Fall/Winter 2000
Message from Executive Director

Editor's Note: On Oct. 19, 1999, john powell gave a lecture at the University of Minnesota School of Law to commemorate his appointment as the Marvin J. Sonosky Professor of Law and Public Policy. Sonosky was a 1932 graduate of the Law School and a distinguished attorney in Washington, D.C. He successfully represented Native American tribes in their efforts to obtain fair and equitable treatment from the federal government. Below is an abbreviated version of Dr. powell's remarks.

The debate about the causes of racial segregation and racialized concentrated poverty continues. Is it class or race that is primarily responsible for perpetuating racial segregation associated with concentrated poverty?

We must recognize that economic and racial considerations are inseparable. Racial dynamics are now played out more frequently in the economic arena than they have been historically because much of the explicit political and social racial subordination that dominated in the Jim Crow era is now illegal. Researcher Myron Orfield has found in his studies of large metropolitan regions throughout the country that when middle-class blacks move to suburbs, the area quickly becomes unstable because whites move in the opposite direction, to suburbs further out or to suburbs on the other side of a region.
This dynamic is playing out in the Twin Cities area, demonstrating that race - not just class - remains a significant factor in segregative patterns. Race plays a significant role in creating and maintaining fragmented metropolitan regions through urban sprawl and racialized concentrated poverty.

While this idea is getting attention from urban activists of color, the epicenter of the anti-sprawl debate remains the suburbs, where race and social justice issues are seldom, if ever, mentioned.

I have argued that one of the central forces behind the sprawl explosion is whites' aversion to blacks, which is supported and reinforced by large institutions such as the federal government, the real estate industry, the banking industry, and state and local zoning boards.

Government participation in racial segregation has been well documented. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) was created by the federal government in 1933 to bolster the construction industry and promote home ownership. HOLC was responsible for instituting "redlining," a neighborhood mortgage rating system that undervalued homes in neighborhoods with racial minorities. The lowest rated areas were "redlined" meaning they were considered too high-risk for mortgage assistance.

"Residential Security Maps" or "redlining maps" that HOLC developed were passed on to private lenders, where the maps were used to inform decisions about high-risk areas and were used as models for private lenders' own discriminatory risk assessments.

The Federal Housing Administration and Veteran's Administration used the HOLC rating system to guide their own mortgage practices. This was a significant influence in segregative housing patterns because FHA and VA home loans reshaped the residential housing patterns of the United States and pumped millions of dollars into housing during the postwar era. The FHA and VA loans have been called one of the most influential forces in the suburbanization of our metropolitan areas.

Biased intent of 'local control'

"Local control" has been used to justify the segregated and fragmented jurisdictional structure of sprawl. It is the primary enforcement mechanism for racially exclusionary practices, and it is a legal method of ensuring racial subordination under current federal law. Two areas of particular significance in the "local control" movement are land-use practices (or exclusionary zoning) and protection of local control
over education.

School desegregation litigation illustrates how white suburbanization under the concept of "local control" has undermined the civil rights movement. Despite almost 50 years of litigation since Brown, most black, and an increasing number of Latino children, attend racially and economically segregated schools in areas that have supposedly been desegregated under federal law.

One of the most important cases for creating precedents for this was the Milliken case. The Supreme Court, basing its decision on the importance of local control, would not allow a lower court to order a desegregation remedy for Detroit's discriminatory school district that included Detroit's suburbs. The court held that the suburban districts could not be incorporated into the desegregation remedy because they had not been found to intentionally segregate their districts.

The highest court ignored the claim that a segregated housing market on a jurisdictional level was causing inter-district school segregation. Instead, the court held that local control of schools was more important than providing a remedy for segregation in Detroit area schools.

Milliken sent a message to whites that neighborhood-level segregation within the city would not be acceptable, but the suburbs would be a safe haven from desegregation. And the message to blacks was that there were limits to how far the court would go to achieve racial justice, and those limits very closely matched the city limits.
This white suburban wall began to crack for middle-income blacks after passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Middle-income blacks have begun to move to the suburbs in record numbers. However, they are often resegregated in the suburbs and remain isolated from the more powerful white suburbs that still capture most of the opportunities and resources.

Low-income people of color have been consigned to resource depleted cities - isolated from the opportunities that brought blacks to the North 50 years ago. This isolation has caused an explosion of racialized concentrated poverty at the urban core. Growth in black and brown concentrated poverty at the urban core is almost always associated with white, upper middle-class, fragmented sprawl at the edge of the region.

Racial subordination has taken on a different form. Through the mechanisms of metropolitan fragmentation and sprawl, blacks have again been subordinated socially, politically, and economically. By racializing space through the spatial isolation of blacks and other minorities, we have achieved many of the negative racial conditions formally held in place with Jim Crow law, thus frustrating the civil rights goals of the 50s and 60s.

