Know Your Price. Andre M. Perry
the Hill District to Wilkinsburg.
Knowing the worth of our homes, businesses, and communities—assets—starts with knowing that our assets are constantly being devalued. The devaluation of our assets affects us physically, psychologically, and economically in negative ways, one of which is to rob us of our sense of self-worth and dignity. Demanding our proper price helps us achieve just and equitable distributions of needed resources and reinforces the notion that there is nothing wrong with Black people that ending racism can’t solve.
Racist federal, state, and local policies created housing, education, and wealth disparities. Policy must work for Black people in the same way it has supported White people’s efforts to lift themselves up. Bootstrapping, financial literacy, and other things we wrongly attribute to White success didn’t save them from urban plight and rabid unemployment during and after the Great Depression. Federal housing, transportation, and employment policies did, and the U.S. government largely excluded Black people from those efforts.
When upliftment is too rigidly viewed as a zero-sum game, there is no incentive for an overwhelmingly White U.S. House and Senate with mostly White constituents to re-create policy history for the benefit of Black people. Therefore, change must emanate upward from the neighborhoods to the halls of Congress. To be clear, I’m not disguising a call for bootstrapping as activism. Bootstrapping won’t solve many of the problems Black people face, especially those around economic mobility. Pragmatically speaking, Black people must leverage the assets we possess to excite change. As Frederick Douglass said in his 1857 “West India Emancipation” address at Canandaigua, New York, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”12 Knowing your price is about leveraging the power we possess.
There are certainly plenty of Black people who know they have value—folks like Memphis and Hambone. However, communities need researchers to provide enough frameworks and information so leaders and families can challenge governments and markets that devalue, dehumanize, and demean us for economic gain. This book is about understanding those processes as well as how our agency and assets can dismantle those structures. We have little choice but to mobilize the resources at our disposal, but we must deploy them toward structural change if we want outcomes free of the influences of racism.
I represent Wilkinsburg. My ups and downs as a person are undoubtedly rooted in many of the struggles of my hometown. Our fates are intertwined. The childhood conflict I related earlier has shaped my entire adult life, which has been beleaguered with unpredictable outbreaks of rage, largely stemming from reminders of past feelings of vulnerability and worthlessness. Minor disagreements with lovers, friends, colleagues, and strangers often turned into blowout arguments, for reasons unknown to them. To those whom I verbally assaulted, I apologize.
In my late thirties, I “progressed.” Instead of outright verbally assaulting people, I aggressively debated with those who consciously or unconsciously reminded me of Hotsy, still taking people to the brink of hurt feelings and broken friendships. Again, I apologize. While many interpreted my anger as passion, I hurt the people in my life and myself. The stain of unresolved contempt toward Hotsy and others kept me trapped in internal conflict. I deeply wanted to belong, to matter.
This book is written using different styles to convey a state of my personal development and my varied levels of connection with certain Black-majority cities. Sometimes my internal conflicts will emerge in my writings about cities. Chapters are part memoir, part essay, and part cri de cœur, with a splash of “dispassionate” analysis, varying in degree. I hope people will turn to the associated research reports on the Brookings website.
Some chapters are emotionally distant; others are very personal. The degree to which I insert my personal narrative into each chapter reflects the level of personal and professional investment I have with each featured Black-majority city. Nonetheless, the goal at the onset of the project was to highlight assets in Black-majority cities, which in and of themselves should be viewed as assets to our democracy. I aimed to push back against the harmful narrative, rooted in White supremacy, that Black people are deficits in need of fixing. And, finally, I set out to identify potential solutions that can be used in Black-majority cities to restore some of the value lost from racism.
I start with using my hometown as a case study of sorts, illuminating the dynamics of devaluation and how it throttles economic growth in geographic areas with high concentrations of Black people. By retracing my old high school cross-country training route, I illustrate in chapter 1, “Who Runs the City,” how Pittsburgh’s tech boom was spurred by common economic development practices that overlooked and ignored Black people and institutions worthy of investment, reifying structural inequality. Consequently, cities need help in identifying assets that have been devalued. To illustrate how research methods can be used to identify assets, in chapter 2, “A Father Forged in Detroit,” I show how racism lowers the prices of owner-occupied homes in Detroit’s Black neighborhoods, lessening past and current residents’ (including my father) abilities to climb the proverbial social ladder. If we can solve for devaluation by restoring value in our homes, we should be able to lift our communities and the people in them. In chapter 3, “Buy Back the Block,” I examine one man’s efforts to restore value through real estate development in the historic Black neighborhood of Ensley, which is in Birmingham, Alabama.
White and middle-class flight leaves many physical structures unoccupied, including school buildings, that are tactically placed to optimize a neighborhood’s access. Adding value to communities will require converting some of these vacant properties into organizations and firms that meet communities’ needs. Chapter 4, “A Different Kind of School,” examines one effort to convert my first school into a business incubator.
There will be mistakes in adding value to communities. In chapter 5, “The Apologies We Owe to Students and Teachers,” I show how my own efforts to reform schools devalued Black teachers of New Orleans. In chapter 6, “Having Babies like White People,” I return to family. The devaluation of property is really a manifestation of the debasement of Black people. Restoring value in our communities will require the expansion of options to make family, gaining reproductive justice rather than restricting it through family planning. I will show how social connections and reproductive justice literally make Black lives matter through an examination of racism, infant mortality, and surrogacy.
Restoring value in communities will require a legislative agenda delivered by the people we elect. Chapter 7, “For the Sake of America, Elect a Black Woman President,” highlights the Atlanta mayoral race to show how Black women voters and elected officials provide a vantage point that can unify communities in an era of fractured politics. In closing, I show in chapter 8 that, in spite of many efforts to remove Black culture from city landscapes like Washington, D.C., chocolate cities can’t be erased because our brilliant culture won’t allow it.
I work toward fixing systems instead of people. I can help my hometown forge a new path in the face of new challenges caused by devaluation. But I’m also creating a new path for my own development. Like many Black men, I directed my unresolved anger at people I should have loved instead. I do my best to atone for those actions throughout the text. However, I choose to keep some of my anger—an anger we all should have when our home, our hometown, is taken from us without a fair hearing—for this project. This time, I will direct my indignations toward biased policies instead of people.
1
Who Runs the City
In 1985, when pop stars convened to perform at Live Aid concerts around the world, singing “We Are the World” to raise awareness of starving populations in Africa, I decided to join the Wilkinsburg cross-country team. One of my team’s primary training routes