Roundtable: Prepared Topics and Questions from the Audience
Panel:
Tim Bates John Foster-Bey john powell
Scott Bollens George Galster David Rusk
Ellen Burzynski Ken Greenberg Charles Smith
Nancy Denton Roderick Mitchell Avis Vidal
Moderator: Roger Clay
Roger Clay
Yesterday several themes emerged: regional versus local strategies,
in-place strategies versus deconcentration, creating individual
wealth, creating community wealth. I hope we touch on all of these
today, but I want to start with a problem I have. Last night I
had a phone call from a friend who works at HUD. She said that
Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Bob Dole had met, and agreed
that they would continue to fund programs in the central cities
at the current levels, meaning 75 percent of what it used to be,
or they would triple funding for the next ten years--if experts
in the field could agree on what the right approach should be.
She knew I was at this conference, and I told her I would bring
the question to this panel: If we have to focus on one approach,
what should it be, mobility strategy, in-place strategy, or something
else?
David Rusk
Let me put your question in the context of a profile of some
of the things we know about poverty, and expand upon some of the
discussion Sandra Newman opened up yesterday about family-centered
impacts as well as community-centered influences on the question.
The best news that I can give you is that in the Twin Cities,
and almost any community I know, of all married white couples
with children, 98 percent are not poor. Of all African-American
married couples with children, 88 percent are not poor. Around
the country, the white numbers are always in that range. In most
places in the country, the African-American numbers hover around
the 90 percent level. By contrast, in the Twin Cities area, a
third of the single mothers who are white, and two-thirds of all
single mothers who are black, are poor. In effect, one response
to your question is that we know what the anti-poverty program
is: that classic two-parent, in this day, often two wage-earner,
family. Despite the fact that there are many single mothers who
are making it, the surest recipe for poverty is to be a child
in a single mother household.
One of the things that has happened is that there has been
a sharp change in these ratios. In the Twin Cities in 1990, among
whites, there were 500 married couple families for every 100 single
mother families. That compares with a national average twenty
years ago of 1000 to 100. Twenty years ago there were 200 black
married couples with children for every 100 black single mothers
with children. There are now 64 black couples with children for
every 100 black single mothers. There's been a shift in both communities,
but what represents a significant social change in the white community
is an absolute demographic and economic disaster for the black
community. What's brought that about? We can point to changes
in divorce laws and social mores, but there has also been a reduction
in the number of marriageable black males, caused by the wiping
out of lower-skilled jobs, a rise in unemployment, and an increase
in the number of young black males in the criminal justice system,
much of it due to unequal prosecution of drug laws. In Baltimore,
56 percent of the young black males are actively in the criminal
justice system. There's been an enormous feminization of poverty,
sometimes for reasons having to do with reduced male opportunity.
Our public policy response has been to pile the single mothers
into huge public housing projects in the poorest census tracts.
There is nothing in our private sector that concentrates poverty
to the degree that our public housing policies do. In the twenty-nine
poorest census tracts in the Twin Cites, there are 3300 married
couples with children and 4900 single mothers, three married couples
for every five single mothers. In Baltimore, it's one married
couple for every four single mothers. In Cincinnati, it's one
married couple for every five single mothers. Looking at the entire
rest of the Twin Cities area, taking away those twenty-nine poorest
census tracts, the ratio is five married couples for every single
mother. This situation was created substantially by the public
policies of the past. We have to end this massive concentration
of poverty, because the environment in these communities is absolutely
programmed for failure, and cannot be turned around by anything
we can do in the schools or projects that serve those children
and those communities. It hasn't happened anywhere in the country
that I can find. So I would advise the three wise men to adopt
the recommendations that Henry Cisneros made in December 1994:
Close the projects and go to an area-wide housing assistance program,
or we really aren't getting at the core of the problem.
George Galster
That's a good first step. What I would suggest further is that
we do more radical rethinking of what we mean by place-based strategy.
Traditionally, we have tried to help low-income people in these
places. What I would like to suggest as an idea for debate is
that that traditional view has not been successful in altering
the economic and social profile of these concentrated poverty
communities. It's built some houses and shopping areas, but it
hasn't fundamentally changed things. Instead of concentrating
directly on low-income people, maybe we should change the focus
to helping moderate income people stay in or come back to those
communities, thereby indirectly helping the low-income people,
by providing a different social environment and a different political
situation. Traditional CDCs can continue to serve as a locus for
social development, and for maintaining affordable housing, but
they cannot radically change these communities, which must attract
and maintain non low-income people.
john powell
There are many areas of agreement and many of disagreement.
One of the problems with what was just suggested, as well as with
Wilson's work, is that it is predicated on the notion that poverty
is colorblind. Poverty is not colorblind. Further, our most tremendous
efforts in terms of poverty occurred in the 1930s and again in
the 1960s. Both of them focused on dealing with white poverty.
"The concentration of poverty" deals with the poverty
experienced by African Americans, and, to a lesser extent, by
Latinos. We have to keep the intersection of poverty and race
together. I agree with much of David Rusk's and George Galster's
work. George was an expert witness in a very important insurance
case I was involved in, but the notion of dealing with poor minorities
by not focusing on them, I find very problematic. When we don't
focus on them, history teaches us that they fall off the map.