Fragmentation and sprawl may be the most important impediments to racial justice as we approach the millennium.

Social justice advocates must weigh in on sprawl debate

The fact that it has become a national concern for environmentalists, as well as land-use planners, provides a ripe opportunity to weigh in on this national discussion, especially since suburban voters have demonstrated growing hostility toward sprawl in the last election.

So, why have civil rights and social justice advocates remained largely absent from this growing anti-sprawl movement? They fear diluting minority political power and losing cultural identity. While both of these are legitimate concerns, they do not justify inaction in addressing fragmentation.

The social justice community must frame these issues from a civil rights perspective, ensuring that racial and ethnic minorities have real access to both shape and partake of opportunity structures in our society. It is hard to imagine an effective civil rights movement that promotes racial justice and addresses the negative consequences of concentrated poverty without addressing the political fragmentation associated with sprawl.

As history has demonstrated, racial subordination mutates. So I am not suggesting that by simply addressing fragmentation and sprawl we will achieve racial justice. However, without addressing these issues it is highly unlikely that we will make much progress toward that goal.

National research on school integration to be released in May

IRP recently completed its Educational Integration Initiatives Project (EIIP), an interdisciplinary research study funded by the Joyce Foundation. The EIIP seeks to inform integration discourse by focusing on those who are most impacted by it - students.

The study captures the experiences of students and, to a lesser extent, teachers and administrators, by relating their experiences through their own words. The context surrounding such experiences is presented through an examination of legal and policy history, public discourse, school curricula, student placement, academic achievement, and student demographics.

The goal of the project was to explore whether the racial makeup, policies and practices of schools affect the educational experiences of students of color. This was accomplished through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research elements.

The heart of the research was interviews with students of varying backgrounds from 10 schools in six major metropolitan areas: Chicago, Ill.; Cleveland, Ohio; Louisville, Ky.; Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minn.; the San Francisco Bay area, Calif.; and Washington, D.C.

Each of the schools was placed within a spectrum that moves from segregation to desegregation (schools with a numerical balance of racial groups) to integration (schools that are numerically balanced and have implemented reforms designed to ensure true integration in classrooms and throughout the school as a whole).

Research indicates that racially segregated schools and school districts are almost always economically segregated as well. Concentrated poverty and racial isolation combine to create obstacles to successful educational outcomes.

Research also indicates that the implementation, or lack thereof, of school policies and practices such as multicultural curricula, small school and class size, and teacher investment, has a significant impact on educational outcomes. Indeed racial balance, detracking, staff diversity, interwoven multicultural curriculum, and other fundamental structural changes are vital ingredients of true integration.

The EIIP found that desegregated schools lacked many of the positive characteristics of an integrated environment. The study also found that students are often segregated within a school through ability grouping and that little attention was paid to developing a multicultural curriculum.

However, several of the segregated schools had implemented practices that addressed curriculum, environment, and other student needs, in an attempt to mitigate the detrimental impact of segregation and poverty. In virtually all of the schools, students were very much aware of race issues, generally valued diversity and expressed interest in a multicultural curriculum.

IRP will release a report detailing the findings of the EIIP this spring. The report was produced by IRP staff under the direction of IRP researcher Meg Hatlen and director john powell. Information about the report and other events related to the EIIP and school reform will be available on our Web site at www1.umn.edu/irp.

IRP is currently working on a civil rights project aimed at reducing racial bias in the criminal justice system. The projects purpose is to document and evaluate current anti-racial bias (ARB) strategies and improve their coordination and implementation, both locally and nationally. Such strategies include monitoring race-based stops, drafting anti-racial bias legislation, creating coalitions, and legally challenging law enforcement agencies.

If you or your organization have initiated or participated in any anti-racial bias projects of a similar nature, we would like to hear about them. Please e-mail IRP senior researcher Marguerite L. Spencer at Mlcspencer@juno.com.

We'd appreciate it if you would include any information that you feel is important in understanding the purpose or goal of your project, as well as the outcomes of your efforts. This project is funded by the Open Society.

Three staff members join IRP

Julie Nielsen was hired in November of 1999 as director of development and administration. She previously worked as a graduate research assistant in Education Policy and Administration at the U of M. Prior to that, she spent five years working for Independent School District 196 coordinating a program in American Indian education and supporting other diversity-related initiatives, such as grant writing, program development and staff development. She recently completed coursework for her master's degree in educational policy and administration, with an emphasis on evaluation studies and policy research from the University of Minnesota.

Eric Myott was hired in November of 1999 as geographic information systems (GIS) specialist. He previously worked on Neighborhood Planning for Community Revitalization and Sustainable Lakes Projects, as well as on projects for St. Paul Water Utility Maps and Engineering. He has a bachelor's degree in Geography from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul.

