Persistent urban inequality

Race, segregation, and inequality — these are the major issues that metropolitan America needs to address, and hasn’t so far. But there is some good analytical work being done to allow us to better understand these processes — and therefore, possibly to alter the course we are on.

I heard an excellent talk a week or so ago by Myron Orfield of the University of Minnesota and the Metropolitan Area Research Corporation (MARC). Orfield is a national expert on the governmental and social processes affecting poverty, segregation, and schooling in the major metropolitan areas of the United States. At his talk at the University of Michigan he provided a series of map overlays for Minneapolis-St. Paul that demonstrated the coincidence of neighborhoods with high incidence of poverty, failing schools, high crime rates, and poor health performance. And, importantly, he highlighted some of the political processes through which school and district boundaries have been drawn in Minneapolis-St. Paul communities that have the fairly direct effect of sharpening the segregation of individual schools.

The same set of issues is addressed in this month’s issue of the Boston Review in a forum on “ending urban poverty.” Each of the contributions is very good, and especially interesting is an article by Patrick Sharkey with the title “The Inherited Ghetto.” Sharkey begins with a crucial and familiar point: that racial inequality has changed only very slightly since the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. The concentration of black poverty in central cities has not substantially improved over that period of time, and the inequalities associated with this segregation have continued. And the association between neighborhood, degree of segregation, and income and quality of life is very strong: children born into a poor and segregated neighborhood are likely to live as adults — in a poor and segregated neighborhood. Sharkey documents this statement on the basis of his analysis of the data provided the University of Michigan Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the first major statistical study of several generations of families in terms of residence, income, occupation, health, and other important variables. Using a computer simulation based on the two-generation data provided by the Panel Study, Sharkey indicates that it would take five generations for the descendants of a family from a poor, black neighborhood to have a normal expectation of living in a typical American neighborhood. (That’s one hundred years in round numbers.) In other words: the progress towards racial equality in urban America is so slow as to be virtually undetectable.

What are the reasons for this? That is Sharkey’s main question. One point that he makes is an important one for explaining the continuation of segregation in the forty years since the passage of the Fair Housing Act. This is the fact that the policy choices that have been made by federal and local authorities concerning housing patterns have more or less deliberately favored segregation by race. Beginning with the initial Fair Housing legislation — which was enacted without giving the Federal agencies the power of enforcement — both federal and state policies have reinforced segregation. As Sharkey notes, federal housing programs have subsidized the growth of largely white suburbs, while redlining and other credit-related restrictions have impeded the ability of black families to follow into these new suburban communities. The continuation of informal discrimination in the housing market (as evidenced by “testers” from fair housing agencies) further reinforces continuing segregation between inner-city black population and the suburban, mostly white population. Sharkey makes another very important point: the forms of disadvantage — economic, health, income, educational — that currently exist between black and white, poor and rich — are the result of at least fifty years of social accumulation. So we should be resolute in designing policies that will move the dial in the right direction — and then stick with those policies for a couple of generations. We should not expect that this accumulation of disadvantage will be reversed in a short time.

One other important part of Sharkey’s piece is his review of the results of several experiments in relocation: what happens when individual families are relocated into less segregated, less poor neighborhoods (the “Moving to Opportunity” program and the Gautreaux program in Chicago)? Stefanie DeLuca picks this topic up in her equally interesting article in the same issue, “Neighborhood Matters.”This topic is one of the most important issues of social justice that we face, and this forum is a great contribution to better thinking about the subject.

Privilege and race

I’ve heard a couple of speakers recently who offered an unusual degree of honesty in addressing issues of race in our society.

The most recent was a talk by Tim Wise at my university on “white privilege.” Tim is the author of several books, including White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son. Tim lectures quite a bit on race in America, and he doesn’t hold back.

