White Space, Black Hood

by Sheryll Cashin

  Indifference to fair housing law, from the 1970s to the present, was not the only problem descendants faced. As William Julius Wilson wrote in his seminal book The Truly Disadvantaged, those trapped in inner cities did not benefit from the civil rights movement. Equality never came to them. He argued that their plight was worsened by deindustrialization, the exit of semiskilled, living-wage jobs from cities, and the exit of middle-class and professional Blacks from poor neighborhoods. By the 1980s, descendants were much less likely to find work and were more isolated socially, deprived of the stabilizing influence of their better-off Black brothers and sisters.35

  SEGREGATION NOW

  The Kerner Report’s prediction of chocolate cities surrounded by vanilla white-flight suburbs came to pass and lasted for a while. It was inevitable. The suburban dream, in which buying a split-level castle in a planned community on a thirty-year mortgage for less than it cost to rent in the city, was too good to pass up for the white masses who were offered this ticket. White flight accelerated in the 1960s on the general desire to avoid Blacks and urban turmoil. The Fair Housing Act and fair credit laws enacted in the 1970s made it easier for Black American strivers to move to suburbs too. Many former white-flight suburbs like Black Jack, Missouri, became very Black; about half of metropolitan Blacks currently live in suburbs, although poverty tends to follow them.

  In 1965, Congress reformed immigration law, eliminating preferences for northern and western Europeans and restrictions on people from places replete with color. This radically changed the complexion of the country. With mass immigration, by 2000, Hispanics were the largest minority, and Asian Americans and multiracial people are currently the fastest-growing demographic groups. The American metropolis became a prism of many colors. It also became a place of economic sorting and zero-sum competition between high-, medium-, and low-opportunity communities. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, wealthy and highly educated people were moving toward the diverse metropolis rather than away from it, although they tend to live in bubbles of affluence. It is unclear whether the pandemic will cause a lull in that pattern or a shift back to suburban or exurban living for those with choices. Whatever the dynamic, concentrated affluence persists, as does racial segregation.

  Each demographic subgroup experiences racial segregation differently. In the classic American Apartheid, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton popularized a measure of segregation known as dissimilarity. In 1970, Black-white dissimilarity stood at 78 across 287 metropolitan areas, meaning that 78 percent of Blacks would have to move in order to be evenly distributed among white people, reflecting their overall percentage of the population in every neighborhood. In 2010, Black-white dissimilarity had fallen to 60, and this measure has been falling modestly with each passing decade since 1970. However, dissimilarity above 60 is considered high, and Blacks remain the group most segregated from whites. Levels for Latinx or Hispanics have increased slightly as this population has grown, to 49, which is considered moderate segregation. And levels of Asian American dissimilarity from whites have remained the same, about 40, or very moderate. Whites, however, tend to be quite spatially isolated from others. The average white person lives in a neighborhood that is 76 percent white.36 While the vast majority of whites reject segregation in public opinion surveys, in practice, their willingness to enter or remain in a neighborhood declines sharply as the percentage of Black neighbors increases.37

  Indigenous people are usually invisible in assessments of segregation because their numbers are so small. Four centuries ago, as English colonizers arrived, an estimated fifteen million Indigenous people inhabited North America above what is now Mexico. According to the 2010 census, the total population that identified solely as Native American or Alaskan was about three million. Millions of Native Americans did not magically disappear. European colonizers annihilated them—a massive act of genocide. While this book is about anti-Black systemic oppression, this history must be acknowledged because American origin stories tend to erase the actions of white supremacy. Native peoples, too, were subjected to inferiorizing myths. US courts and society participated in the racist myth of the allegedly superior European Christian discoverer to the “heathen” or “savage,” justifying murder and taking of ancestral land from highly organized Indigenous nations.38 In some countries that acknowledge a past history of violation of human rights, current policy attempts to ameliorate and reconcile that past.39 In the US, the project of awakening and acknowledging racism and its ancient and current structures continues.