Ken Bechtel was hired in August of 1999 as office manager. He was formerly the office manager for Mani-Graphics in Madison, Wis. He received his associate degree from Somerset City College in New Jersey.

Board Member George Galster releases studies on immigrant barriers

George Galster published two related studies that examine the neighborhood opportunity structures facing different immigrant groups in five metro areas throughout the United States. One study reveals how black immigrants face systematically less advantaged neighborhood environments (in many dimensions) than other groups. The second shows how the sorts of neighborhood environments that immigrants experience strongly affects how the group advances socio-economically during the ensuing decade. The names and citations of the respective studies are as follows: "Neighborhood Opportunity Structures of Immigrant populations, 1980 and 1990," Housing Policy Debate 10 (no. 2, 1999): 395-442 [with Kurt Metzger and Ruth Waite] and "Neighborhood Opportunity Structures and Immigrants' Socio-economic Advancement," Journal of Housing Research 10 (no. 1, 1999): 95-128 [with Kurt Metzger and Ruth Waite].

Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America
Dalton Conley, Berkeley: University of California Press (1999),
By Marguerite L. Spencer

Author Dalton Conley asks why the wealth gap between blacks and whites exists and persists over and above income differences and whether this wealth gap explains racial differences in areas such as education, work, earnings, welfare and family structure.

To answer these questions, Conley studies data from a survey of blacks and whites that has been conducted annually since 1968 (the Panel Study of Income Dynamics). Ultimately, Conley's study tries to determine where race per se matters and where race simply acts as a stand-in for class. His conclusion: "… it is not race per se that matters directly; instead, what matters are the wealth levels and class positions that are associated with race in America."

Conley's most stark finding is that in 1994, the median white family held assets worth more than seven times those of the median nonwhite family. He uses this finding to illustrate that "... in order to understand a family's well-being and the life chances of its children - in short, to understand its class position - we not only must consider income, edu-cation and occupation [the classic socio-economic status indicators] but also must take into account accumulated wealth." This reconceptualization, Conley argues, should better clarify racial inequality in contemporary America.
Conley has the following observations:

• Historical (parental) wealth disadvantages explain the gap in net worth between blacks and whites more than contemporary dynamics (e.g., residential segregation and differential credit access).
  
• Many of the behaviors and circumstances that we associate with blackness or whiteness are really more attributable to the class structure of American society.
  
• When we compare black and white individuals, while factoring out the effect of blacks' lower average parental incomes and wealth levels, we find that blacks actually complete higher levels of education than their white counterparts.
  
• The employment and earnings gap between blacks and whites is largely explained by class dynamics, not by race per se.

Conley forcefully concludes that because class mirrors race and because "there is no net racial effect that explains the black-white asset difference, policy must be more, not less aggressive if it is to work toward the goal of racial equity in wealth .... merely eliminating remaining discrimination - be it individual or institutional - will do little to alleviate the wealth gap, which has already been set into intergenerational motion. Only radical, progressive, wealth-based policy will redress the issue."

IRP Gets the Word Out on Racial Justice Issues

Editor's note: During the fall of 1999, IRP Executive Director john powell participated in many speaking engagements on a variety of issues important to IRP. Several of his speeches are summarized below.

Beyond Tolerance: A Call to Action
john powell spoke about the importance of moving from dialogue to action to address economic and racial injustice at an event sponsored by the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation in St. Paul on Nov. 8. In his keynote speech, powell argued that what is required to move from talk to action is an ongoing transformative discussion - one that should be directly tied to action. "Words alone will not change the structural and institutional manifestations of the injustices we seek to eradicate," stated powell. "Until the institutions that embody our racial hierarchy are challenged, talk will do little or nothing to actually change the structure of this racial hierarchy."

Growing Pains: Making Sense of Sprawl
On Nov. 16, john powell spoke at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota on the topic of managing growth and development. In his speech, powell noted that throughout the manifestations of metropolitan fragmentation and sprawl, blacks have been subordinated socially, politically, and economically. "By racializing space through the spatial isolation of blacks and other minorities," powell pointed out, "we have achieved many of the negative racial conditions formally held in place with the Jim Crow law, thus frustrating the civil rights goals of the '50s and '60s."

Children's Human Rights
john powell spoke on Nov. 8 at a convention on children's human rights sponsored by the Children, Youth and Family Consortium and the Human Rights Center, both part of the University of Minnesota. In his speech, powell addressed the issue of concentrated poverty and explained that poor and minority children growing up in concentrated poverty inherently have fewer opportunities. Additionally, powell noted several measures that are essential to ensuring the human rights of all children. These include: affordable housing for all families, equitable educational opportunities, carefully monitored welfare reform, and a regional focus on concentrated poverty by all public officials.

