"The Long Shadow": Race, Class and Privilege in Baltimore (4/5)

This discussion is good enough that I don't have to say much. This should be an eye-opening discussion for those people who think racism & discrimination no longer exist in 21st century North America or anywhere else in the developed world. Racism & discrimination in every sphere of life is alive, & being vigorously practiced, all over the West / Global North / developed world.

As per the discussion, social mobility is restricted, or at least, severely handicapped, due to this discrimination, & the general public incorrectly thinks that African-Americans, or every non-white / non-Caucasian, is poor or destitute because he / she is lazy or does not know how to find jobs. It's not that black & white.

Non-whites / non-Caucasians are hard-working & studious, & want to find gainful employment, but they are being restricted from doing such. But they & their families need that money, too, so they get involved in criminal endeavours, for which, society treats them very harshly. Severe punishment is not going to make the problem of people turning towards crimes, but eliminating the root cause will solve that problem, & the root cause is racism & discrimination in the society.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FBcnrDf_l0

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: Out of the 790 Baltimore children you surveyed in 1982, 33 moved from low-income to high-income brackets. What was different about them? ...

KARL ALEXANDER, JOHN DEWEY PROF. OF SOCIOLOGY, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIV.: Well, let me say, just to clarify, that's not income. The way we classify their families and themselves as young adults, it's socioeconomic standing, which is a combination of income, occupational status, and level of education. So it's all three of those things combined. And that movement up, what we do is we classify families as low, medium, and high in terms of their socioeconomic standing, and we do that for the parents and we do it for the children. And then we cross-classify the two so we can see how many children went from low to high, how many children went from high to low, and so forth.

And so, yes, we find that just 33 of the children who grew up in lower socioeconomic status families made it into the higher realm as adults. The number of children who started out in favorable family circumstances and dropped to the lowest level, there's just nine of them. So there is upward mobility, there's downward mobility, but that's relatively infrequent ... .

So there's children who moved up from the lowest, from the bottom category to the highest of our classification. That was 9.5% ... . The ones who dropped down from high to low was just 6.3% of the group that started out high fell to the lowest category. ... But that 9.5% moving from low to high is contrasted with 41% who started low and stayed low, so when there's a fourfold difference in the likelihood of moving up from lower origins to the high destinations. The 6.5% who started out high and dropped low, that's against 50% who started high and stayed high. So that's more than almost a tenfold difference.

So ... that actually does a good job of kind of capturing the whole experience globally over the span of years, 'cause it anchors children in where they started in life in terms of their family conditions and then compares it to where they wound up in life in terms of their own conditions as young adults. And the predominant tendency is to stay where you started. Some people move up, some people drop down, but a predominant tendency is to stay where you started. And that's what really the "long shadow" imagery is intended to convey. Economists that look at these mobility patterns, they call it stickiness at the extreme. You know, you're kind of stuck where you started out.

How did the people move up who did make it out? ... the stories are so different one from the other it's hard to generalize. But some did it by being successful in school, ... , the way your parents probably told you to do it and the way my parents taught me to do it, ... , stay the course, study hard, come to school prepared, and do what your teachers tell you, and you'll be successful. Some of them did that. ... We have others who have moved up by being entrepreneurial, doing well without the advantages of a college degree. ...

So the paths to moving up--now, there are different ways you can do this, and many of our study participants have been quite resourceful and energetic and entrepreneurial and have managed to rise above. But, again, the predominant tendency, the pattern, is to not move up. If you start out in a disadvantaged family, the likelihood is that you're going to be in a disadvantaged family yourself as a young adult. So there's movement up, but there's also stability, and the stability in terms of your position in the stratification, hierarchy ... . Stability is the norm. Most people stay where they start. And the ones who break out and are successful, we applaud them, and it's great to see that, but you'd like to have it from more than just 9.5%. You'd like it to be ... 100% if you could. But short of that, you know, something. You'd like to see greater opportunities for children to get ahead in life who start out kind of behind.

NOOR: ... So, recently Paul Ryan, he said that inner-city men are lazy; and that's why they're not successful, that's why they don't have jobs: they don't want to get jobs. And what has happened since you started this study is that you've had under the Reagan administration a massive amount of cuts in social spending, cuts in social security and welfare in the Clinton years, and the escalation of the war on drugs, mass incarceration. What is your response to Paul Ryan? What are your thoughts? And this is also a common idea throughout society.