The talk was outstanding, and Tim did a great job of connecting with the audience of students and faculty — over a hundred students and a handful of faculty. Tim’s message is that we need to refocus the way that we talk about racism and racial inequality and we need to recognize racial inequality as the structural fact that it is in America. If a set of social institutions — education, banking, employment, healthcare — have the effect of conferring disadvantages on some groups of people, then it is unavoidable that these institutions are conferring advantages or privilege on other groups of people. If African-Americans have substantially lower levels of health, at every level of income, this seems to imply that white Americans are “privileged” with respect to access to health care. This is what he means by “white privilege.” And his basic point is that privilege is pervasive in our society — along with its opposite, cultural, economic, and social disadvantage.

Tim also makes the point that it is crucial that we listen, really listen, to the voices of people who are the recipients of these entrenched disadvantages. Their perspectives are fundamentally different from those of racially privileged, economically advantaged upper-middle class Americans.

I also heard a pair of talks in Detroit recently by Tom Sugrue, a historian from the University of Pennsylvania, and Kurt Metzger, director of research at the United Way of Southeast Michigan. The panel was on the causes and effects of racial segregation in metro Detroit. Tom is the author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit and is a leading expert on the history of race in America. Kurt is recognized throughout metro Detroit as the most knowledgeable person around when it comes to the demography of southeast Michigan. The two talks made a powerful case for demonstrating how crucial the social mechanisms of racial separation are in the history of Detroit and the suburbs. And the consequences for all of southeast Michigan are severe — especially for the population of young African-American men and women whose opportunities are so limited by the existing social institutions supporting employment, education, and health. (Tom addresses some of these issues in a conversation he and I had that is posted on YouTube.)

The third great talk that I have heard in the past six months was by Ted Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. (Visit the LDF site for a bio.) Ted is absolutely eloquent and direct in talking about racial inequalities in our country. He is an unapologetic defender of affirmative action, on the ground that it is an entirely appropriate social mechanism for addressing the structural inequalities that the history of slavery, segregation, and discrimination have created in our country. (There is a good piece of video on YouTube featuring some of Ted’s ideas and views — Ted’s speech begins at 3:40 in the video.) Ted is an inspiring visionary and our country needs to hear his voice.

All three of these thinkers make the point that we need to find more space for honest, direct talk about the legacy of racism in our country. And that is certainly true.

Martin Luther King’s journey

Today we celebrate the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is easy enough to be discouraged about the current state of racial inequality in this country. We have not made nearly the progress on economic inequalities and inequalities of opportunity that seemed possible in 1966. But Dr. King was an optimistic man and a man who always looked for ways of moving forward. So I want to honor him today by reflecting on some of the difficult but real efforts that are underway today to prepare our society for a more racially just future. And examples can be found in my own city of Detroit.

I think first of a youth opportunity program that is having significant impact in Detroit. The program is called YouthVille. Located in a repurposed warehouse, YouthVille is filled with young people finding some of the resources and support they need to take charge of their lives — succeed in school, develop the confidence that they can achieve their dreams, and successfully negotiate the challenges of being a kid in a tough city. Young people from over 270 schools in the Detroit area have participated in programs at YouthVille, and the numbers are growing.

Next I think of an African-centered after-school program for middle and high school students, the Alkebu-lan Village. Founded by committed community activists and sustained by the daily efforts of these same dedicated men and women, the Village gives inner city kids a supportive and safe environment where they can develop their own dreams about the futures they want to achieve. The mission statement of the organization describes it as “an African-centered community-based organization committed to developing and nurturing an environment where families work together to build healthy minds, bodies and communities.” It is inspiring to spend time at Alkebu-lan Village and to witness the caring concern and commitment that these Detroiters give to their mission. The village provides tutoring and homework help, and it measurably improves the kids’ experience in school. It offers sports, dance, and music activities for the kids who attend, and it organizes summer camp experiences for inner-city kids. Throughout it gives all its kids a better chance at success. This is a community-based organization that has successfully harnessed the energies of a community of people in service to the futures of Detroit’s youth.