IRP funders for fiscal year 2000 include The Open Society Institute, which contributed $125,000 for the Racial Justice and Regional Equity project, as well as $75,000 for the Anti-Racial Bias project. The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation contributed $200,000, and the Rockefeller Foundation contributed $50,000 toward the Racial Justice and Regional Equity Project.

In addition, IRP received $200,000 from the Ford Foundation over two years, and $150,000 from the McKnight Foundation over three years to support a Regional Opportunity Mapping project to identify opportunities and barriers in the Twin Cities region. The McKnight Foundation provided an additional $150,000 over three years in general operating support.

The Applied Research Center (ARC) provided $20,000 for IRP support and consultation for a Grass Roots Innovative Policy Program, also known as GRIPP, which ARC sponsors.

The International Leadership Institute (ILI) presented IRP Executive Director john powell with a 1999 Leadership Award on Nov. 16. The ILI leadership awards recognize individuals who have spent a decade or more working to eliminate social injustice and intolerance during the last century. The focus of ILI is to increase and strengthen international interchange and understanding between Minnesota and the world, with the goal of empowering communities of color by promoting leadership, justice, peace, and democracy. The ILI is a non-profit organization based in Edina, Minnesota.

Editor's note: The following are excerpts of articles by and featuring IRP staff members. Articles in their entirety can be found on the News and Articles page on our Web site. www1.umn.edu/irp/irpnewsart.html

A commentary by john powell, which appeared in the September/October, 1999 Poverty and Race Research Action Council Poverty and Race Newsletter, suggests that political fragmentation and sprawl may be the most important impediments to racial justice in the new millennium. powell wrote that the fear of diluting minority political power and of losing cultural identity are the primary reasons civil rights and social justice advocates have been largely absent from the anti-sprawl movement. Rather than an all-or-nothing approach, powell advocates an approach called federated regionalism, which balances localism and regional policy to preserve both political and cultural voice, while providing access to opportunity and a chance to fulfill the ultimate goals of the civil rights movement.

An interview with john powell appeared in the fall 1999 issue of ColorLines Magazine. In the interview, powell defined the benefits of a regional approach to metropolitan governance. He stated that regional inequity has seriously undermined the efforts of the civil rights movement and pointed out that in most cases, cities actually subsidize their suburbs, which in turn drains resources from cities. As a result, poverty is concentrated in cities, leading to the segregation of poor people of color from opportunity and resources. powell concluded that bringing racial justice awareness to regionalism is the single most important civil rights task facing advocates today.

Forum for Social Economics, (published by the Association for Social Economics). Vol. 28, No. 2. Spring 1999.

This article demonstrates the need for social justice and urban civil rights advocates to focus on urban sprawl, as well as concentrated poverty. The article argues that these are as much civil rights issues as they are environmental or land use issues, and that sprawl has frustrated civil rights efforts. There is strong evidence that racialized concentrated poverty is both a cause and product of sprawl and cannot be effectively addressed without addressing sprawl. The article explores the effects of gentrification and how in-fill revitalization strategies operate differently in rich, middle-class and poor cities.

During 1999, john powell served as the chair of the Affordable Housing Task Force for the City of Minneapolis. In a commentary written by powell, which appeared in the Star Tribune on Jan. 4, 2000, he argued: "Star Tribune headlines proclaimed that our state coffers are filled with a boatload of money. However, when the jubilation subsides, we must remember that our projected $1.805 billion surplus cannot really be counted as a windfall if we are not taking adequate care of our state's fragile infrastructure, including providing housing for our poorest citizens.

Some argue that giving back the money to the taxpayers; is the right thing to do. However, housing, education and other infrastructure needs cannot be resolved by individual spending caused by tax rebates. Those who argue otherwise ignore the fact that the surplus represents money that was dedicated to pay for public resources to meet our collective civic needs. The failure to wisely use this resource would not only neglect the most vulnerable people in our state, it would hurt us all. Giving back the apparent surplus may be good politics, but it is certainly bad government. We can and must do better than this.

Racial inequity casts a shadow on nearly every part of pubic policymaking. Issues such as urban sprawl, welfare, criminal justice and public education will go unresolved until their racial dimension is acknowledged.

On May 19 and 20, the Grassroots Innovative Policy Program (GRIPP) will host "Race Rules: Equity, Justice, and Public Policy" in Washington D.C. to address these issues, and more broadly, the problem of institutional racism.

Additionally, conference organizers request the submission of case studies, model policies and background
studies that emphasize the role of institutions and/or government in race and public policy. Papers and models should be concise and focus on successful strategies.

The conference is co-sponsored by IRP. Enrollment is limited, and anyone interested should register online at www.arc.org/gripp or call GRIPP at (540) 857-3088.