ALEXANDER: Yeah, no, it is a common idea. It's widely held. And I think it's just--it's certainly too superficial, and it might be just out-and-out wrong. Certainly as a blanket statement, broadly applicable, it's certainly wrong. We certainly don't see this in the experiences of our group. They try to get ahead by getting additional education, and there are just obstacles that stand in their way, so they're unsuccessful. They try to find jobs, but they don't have family members or neighbors or ins with the boss that can help them get into the door.
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... I think, as a social social concern, I think much attention is focused on the limited opportunities for African Americans. But it's absolutely wrong about all inner-city people, 'cause one of the things that our book establishes is that the whites of lower background have are much more successful in terms of finding stable and well-paying employment, good-paying employment, much more successful than African-American counterparts and the women of either--, black and white.

... it's clear that they, African-American men in particular, lag behind, and it's challenging for them. And then their challenges kind of trickle down to affect women who are trying to establish lives and take care of families, many of them on their own. The national literature says that African-American men are more likely to apply for jobs than are white men when they need them and are eager to find employment. That much is clear.

It's also clear that the stain of a criminal justice record is a greater impediment for African-American men [than] for white men. We see that in our research, but it's also seen nationally.

So I think there's a relevant history here that we haven't even touched upon. But it has to do with the way opportunities open up in the kind of blue-collar workforce. And it goes back to the World War II industrial era, industrial boom. So what it wasn't too long ago, I think, that Baltimore was the economic engine or powerhouse of the Maryland economy. It's easy to forget, but--because we've been mired in these difficult times for decades now, but in the World War II era, when during the height of the war mobilization--Beth Steel, for example, was the largest steel mill in the world, with 35,000 workers, and now it's being sold off for scrap. That was a time--some of the literature refers to this as the moment of the blue-collar elite, where you could find steady work and high-paying work on the assembly lines, in the steel mills, on the docks. So there was a lot of good, steady work to be found.

But Baltimore was highly segregated during that time, and most of that good, steady work was available to blue-collar whites and not blue-collar African Americans, who were relegated to the least-promising kind of employment. They did all the dirty work and the nonskilled laboring work. And so we're talking three generations back. We're talking about the--our study, youngsters' grandparents.

Also there were restrictive residential covenants. So the white working-class in Baltimore were substantially isolated in residential enclaves. If you know the area locally, the first thing you think about when you--what comes to mind when you think about whites in Baltimore are the upscale neighborhoods that are exclusive--the Roland Parks, the Guilfords, the Homelands. But in point of fact, there are working-class, white working-class neighborhoods scattered throughout the city that also are long-standing and very much insulated by residential segregation--Curtis Bay, Brooklyn, and there's over on the west side (near the B&O Railroad Museum) Pigtown, Sandtown, low-income working-class, white working-class neighborhoods that are insulated in terms of being racially segregated.

So you put these two things together in a historic perspective, you've got really a booming industry of high-skill, high-pay blue-collar work and whites having access, greater access to that kind of employment, and you have segregated residential neighborhoods, where people, blacks and whites, don't mix and mingle. They didn't back then, and they don't do much better today. White parents who have social networks through those in the workplace or in the neighborhood, a lot of employment in the non-college workforce is word-of-mouth, ... recommendation from a friend or a cousin or a neighbor that can help open doors. And working-class whites are much better able to provide those opportunities for their children than are African Americans, than are working-class African-American parents.

So what happens is, in the historic context, you see--in the book, we quote a sociologist by the name of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. He's a sociologist at Duke University. And here's the quote. It says, the racial practices and mechanisms that have kept blacks subordinated have changed from overtly and eminently racist to covert and indirectly racist.

So I think this history is where the overtly and eminently racist practices come into play that excluded African-Americans from high-wage work, blue-collar work, and that excluded them from neighborhoods where they could develop social contacts that would be helpful to their children. That's 50 years ago. But if you fast-forward to today, you still have these same isolated neighborhoods, and you still have word-of-mouth hiring for these kinds of--on the construction sites and whatnot. And so white parents are better able to help their children get this kind of work. And they do it. They do it.