  For the majority of Black Americans, segregation and exposure to poverty continue to be a lived reality. About half of all Black metropolitan residents live in highly segregated neighborhoods.40 Black American descendants of slavery tend to be more segregated from whites than recent Black immigrants.41 This underscores a basic claim: Only Black Americans were subjected to massive forced servitude that endured for centuries. Other groups historically placed below white Anglo-Saxons certainly endured and continue to endure harsh forms of discrimination. The descendants of slavery and Jim Crow, however, were subjected to a regime of extreme, massive residential segregation that uniquely defines the Black American experience. In other words, Black Americans have endured a series of peculiar institutions designed by the state specifically to oppress them, and the hood and its attendant processes of predation, containment, and disinvestment continue.

  While a majority of Blacks no longer live in the hood, high-poverty Black neighborhoods persist, as does the architecture of segregation. Intentional segregation of Blacks in the twentieth century shaped development and living patterns for everyone and put in place an infrastructure for promoting and maintaining segregation. The past is not past. Racial steering in real estate markets, discrimination in mortgage lending, exclusionary zoning, a government-subsidized affordable housing industrial complex that concentrates poverty, local school boundaries that encourage segregation, plus continued resistance to integration by many but not all whites—all contribute to enduring segregation. All of these practices also happen to produce profits and enormous wealth for a small cadre of mainly white investors, institutions, and corporations.42

  In metropolitan areas with large Black populations that were very overt in creating ghettos, the main trend is stasis or as some demographers put it “stalled integration.”43 Milwaukee, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Birmingham, Philadelphia, and Flint are among the twenty-one metro areas that remained hypersegregated as of the 2010 census. Massey and Denton explained this concept. Hypersegregated neighborhoods experience high levels on at least four of five distinct measures of segregation. In a hypersegregated Black neighborhood, one can walk several blocks in any direction and not spy a white person.44 In the Milwaukee metro area, about 80 percent of African Americans would have to move in order to be evenly distributed. To summarize, while rates of Black-white segregation have declined, in hypersegregated areas, a basic architecture of containment, particularly of poor Black Americans, continues.

  In 2010, roughly one-third of all metropolitan Blacks were hypersegregated, down from 61 percent in 1970.45 This progress should be acknowledged. But while fewer people live in the hypersegregated spaces, the hood as a place and an institution of caste remains, with outsized consequences for descendants and American race relations.

  Metropolitan areas with large numbers of Black people still have neighborhoods of concentrated Black poverty and the unequal state and private practices that attach to them. Headline-grabbing events involving disparate treatment of Black people happen regularly in segregated Black neighborhoods or regions that have them.46 A metro area need not meet the technical definition of hypersegregation for anti-Black systemic forces to operate. A history of Black ghettoization and the continued presence of high-poverty Black neighborhoods may be sufficient.

  Affluent Black Americans who can afford it buy their way into premium neighborhoods. Economic segregation is rising fastest among Black and Latinx people. Black and brown one-perc
enters are moving to high opportunity, although when they do, that usually means moving to predominantly white spaces. For Blacks with resources, the African American Dream is fraught with dilemma. Real estate markets often present extremes: majority-Black neighborhoods near pockets of poverty or very white spaces where a nondexterous neighbor may call the police, say, when they spy a Black man attempting to enter his own house.47 Only about 4 percent of advantaged, majority-Black neighborhoods are surrounded by other advantaged neighborhoods.48

  Mary Patillo, a professor of sociology and African American studies, documented the proximity of Black middle-class neighborhoods in Chicago to disadvantaged poor Black neighborhoods, a pattern that has been replicated nationally.49 Predominantly Black neighborhoods, even relatively elite ones with households earning at least $100,000, are usually spatially linked to Black communities of concentrated disadvantage. Try as they might, most Black American strivers do not fully escape “the hood” or segregation. About two-thirds of majority-Black census tracts share a border with a severely disadvantaged census tract, compared to only 35 percent of Latinx tracts and only 8 percent of white tracts.50 Put differently, Black Americans making $100,000 tend to live in neighborhoods with amenities akin to neighborhoods occupied by whites making $40,000.51