Finally, I think of CityYear Detroit and the wonderful team members and staff who are devoted to providing meaningful service to their community. CityYear exists in over a dozen cities throughout the country and, recently, South Africa. Its team members can be spotted in their red jackets, providing tutoring, establishing urban gardens, and helping to improve the lives of children and adults in the cities they serve. I have met quite a few team members and leaders in Detroit and elsewhere over the years, and their commitment and energy are inspiring. These young people, often inner city kids, are learning about team work, leadership, and service in ways that will affect them throughout their lives. And because CityYear is successful in recruiting a highly diverse group, each kid learns very deeply and personally about other people’s experiences in life. This is the kind of learning that universities haven’t yet succeeded in creating. But a year of service in CityYear (and other AmeriCorps programs) is transforming for almost every young person who does it. And the CityYear alums have a vison for their futures that we all can learn from.

So there are some compelling examples of people and organizations that are addressing the issues of poverty, race, and inequalities of opportunity that have proven so intractable. One thing that ties all three examples together is the ethic of community service that they reflect, and the determination by so many leaders and activists to live this comitment out. And there is inspiration here at every level — in the men and women who have dedicated their energies to create these organizations, and the young people who have gained such good values and skills within them. Let’s all find ways of joining in this important work. And in doing so, let’s notice that we’re helping with the work that Martin began.

Gradient of justice

Given that there is significant injustice in our society, and granted that we are a long ways from a society that establishes what Rawls called the circumstances of justice — can we at least have the confidence that we are moving in the right direction?

Some people would argue that our society is doing just that. They sometimes point to the fact of rising nutritional and health status in the poorest 40 percent of our population during a 50-year period, and they might say that the situation of institutionalized racism — and with it the circumstances of middle-class African-Americans — has also improved measurably in 50 years.

Unfortunately, these impressions are misleading. In fact, it is more likely the case that inequalities of income, wealth, and well-being have worsened in the past twenty years. Lower-middle income and poor people have the smallest share of the nation’s affluence that they have ever had. And many of the programs designed to provide a social safety net have been gutted or have disappeared altogether.

And on the racial justice side — if general social racism has diminished, the depth of racial inequality and lack of opportunity in large cities has almost certainly increased in thirty years. The lack of opportunity and hope that exists in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, or Oakland is truly staggering — and it is worsening. This wall of deprivation is drawn largely along racial lines. And all too often this impacted lack of opportunity leads to crime and violence.

So we don’t seem to be on a trajectory of general improvement when it comes to social justice. The myth of the “trickle-down society has turned out to be more trick than truth. The benefits of economic growth have not lifted the lower middle class. This growth has not dissolved the knot of urban poverty. The public is turning its back on public schools — surely one of the surest mechanisms of greater social justice over time. And we don’t seem to have a public commitment to the basic value of allowing all members of society to fully develop their talents. Even more disturbingly, we seem to be entering a period of time that will involve even greater economic anxiety. And anxious times seem to bring out the worst in people when it comes to competition for scarce resources and opportunities.

What we seem to need is a greater sense of community, a greater recognition of our inter-connectedness and inter-dependence, and a greater common commitment to making sure that our society and its policies work to improve the lot of all its citizens. But most regrettably — this sense of the strands of community is exactly what is most imperiled by the facts of current inequalities. It is difficult to maintain the strands of civic commitment to each other when fundamental inequalities separate us further and further.

So perhaps we ought to consider the unhappy possibility that our society may be inching towards the deepening chasm of inequality that characterizes South Africa, Mexico, or Brazil today. And if this is true, then the future is ominous.

A sense of justice

What does it take to get people truly engaged in a common purpose, joined with others in pursuit of a common cause?

I suppose there are numerous answers to this question — fear of impending danger (global warming), a sense of empathy at the suffering of others (Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami), a rational desire to gain a collective benefit, resentment of other people or groups, anger at the actions of the state or its officials. But the question on my mind right now is about the role of the sense of justice in people’s readiness to act collectively or politically.

I asked a group of students today to talk about their perceptions of “major social problems” in the United States today. This wasn’t part of a class, and it wasn’t a group of students who knew each other well. It was a very diverse group of young people from Detroit and the suburbs. But in spite of the fact that there wasn’t an organized setting of the problem, we had a good discussion that brought out some of the most fundamental issues of justice in our country today. They talked in very personal terms about poverty, inequality of opportunity, racism, hunger, lack of access to health care, and personal uncertainty about their futures. One young woman said to me, “There are hungry people on this campus — and there are caring people on the campus who help by making sure that food at campus events isn’t wasted.” These students tended to agree with each other that the worst sources of injustice are those that involve enduring inequalities of opportunities across generations.