I'm going to kind of in a very roundabout way get back to your Paul Ryan quote. The white guys are working hard and doing rather well, inner-city white guys working hard and doing rather well. Because they have these network advantages through their parents, relatives, and friends, they can get into this kind of work. And they grew up with it. ... if your father was an auto mechanic, you're helping him. If he's an electrician, a small-jobber, you're on the job with him. So you get worked in that way. African Americans by and large don't have those opportunities and that access.

But the African Americans that we know through our project are also highly motivated and willing to work hard. But they have more impediments, maybe more barriers in the way that keep them from finding, realizing the same kinds of success that the lower income background whites realize. And so I'm very dismissive of that kind of attitude about inner-city young people, African-American or white or/and white. It just doesn't ring true. It doesn't resonate with what we've seen in the experiences of our children growing up, and it doesn't resonate in terms of what I know of the broader literature that speaks to these very same kinds of issues.

The Resegregation of American schools

I used to, & still do, love TheRealNews network. I used to post their stories & my thoughts on their stories on my personal Facebook page, but since last year, when I started this blog, I haven't been able to go through any of the stories of TheRealNews network. But now, I am finally going through them.

Anyway, this news story / analysis didn't surprise me that much. The developed / Western world is becoming that much racist, & in general, discrimination of all kinds are increasing. Now, this story only explores how the American schools are re-segregating students based on skin colour. But, this re-segregation, & the story alludes to it a little bit, is symptomatic of larger & deep-seated socioeconomic problem.

That problem is centuries old. That problem is ingrained in the minds of leaders, & the general public, of the Western world. The general public is not generally racist or discriminatory but it discriminates unconsciously. The white leaders & a large proportion of the general public, who is white, think they are superior to other races.

Let me show this with an example. Let's take the example of a segregated school &, as the story explains below, how adversely it impacts a child of a minority or discriminated public.

When a poor African child studies in a segregated school, he/she is pretty much slated to be poor all his/her life. Reason being is that poor people of all walks of life, with all different skin colours, enroll their kids in these urban schools. These schools lack sufficient funding from government. Even if they are getting funding from governments, which are usually insufficient, they have parents with such socioeconomic backgrouds that these schools cannot even fundraise on their own. The parents of these poor students then grow up & make friends which are going through similar situations; homelessness, poverty, drugs, gangs, crime, broken families, etc.

Even if a child goes through all these social problems, which are going around him / her, unscathed, he / she graduates from a university or college but lacks those vital connections, which can land him / her in a job from where he / she can meaningfully improve his / her future.

All the while, white or wealthy children of other races, which are usually not that many, attend schools which have more than enough resources to give them a "complete" education & prepare them for a good, & perhaps even private, universities, where they themselves & their parents make those vital connections, from where they can land those financially-rewarding jobs & careers.

That's how the wealth & achievement gap starts to appear & keeps widening. And the cycle, or history, repeats itself & it goes around again with their children.

That's the same case with immigrants & their children in the Western world. African populations in Western world came to these countries by force, but immigrants were shown a world where, if they themselves won't be able to achieve a good life, then at least, their children will. That dream is generally coming apart for most children of the immigrants. Why people immigrate & how the West is complicit in that regard, too, is a topic for another blog post & has been blogged earlier.

Good / financially rewarding jobs are going to the wealthy children because of their own & their parents' connections. Of course, the well-connected rich parents can easily pass down their rolodex or connection lists to their children. Some prime examples are current Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, using his father's vital connections to eventually become a leader of a country, or the Bushes, Clintons, Obamas, & multiple other children of the politicians becoming politicians themselves, with the help of their parents' connections or children of famous celebrities becoming celebrities themselves. Whenever I come across a personality who is successful, I first go through his / her past & try to find that one piece of connection that must have created that first big opportunity for them. I usually find one easily. Nowadays, there are very few people in this world who get to the top without anyone's help, whatsoever.