  Between 1970 and 2005 to 2009, the percentage of middle-class or affluent Blacks who lived in islands of advantage grew from 12 percent to 34 percent. If this is progress, as some would argue, it also underscores that descendants trapped in the hood are ever more isolated from Black models of success. Through her fieldwork, sociologist Karyn Lacy documented the phenomenon of economic sorting. Escaping “the ghetto” and its perceived undertow was very much on the minds of Blacks who moved to affluent spaces. Yet, as sociologist and criminologist Patrick Sharkey has documented, the “most common residential environment of middle- and upper-income African Americans continues to be a disadvantaged neighborhood that is surrounded by other disadvantaged neighborhoods.”52 The options are much worse for poor Black folk.

  Experts define ghettos today in terms of concentrated poverty, not race. Paul Jargowsky, a public policy scholar, analyzed neighborhood characteristics and concluded that where 40 percent or more of families in a neighborhood have incomes below the federally defined poverty level, this is a rough measure of a high-poverty ghetto. Many academics and policy advocates use this 40 percent threshold for “high” or “concentrated poverty” and so will I.53 Despite the decline in number of hypersegregated metropolitan areas, the number of high-poverty census tracts rose by 50 percent after 2000. Jargowsky noted in 2013 that there were more zones of concentrated poverty than had ever been recorded.54 As of 2016, there were 4,058 high-poverty census tracts. About half were predominantly a mixture of Black and Latinx, and about one-quarter were predominantly Black.55

  After declining in the 1990s, the number of people living in high-poverty neighborhoods nearly doubled, from roughly seven million to fourteen million, between 2000 and 2013. The footprint of concentrated poverty spread and shifted in many areas, often landing in older suburbs. In the Detroit metro area, for example, the number of high-poverty tracts tripled, from 51 to 184, between 2000 and 2013. Maps convey this story better than words. Maps 3.1 and 3.2 in the insert of colored maps show the disappearance of middle-class people, the spread of concentrated poverty, and the increasing concentration of affluence in Chicago, from 1970 to 2017. The economic ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic may well entrench more concentrated poverty.

  Concentrated affluence tracks heavily with predominantly white space. Concentrated poverty leans Black and Latinx.56 Stark lines between white space and Black and brown hoods create political polarization and constant battles over resources and who the city will serve. In Chicago, the wealthy and highly educated gravitate to the North Side. Rising housing prices and rents and a winnowing of middle-class jobs drive out ordinary folk who used to call the city theirs.

  In the summer of 2020 in Chicago, and elsewhere, these battles or uprisings spilled out into the streets. A police shooting, or a rumor about one, caused some young people to rampage in Chicago on the Magnificent Mile, a high-end retail district on the North Side. Some broke windows, vandalized, and looted. I do not condone criminal behavior. But I understand where these emotions come from. Kimberly Jones, an author and activist, broke it down in a viral video. In a summer of uprisings and protest, she summarized plainly that responders to police killings included peaceful protestors, rioters, and looters; she defended all three responses. She called on those focused on looters to consider, “Why are people that broke . . . that food insecure . . . that clothing insecure that they feel like their only shot [is] walking through a broken glass window to get what they need.” She asserted that the social contract was broken and used the metaphor of the game Monopoly. After 400 rounds of Monopoly in which you had to play for someone else and give them everything you earned to build wealth for them, and then another 50 rounds “where everything you gained and earned was taken from you—that was Tulsa [and] Rosewood,” economically self-sufficient places that whites burned to the ground. Then, after 450 rounds, she continued, “finally they allow you to play and they say catch up, but you can’t win, the game is fixed.” She concluded, with barely contained rage, that if poor Black people don’t own anything, “as far as I’m concerned, they can burn this bitch to the ground.”57 The Kerner Commission’s nightmares, it seemed, had come true.