I mention this conversation for several reasons. First, it illustrates the point that these young people have very developed intuitions about fairness and justice, and they have had very concrete experiences that inform their judgments. They have a sense of justice, and they have a strong ability to recognize and evaluate some of the unfair workings of our basic social institutions. It’s not a theoretical issue to them.

Second, there is a very palpable sense of a desire to do something about the social problems they see around them — to be engaged, to find organizations that make a difference. We talk a lot on our campus about the value of “student engagement” — these students want to be engaged, and sometimes the frustration is that there aren’t opportunities for engagement that can really promise to make a difference.

Third, there was in this discussion a very strong illustration of the value of “diversity” in American communities and on American university campuses. I mean this in two ways — first, the valuable contributions brought by the different life experiences of different people in the room. The perspectives and experiences that African-American students brought into this discussion was very different from that of their white suburban fellow students. But equally, the perspective that a returning woman student brought — her own story of going from a white middle-class life to a struggling life of near-poverty — added tremendously to the discussion. (This is a dimension of age diversity that you don’t often find on many university campuses.)

Moreover, every student in the room plainly recognized the value of a diverse discussion of these topics. The group was willing to talk honestly about their different experiences in white, black, and brown communities — and to value the fact that they were able to do so. There was a strong shared sense of the reality and importance of mutual respect, and an openness to learning from each other’s experiences.

So what does this show? In my eyes, it demonstrates two important facts. First, many young people have well-defined ideas about justice, fairness, and denied opportunities, and they care about these issues. They can figure out some of the ways in which some of our basic institutions assign benefits, burdens, and opportunities in very different ways to different groups — and they are offended. And second, this “knowledge” of injustice also has a motivational effect. They want to be mobilized around a project that can have some success in addressing some of these unjust inequalities. Their engagement can take many forms — excitement about a political candidate who is speaking of these issues, involvement in a tutoring program in an inner-city school, participation in a student organization that is campaigning for more scholarships for poor people.

So this experience with a dozen students at a public university in the midwest goes against the grain of those who talk about the current youth generation as being apolitical, disengaged, and unmoved by injustice. Isn’t there something in this story that lays a basis for some hope about the feasibility of a more activist politics in the America of the future?

Why affirmative action?

Since the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision in 1978, universities that practice affirmative action in admissions have premised their case on the educational benefits that accrue to all students from a diverse student body. This is the heart of the successful University of Michigan defense of affirmative action in the Supreme Court in 2003. What has been largely lost in this debate is any explicit effort to assert that there are fundamental reasons of social justice that should require American social institutions to practice some form of affirmative action. And yet those reasons are if anything more immediate, more fact-driven, and more compelling than the “indirect educational benefits” justification.

Three arguments based on social justice are particularly important. First is the history of slavery and racial discrimination in this country, a history that has persistent consequences up to the present day. Consider the premise that current educational and economic disadvantages for African Americans as a population derive chiefly from these historical facts about slavery and past discrimination — facts that are manifestly unjust. Is it not then apparent that justice requires concrete social actions and policies today that have the effect of reducing and eliminating current-day disadvantages that derive fairly obviously from past injustice? And given that those historical disadvantages create exactly the current educational deficits that make further educational progress more difficult, is it not clear that there need to be processes in universities to assist in increasing the percentage of African American students who have benefited from high-quality university education? This line of thought creates a positive obligation for current institutions to “affirmatively” work to overcome current inequalities created by past injustice. The tool of affirmative action is one such tool, and justice requires that it be used.

Second, the broad conception of equality of opportunity discussed in a prior posting has special relevance to the case for affirmative action. If various sub-populations in a society have less than full access to current opportunities because of substantial structural inequalities of access to critical resources in the past, then it is very convincing that society needs to find tools for leveling out these opportunities. Access to excellent higher education is fundamental to achieving decent life prospects. Again, affirmative action is such a tool and should be available.