So that dream or expectation of achieving greatness with education when never materializes hurts the children a lot. Hence, those children, then lash out at the society through violence, because that's the only method they know how to vent their frustration at the injustice & false dreams / promises of the society. That violence can be in the form of being involved with trafficking of all kinds, big or small crimes, or even moving to another country to join terrorist groups like ISIS or Boko Haram.

So, as we can see, that the impact of discrimination is huge. I always say that slavery / serfdom hasn't actually died, yet. It has merely taken a different shape. White people, all over the world, are still at the top, for example, if you go visit Dubai, you will find all the rich & glamourous downtown Dubai residences are taken up by wealthy white people from Europe, UK, Canada, US, & Australia. Of course, they are living in those expensive residences with the help of big fat tax-free paycheques they are getting because of their high & influential positions in companies over there. Immigration, or even refugee asylum, in the West is due to the fact that these Western countries need workers for the jobs for which their own white populations is voluntarily unavailable, for example, for agricultural work.

So, this discrimination starts from segregated school & go all the way up to employment, & immigration in the public arena. Consequences of this discrimination are one of the worst but governments don't want to do anything substantive because this discrimination on all levels is all planned & not an effect of unplanned & haphazard policy making.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0f0jyvdl98

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: There's a brand new story out detailing how one of desegregation's success stories in the South has become one of the nation's most racially & economically segregated schools. Today, a third of black students attend schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, that look like the 60-year-old Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that said separate schools for black & white students is unequal never happened.

Writing for ProPublica, Nikole Hannah-Jones writes, quote:

"Tuscaloosa's school resegregation--among the most extensive in the country--is a story of city financial interests, secret meetings, & angry public votes. It is a story shaped by racial politics & a consuming fear of white flight. It was facilitated, to some extent, by the city's black elites. And it was blessed by a US Department of Justice no longer committed to fighting for the civil-rights aims it had once championed."
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NOOR: So, Nikole, you really get into this story by talking about Central High in Tuscaloosa. It was an all-white school before Brown v. Board of Education. It was desegregated over ... a fairly decent, long period of time, & it became, when it was desegregated, one of the top schools in the whole state. Tell us the story of how it went from being desegregated to re-segregated now & what the impact has been on the students.

NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES, REPORTER, PROPUBLICA: Well, Central High School was actually created by a federal court order. Before Central existed--came to existence in 1979, there were two high schools in Tuscaloosa. One had been the historic black high school, & one had been the historic white high school. And even in 1979, 25 years after Brown v. Board, they were still segregated. So a federal judge ordered the merger of the two high schools into one, & they created Central High School.

So Central High School became a city-wide high school, meaning any public high school in the city, no matter their race, no matter where they lived, all went to the same school. And it became a true powerhouse in the state. It was the second-largest high school in the state. It was a school that swept up academic competitions, math competitions, just as easily as athletic competitions. And it really became the pride of the town & kind of a story of how integration in the South could be successful.

But what happened is there were white parents who had been turned off by desegregation. And as we've seen across the country, there was white flight from the school district. And city officials decided that the court order that had created this school was the problem & that they needed to break this school apart in order to bring white parents back to the district. So in 2000, when a federal judge dismissed Tuscaloosa from its federal desegregation order, immediately the school board voted to break apart Central High School. It created three new high schools, & it turned Central High School into a 100% black, almost entirely poor high school.

NOOR: And so talk about what that impact is for the students that go there.

HANNAH-JONES: Well, I think, one, we should make it clear that black kids don't have to sit with white kids in order to learn. But what we also know is never in the history of this country has separate been made equal. So, in Tuscaloosa, once these kids were separated off from the rest of the kids in the district, they were then kind of ignored. These kids spend their entire education, starting in kindergarten through graduation, in entirely segregated schools. These schools were once called the dumping ground for bad teachers. A teacher could be let go from a school that was an integrated school & could be hired on to work at Central or the other all-black schools in Tuscaloosa. Or, until last year, Central High School didn't even offer physics to the students. There were many years where it didn't offer advanced placement courses. So the most integrated high school in the city offered 12. So these kids were not given the same education opportunity as other kids, & they suffered for it.

NOOR: And this story of resegregation is not just happening at Central High or Tuscaloosa; it's really happening all over the South. Talk about its broader impacts.

