Why Don't American Cities Burn?. Michael B. Katz
and policy foundations of the New Deal three decades later.70
Early twentieth-century urban reformers, struggling to define and tame industrial cities, grappled with the consequences of massive immigration by people with different cultures, the lack of affordable housing, the growth of poverty and homelessness, crises in public health and sanitation, and the impact of growing concentrations of wealth on society and politics. They worried about the role of privatization in municipal services, the heavy hand of state government, the weakness of mayoral executive authority, the corruption of machine politics, the inefficiencies and inequities of the courts, and the regressive and inadequate foundation of city finances on property taxes.71
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cities tried to respond to these issues with active government—what historians have labeled progressivism. Despite the persistence of corruption, widespread poverty, and racial discrimination, in these decades cities increased municipal expenditures, professionalized their administrations, and constructed buildings and infrastructures that supported the most vibrant and successful era in American urban history. In the late twentieth century, by contrast, the response was the withdrawal of active government, evident in reduced federal funds, reliance on market-based solutions to urban problems, and the need to turn to private initiatives, like special service districts, to carry out public functions such as street cleaning and security. The results are everywhere to be seen, in homelessness on city streets, poverty spreading outward to inner suburbs, uncontrolled sprawl eating up open space, crumbling infrastructure, gross inequity in spending on public education, the future of urban finance mortgaged to casino gambling, and the incapacity to prevent or respond effectively to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. The widely heralded comeback of American cities is thin and fragile. Move away from shiny center cities, and it is not nearly so visible. Look at city budgets, and it does not seem nearly so robust. “What is an American city?” has begun to elicit both a cacophony of definitions and an array of intelligent and promising ideas about how to respond. But these have not coalesced into a new urban progressivism. Without the will to forge an effective and coordinated political response, the future of American cities, however defined, is unlikely to be as buoyant as their past.
Chapter 2
The New African American Inequality
“It is now a commonplace,” observes historian Thomas J. Sugrue, “that the election of Barack Obama marks the opening of a new period in America’s long racial history . . . that the United States is a postracial society.”1 In 2005, the year Barack Obama took his place in the United States Senate, Shorty, born three years after Obama, high on cocaine and alcohol, died from a knife wound on the racially segregated streets of North Philadelphia. Shorty’s foreshortened life—a run-down row house on a mean street, frequent encounters with the police, work outside the regular economy as a street mechanic, violent death at the hand of another black man—screamed the stubborn salience of race in American life. “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past,” wrote William Faulkner.2 Whose life—Obama’s or Shorty’s—more accurately represented the trajectory of African American experience in early twentieth-century America?
The question is crucial because, as Sugrue notes, “the ways that we recount the history of racial inequality and civil rights—the narratives that we construct about our past—guide our public policy priorities and, even more fundamentally, shape our national identity.”3 The narrative of racial inequality weaves together multiple threads as it recounts African Americans’ struggle for political, civic, and social citizenship, to use T. H. Marshall’s famous typology. What are the story’s outcomes? This chapter concentrates on one thread: economic equality and mobility. It asks, “Have barriers to African American economic progress crumbled or remained stubbornly resistant to fundamental change? Has the story been similar for women and men? What mechanisms have fostered or retarded change?” These questions matter not only because they cut so close to the heart of twentieth-century American history but also because they bear on important public policy choices in the present.
The history of black economic equality and mobility does not support either the optimistic or the pessimistic version of African American history. But it does not come down in an illusory middle, either. Rather, it recasts the issue by showing that after World War II the nature of black inequality altered fundamentally. inequality worked differently at the end of the twentieth century than at its start or midpoint. At the start of the twentieth century, pervasive, overt racial discrimination barred blacks from most jobs, denied them equal education, and disenfranchised them politically. In the course of the second half of the twentieth century, slowly and sometimes with violent opposition, the situation of African Americans changed dramatically. Courts and Congress—prodded by a massive social movement, national embarrassment on the world stage during the Cold War, and the electoral concerns of urban politicians—extended political and civil rights.4 Affirmative action and new “welfare rights” contributed to the extension of social citizenship—guarantees of food, shelter, medical care, and education.5 By the end of the century, legal and formal barriers that had excluded blacks from most institutions and from the most favorable labor market positions largely had disappeared. Black poverty had plummeted, and black political and economic achievements were undeniable.6 Eight years later a black man was elected president of the United States.
Yet, for many people—both white and black—the sense remained that racism still pervaded American society, operative in both old and new ways, removing some barriers but erecting others. Observers found discrimination in racial profiling by police; verbal slips by members of Congress; disproportionate poverty, incarceration, and capital punishment; and the workings of institutions and public policies that disadvantaged blacks. Racism, they maintained, kept African Americans like Herbert Manes and Shorty residentially segregated and clustered disproportionately in the least desirable jobs, if not out of the workforce altogether, and circumscribed their opportunities for education, high incomes, and the accumulation of wealth. Far more often than whites, African Americans lived in poverty. Most black children were born out of wedlock, and a very large fraction of them grew up poor. And in the 1980s and 1990s, some indices of black economic progress began to reverse direction, accelerating downward during the Great Recession that marked the new century’s first decade.
Two books captured the debate over black progress. In Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, political scientist Andrew Hacker stressed the continued force of racism in American life. In America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible, written partly in response to Hacker, historian Stephan Thernstrom and political scientist Abigail Thernstrom emphasized its attenuation.7 Hacker highlighted the continued obstacles confronting blacks; the Thernstroms focused on black progress. Hacker intended his analysis to buttress affirmative action; the Thernstroms wanted to undercut its legitimacy.8 Economic inequality was only one among several topics considered in each book. But it was crucial—fundamental to the story of progress, or its absence. Was the glass half empty or half full? Could past black achievement be projected into the future, or had it stalled, leaving this enduring categorical inequality etched deeply into the soil of American life?9 What did the contrasting histories of Shorty and Barack Obama signify?
Trying to understand black inequality in the terms posed by the Hacker-Thernstrom debate, or focusing on whether America has become a post-racial society, takes us in the wrong direction. The question should not be framed in either/or terms or assessed on a single scale of progress. Rather, the historic pattern of black inequality based on social, economic, and political exclusion largely shattered during the course of the century—replaced by 2000 with its features rearranged in a new configuration of inequality. In the early twentieth century, the sources and results of America’s black/white divide overlapped with and reinforced one another. What stands out about the new pattern of inequality is the cumulative process from which it results and the internal differentiation which is its product. inequality among African Americans no longer grows out of a massive and mutually reinforcing, legal and extralegal, public and private system of racial oppression.10 Rather, it is a subtler matter, proceeding through a series of screens that filter