Finally, these two arguments converge when we consider that the current educational disadvantages suffered by young African American students themselves derive from current social arrangements that are deeply discriminatory. The fact that current racial structures impose very different life prospects on different groups gives rise to a pressing non-historical reason for “affirmatively” addressing these inequalities. Unjust racial inequality of outcome is not simply a fact about the past; it is a fact about the present. The racism associated with the fact that inner-city (largely minority) schools are underfunded and substantially inferior to suburban (majority white) schools in providing educational opportunities to the children they serve, indicates a powerful basis for concluding that affirmative action programs need to be available as a tool. Affirmative action can help redress current injustice along racial lines.

So there are powerful reasons based in facts about historical injustice, equality of opportunity, and the injustice of the current distribution of educational resources, that all lead to the conclusion that affirmative action policies should be lawful and available to large social institutions, especially in education and employment. The fact that the terms of debate have been limited in such a way as to simply exclude these considerations of past and present racial injustice is itself an obstacle to our society’s successfully addressing these injustices.

Real equality of opportunity?

Let’s say that our basic moral commitment is the idea that every human being ought to have real equality of opportunity as he/she pursues a life plan. What does this mean, in detail, and what implications does it have for social justice?

Equality of opportunity can be construed in broader or more narrow ways. Narrowly, we might say that persons have equality of opportunity if they are considered for positions, benefits, and burdens without respect to “personal” characteristics — their family origin, race, age, ethnicity, health status, etc. Only the objective and person-independent features that are relevant to performance ought to be considered in selecting people for opportunities. (This is how equality of opportunity is construed in employment.) Does this narrow construction really capture the moral value of equality of opportunity, however? Evidently it does not, because it ignores the history of how various individuals came to have the objective characteristics and talents they possess today. If two candidates for firefighter are compared on the basis of their current physical fitness, but one had a childhood of normal nutrition and the second was chronically malnourished, then we would be reluctant to say that they are currently enjoying equality of opportunity. The choice between them today depends on objective differences of fitness for the job; but the differences that currently exist were not themselves created through a fair process.

So we should broaden the definition of equality of opportunity and require that each individual should have had access to the resources normally necessary for the full development of his/her capacities as a human being. These would include decent nutrition, access to health care, and access to education of comparable quality. And we might even add in an empirical assumption, that there is a range of levels of provisioning of these social goods within which any individual has the possibility of achieving high levels of performance. That is, it might be maintained that there is a (reasonably high) level of provisioning of health care, nutrition, and education that is “good enough” to permit the individual to have a fair chance to compete for opportunities in a ” narrow equality of opportunity” environment.

If we take this somewhat broader view of equality of opportunity, then we are immediately forced to consider the workings of basic social institutions and the distributive consequences they have for rich and poor. Do the resources available to the poor exceed the minimum level of provisioning specified above? Or are significant numbers of the poor sufficiently disadvantaged in their current performance by the history of unequal access to resources, that today’s competition fails the broader “equality of opportunity” criterion?

In many of the instances we can observe today the answer to the final question is “yes”. Children who have attended under-resourced elementary schools and high schools have substantial deficits in terms of high-end cognitive achievement — so a “neutral” competition between them and better-educated children fails the test. Children whose nutritional status and health status is sufficiently compromised that their cognitive development has been impaired, are equally unfairly treated when subjected to “narrow equality of opportunity” processes. And this has immediate implications for the social inequalities that exist in American society between rich and poor, urban and suburban, white and black, and rural and urban.

When we shift the focus to international inequalities across levels of human development, we come to a similar conclusion: because of gross inequalities in the availability of resources during the process of human development for children and young people, we cannot conclude that contemporary distributions of positions, opportunities, and burdens are the fair result of institutions embodying equality of opportunity. Nutrition, health, and education are factors that are very unequally distributed in the country and the world today; and the bottom end of the distribution falls well below any reasonable standard of “good enough” for full human functioning.

The implication, then, is a strong one: if we think that fair equality of opportunity is a compelling moral principle, then we also must conclude that a very significant reform of some basic social institutions must occur if we are to be able to assert that contemporary society is just.