HANNAH-JONES: Okay. I mean, first I think we should note that the reason that I focus on the South was in 1954 the South was completely segregated, & it was the most segregated part of the country, but because of these court orders, by the early '70s the South had become the most integrated part of the country, far more integrated than the Northeast or the Midwest, & it actually remains the most integrated part of the country. So I wrote about the South because the South has the most to lose. It educates more black students than anywhere else in the country. And because it had actually desegregated, where, as we know, many northern cities never have, this is the one place we got traction.

And what we're seeing is, as hundreds of school districts have been released from their court orders to integrate in the last 10 to 20 years. And as they release, within a few years these districts almost always start to take actions that resegregate black students. And so we're seeing a rise in the number of black students that are attending intensely segregated schools, which are schools that are less than 10% white. And a large number of students, black students, are now attending what some scholars call apartheid schools. And those are schools that are 1% or less white. And as a result, we're seeing the achievement gap that had started closing during the height of desegregation has widened, & it has remained wide.

NOOR: And as you mention in your story, this is not limited to the South. In fact, the Northeast has a really high number of schools. And according to a new report out by the UCLA's Civil Rights Project, it's actually New York State & New York City itself that has the highest number of these apartheid schools that you just mentioned. And I worked at a Museum in New York & I taught at public schools across New York City, & it'd be an ordinary experience for me for one day, for example, to teach in the upper West side, often children of investment bankers, people that worked on Wall Street, very wealthy, & the next day I'd teach at a school in West Harlem, just a few miles away, where all the families there were African-American & lived in the projects. And you could see the resources were different. In New York City each school gets the same amount of funding, but for example, the schools in the Upper West Side, the parents of those students would raise $1 million every year for extra resources & extra funding, & even extra teachers. So I would teach kids as young as kindergarten, but then all the way up to high school & college, & you could see what the long-term impact of the lack of resources & the isolation & segregation are.

HANNAH-JONES: Absolutely. And I think even outside of additional funding that these schools are able to raise, you have to look at--districts make very clear which students they prize, & those students tend to be middle-class students, & they also tend to be white students, I think largely because people believe that their parents are more influential in the community.

So what happens is black schools & Latino schools, not just in terms of additional resources, but they don't get the same quality of teachers. They tend to get the least experienced teachers. For instance, I live in Bedford-Stuyvesant & Brooklyn, which is an almost entirely black neighborhood, & there's not a single talented & gifted program in the schools in my neighborhood. So these kids aren't even getting access to the same types of courses, the same types of rigor. And those are resources that school officials are providing, & it has nothing to do with the wealth of parents.

NOOR: Right. And ever since No Child Left Behind, & now Race to the Top, teachers in schools are evaluated by their student performance. And we know that the biggest predictor of student performance is your socioeconomic background, so there's no incentive for teachers to really teach in the most challenging schools, because they know that they'll be held accountable for their students' performance.

HANNAH-JONES: That's right. Teachers will be penalized for the way that school districts have allowed high poverty to be concentrated in certain schools. So there is a disincentive. That's why you tend to see young teachers right out of college teaching in these schools. And once they get experience, they move on to more integrated schools.

NOOR: But what's being done in places like Alabama, & even in New York City, to challenge these policies, if anything? And do you see any hope of re-segregating these schools? You know, we're talking about 60 years after Brown v. Board of Education.

HANNAH-JONES: I mean, to be honest, very little, very little is being done. I think we've seen very little national will to deal with this issue. Even President Obama, while the administration says that they support integration, if you look into how they fund school, they offer no financial incentive & really no larger incentive for districts to voluntarily integrate. And, in fact, some of the biggest incentives are for charter schools, which, of course, research shows in many places are more segregated than traditional public schools.

So I think we don't have a lot of will about this. I think we're still trying to make separate equal. That's what No Child Left Behind does, that's what Race to the Top does, is it tries to say, okay, we have these high-poverty black & Latino schools, let's bring them up to par, instead of doing what everyone knows can have a great impact on achievement, which is: why don't you break up the racial & economic isolation of these schools? But we're not really willing to talk about that.

NOOR: Worth mentioning: all these policies are supported by Democrats & Republicans.

HANNAH-JONES: That's right.