Two Books on the Inner City
Cultural Capitalby Paul Grant
Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen by David Hilfiker
Honky by Dalton Conley
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There is an ample supply of research on inner city American poverty, spanning academic fields from medicine, education and sociology, to business, ecology, and civil engineering. Thoughout the dialogue, there is a surprising consensus about causes and effects of ghettos. Some components of ghetto poverty are open for debate (like how much the poor could, but fail to, help themselves). But there is a lot of true knowledge out there on poverty that is nonetheless widely ignored by majority culture in North America. These two small volumes should be considered popularizations of sociology: 150-200 page, very readable, non-academic essays by European American specialists who are themselves highly educated about the inner city. As such, they are to be recommended to newcomers, especially white, to the topic.
Both books come from the authors' experiences of being members of the white, educated elite in isolated and impoverished ghetto neighborhoods. Honky is a coming-of-age memoir from a child of artists living in Harlem. As measured by income alone, Conley's parents were no different than their neighbors. The difference lay partially in race: Conley had an easier time switching classes to a better teacher than his black friends, and as a teenager had an easier time escaping police harassment. Still, some of Conley's friends were shot and killed, and his family was burgled. Some features of inner-city life afflict everyone.
But the real distinction lay in what Conley calls "cultural capital": something far more valuable than money. His parents were poor because of lifestyle choices. They were artists. But they still had the system at their disposal, and were able to expose their son to a larger world than the housing projects. Conley grew up assuming he would go to college, and he was taught how the world works. In other words, he had freedom from major ghetto pathologies - he had the road map out of the slums.
This freedom is also reflected in Urban Injustice, a short discussion of the politics, economics and social diseases that led to today's blighted ghettos. It's a different approach that arrives at a similar conclusion: inner-city poverty is closely related to class segregation, the antidote for which is not just political, but also cultural.
Urban Injustice is written by an M.D. named David Hilfiker, who as a young do-gooder moved to inner-city Washington DC. He was going to give those poor souls a "hand-up", but he soon discovered that most inner city poor are every bit as frugal, hard-working and honest as his friends from med school. Hilfiker discusses the old myth that the poor primarily have themselves to blame, deconstructing it by anecdote, analogy, and hard, cold numbers. As it turns out, our inner cities did not appear overnight. They developed in tandem with the Jim Crow segregation laws (which led to unequal services), the automobile (which freed up the middle classes to live and work in different neighborhoods), and the interstate highway system (which created rivers of asphalt that physically isolated many inner-city neighborhoods from places of employment).
Notably, the latter two are overall positive inventions: the automobile has brought immense improvements to the world's standards of living; and the highway system makes commerce much cheaper. The point is not that we should all go back to living in caves and rubbing sticks together to cook our meat. But rather, Hilfiker is explaining how morally neutral developments often have unintended social consequences. Hilfiker illustrates this point with a more tricky problem. The civil rights acts of the fifties and sixties, which abolished legal segregation in education and housing, actually helped make the ghettos worse, by facilitating a brain drain from the poor neighborhoods. Those who could get out, did. Minority businessmen, union workers and the educated were the ones who gained the most from Jim Crow's demise. And more power to them! Shouldn't anyone, who can provide safety and a future for their children, seriously consider it?
However, people were only moving out; nobody moved in, and the jobs left. During the seventies, when the American economy began to shift to a service economy, factories began to close in the inner-cities. This trend continues to this day. Today, it is nearly impossible to support a family without a high-school degree or higher. Conley contends that the flight of cultural capital from the inner city has shifted segregation away from race to class, but has kept the inner city in dire straits.
Hilfiker agrees, noting a few longitudinal studies of impoverished families who were given grants to move out of the ghetto. Though the transition to suburban life is usually a culture shock, the social infrastructures have helped immensely. Children who escaped the ghetto were far more likely to graduate and go to college than the erstwhile peers they left behind.
At the same time, white flight is still a reality. On average, European Americans feel most comfortable as a majority group in any given neighborhood. Most other groups - African Americans, Immigrants etc. - want to live in mixed neighborhoods. These two desires are contradictory, with the result of white Americans continually relocating after their neighborhoods reach a critical point of diversification. While white flight is beyond the scope of these two books, and accordingly of this essay, it should be noted that segregation did not end when the legal and formal foundations of it were removed in the civil rights era.
This is a bitter truth. It is bitter because it means that many of us have aided and abetted segregation without legally or formally working to maintain it. It means that many of our parents, who relocated to better school districts for our sake - indeed went to great lengths to provide safe and healthy lives for their children - did so at a cost to society. It is a bitter truth because there are no easy answers. The early civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King until the mid-sixties, thought segregation would end once the legal system was changed, and that all the attendant pathologies would dissipate. They were wrong, because they didn't realize the extent to which the sin of racism had its hand on the neck of this culture. Hilfiker does not have much hope. His diagnosis is that segregation will continue until European Americans become comfortable living with minorities, especially African Americans.
Hilfiker is reflecting a theme profoundly analyzed a few years back in Divided by Faith, a discussion of evangelical Christianity and the racial segregation of churches. Authors Emerson and Smith point out that monoculturally white churches tend to prosper and grow. People will drive twenty miles or more to go to a church with people like themselves. They won't go to a church down the street, which may share their spiritual values to a tee, but whose members look different or sing different.
Both Conley and Hilfiker (as well as Emerson and Smith) argue that segregation is more than aesthetics. That is, when people act on their aesthetical values (such as wanting to live in the country, or choosing a church because of style of music), important moral implications arise, that we daren't ignore. As Christians, we have a word for moral failures: sin. And we know that God takes sin more seriously than just about anything else in the human sphere. Therefore, we really need to investigate the impact on our neighbor of all the things we do.
This is not to say that mono-cultural neighborhoods are evil. But when Jesus asked the lawyer, in the parable of the good Samaritan, which of the characters was his neighbor, the lawyer was forced to acknowledge the humanity and brotherhood of someone unlike himself. In other words, when the Lord comes to judge, those of us counted as Jesus' friends will find many people alongside us, who could not afford to feed their children healthy food during their days on earth, but whose plight took place mere blocks from our homes. Why is this?
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