed out America’s inner cities. The urban poor need remedies that judges cannot order: public and private investment to create jobs that pay a living wage, training to help them learn new skills and understand the job market, and most of all a chance to move into racially and economically integrated neighborhoods where there are better opportunities and healthier cultural norms. Wilson’s levelheaded, thorough and unemotional analysis should help such badly needed policies prevail in the court of public opinion.
Wilson says the legacy of racism and changes in the economy matter more than the culture of the ghetto.
Richard Thompson Ford is a professor of law at Stanford University. His book “The Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse” is being published in paperback this month.