  Chicago is not alone in these stark patterns and civil discord. In the twenty-first century, descendants still rise up—in Cincinnati, Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and beyond—often for the same reasons the Kerner Commission identified in 1968. People segregated into low-opportunity, high-poverty neighborhoods may revolt when harassed, beaten, or killed by the police. Since the Kerner Report was issued, life chances have grown worse for the descendants left behind in very poor places. Economic inequality has increased, racial and ideological polarization has grown, segregation in neighborhoods and schools are a persistent feature of American life. And democracy and our democratic values are threatened in a political system in which popular will is regularly subverted by racial partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression.

  Meanwhile, concentrated poverty is much more complex than it used to be. Single-race high-poverty census tracts are less common. Although Black people are most exposed to concentrated poverty, followed by Hispanics, white exposure grew fastest in the 2000s.58 The stereotype of the ghetto hides this complexity.

  Where high levels of Black segregation persist, researchers have found that it was actively promoted by zoning laws that restricted density and by high levels of anti-Black prejudice, particularly in places with large numbers of Blacks with lower incomes and education levels than most whites.59 Old habits persist. Those who feel justified in their prejudices about descendants are not likely to know or care about intentional state action in creating and sustaining segregation and pols have pandered to those prejudices for decades.

  CHAPTER 4

  GHETTO MYTHS THEY TOLD A NATION

  She did not look especially Black, except perhaps to those skilled at discerning hints of African. Linda Taylor, one of many aliases deployed in a life of putting on identities, was a mixed-race woman born to a white mother. She was sufficiently pale to be listed as white by census takers in Arkansas in 1930 and 1940, an era when the state prized and protected whiteness by criminalizing interracial sex. Family lore and outrage had it that Taylor’s father was a Black man. Her mother denied it. As an adult, Taylor escaped the oppressions of color lines through disguise and flight. She was a migrant, though not a great or honest one. She left the South for California and passed as white, Hawaiian, Filipino, “Spanish,” as needed. Segregation facilitated her deceptions. She “whitened” when she lived in white spaces and “Blackened” when she moved to a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago.

  Taylor was arraigned for welfare fraud in 1974 and dressed the part of “welfare queen,”
the name the Chicago Tribune gave Taylor as it dramatized her to its readers. She seemed to relish the role. In a photograph, Taylor was super-fly, sporting a double-breasted fur coat and a studded, wide-brimmed hat tipped to the side. A fact-drenched book, The Queen, depicted reporters, politicians, and law enforcement so obsessed with Taylor’s potential abuse of social programs that the state did not pursue evidence that may have convicted her of kidnapping and murder.1

  How did this extraordinary con artist and probable psychopath, a biracial woman unusually skilled at fooling states and eight (purported) husbands, become a stereotype of Blackness that ultimately justified shredding the social safety net?2 This American story speaks to the power of convenient narrative over fact. It is also an exemplar of a particular kind of racist mythmaking that I call “ghetto mythology.”

  Ronald Reagan was not sparking much interest in his first run for president in 1976. As Taylor’s real-life soap opera emerged in the press, Reagan, the actor, found that her story and his repeated use of it got him traction with audiences. Taylor became the star of his stump speech. She was cheating not just on welfare but food stamps, Social Security, and veterans benefits from ostensibly dead husbands to collect an annual tax-free income of $150,000, Reagan claimed, as the audience gasped. That figure was grossly inaccurate. In his prodigious search for the truth, Josh Levin, author of The Queen, found that Taylor’s cumulative fraudulent take over decades, not annually, was estimated at $40,000. She was charged and convicted of stealing less than nine thousand dollars from taxpayers in 1976, the year Reagan ran with Taylor’s story.3 Though the Tribune coined the term “welfare queen,” Reagan subsequently used it in a radio address, claiming that Taylor’s “take” from government was “at a million dollars,” an even more exaggerated and untrue sum.4