Anyone who has children will agree, I think, that two parents
are not enough. I don't think there's any debate that having an
appropriate family structure to raise children is important. I
don't know that it has to be two married people. An obvious exception
is gay and lesbian families with children. Secondly, there's some
confusion around this issue. The correlation between single parent
households and poverty is very confused. For example, until recently,
the incidence of marriage among Latinos was higher than the marriage
rate among Anglos, yet the poverty rate, especially among Mexican
Americans, was comparable to that of African Americans. One would
expect that if it were just marriage, the poverty rate would be
very different. If you look at the income levels of single male-headed
households, they are higher than the national average. Part of
the feminization of poverty is because women's income is so low.
Again, I'm not advocating that we have one adult in the household,
but if that one person is a man, the likelihood of that child's
being poor is much lower. The problem is in the wage structure.
Wilson's work, which is valuable, still, in a sense, buys into
that.
It seems to me that John Foster-Bey has given us an approach
to what you should tell Dole, Gingrich and Clinton, for all the
good it would do. It's clear that a synergy is needed. Regardless
of how one talks about it, a single, in-place strategy, focusing
just on a neighborhood, will not work. It is equally clear that
a regional strategy which is not particularly sensitive to people
living in concentrated areas will not work. We have to be careful
of the distinction between deconcentration strategies, which I
consider to be anti-poverty strategies, and dispersal strategies,
which need not be anti-poverty. They're not the same, though they're
often used interchangeably. We have to be hardheaded and pragmatic
in looking at how this will affect people. Deconcentration strategies
are important. As I said in the Integration and Regional and Urban
Planning session, the way we've maintained racial hierarchy after
Jim Crow laws is by spatial isolation. Reversing this isolation
is significant, but not enough; because racial discrimination
will continue. With the deterioration of the class structure,
the fastest growing group in terms of poverty in this country
is the working poor, most of whom are white. Unless we pay attention
to the wage structure, this train will catch up to us. Some of
these strategies won't really go as deeply as we want them to,
unless we pay attention to all of these things.
Charles Smith
It disturbs me when I hear that experts should come up with
one strategy. Having been here for the past day, listening to
the speakers, it's clear to me that there's no way that one strategy
is either desirable or possible. As john just mentioned, there
are a variety of things we should be looking at. For the political
powers that be to say "We will dedicate this amount of resources
if you can think of one way of doing it" is somewhat
disturbing, and I think the three wise men, as they were just
called, should examine what their true commitment is, because
it doesn't sound like a true commitment to eradicating racism
and poverty. john's last comment about the increasing poverty
of white working people is a key concern. When we look at our
current economy, we know that the intersection of race and class
is integral to this historical epoch. Racism as we see it, as
a current social construct, comes with this period in our history
and society, as does the notion of class, and the linkages of
class to poverty as well. When we start looking ahead at the future,
and to the increasing impoverishment of all people, particularly
people who think their incomes are going to be more stable, meaning
middle-class and working white people, it's time to start looking
at coalition-building. There are a number of years of experimentation
that will be required. That means that resources have to be committed,
and there has to be a public recognition that we've been dealing
with the issues of racism for say, four hundred years, and it's
not going to be gone because we've come up with one particular
strategy. Local conditions and regional conditions need to be
paid attention to. The demographics are going to be different
in different communities, so how can one strategy that works over
here be just transposed over there? They should rethink their
commitments, because it sounds as if there isn't a commitment.
It's sounds as if they're just ducking the question.
Tim Bates
Some of our urban development strategies that work produce
poverty. Unemployment and poverty are increasingly very different
topics, in that one of the great growth areas of the poor consists
of people who work. One example is Baltimore's revitalized downtown
business center, which generates jobs in hotels and restaurants.
There is currently a debate there about raising the minimum wage
to $6.10 an hour. This would affect a significant portion of the
labor force. The head of the convention center has said that that
wage would make them uncompetitive, and must be opposed; yet,
$6.10 an hour is working poverty, even though it is well above
the prevailing minimum wage. So, to the extent that many of our
programs of urban revitalization are creating $5 an hour jobs,
we are generating working poverty. Many of the jobs in the suburbs
that can be made available through mobility amount to working
poverty. For people who are not college-educated, the wage structure
is indeed increasingly the problem. Poverty and employment increasingly
coexist. At the national level, the notion that we might raise
the minimum wage above $5 an hour seems to be politically non-viable.
Of the three politicians you mentioned, certainly two of the three
would oppose a $5.25 an hour minimum wage. We have a tremendous
growth in the number of people in this country who work and are
nonetheless poor.
John Foster-Bey
If I had to recommend something, I would recommend that we take a look, as I mentioned in my comments, at what Bill Wilson refers to as organizing communities around work. There are some troubling issues around the current wage structure, but it's much more troubling to have large numbers of people who are idle, who have no way of being a part of the mainstream. In the Twin Cities, while there are a fair amount of jobs at the low end, there are also an enormous number of jobs that don't require college educations that employers can't fill. If I were advising this troika, I would say they should focus on how to connect poor folks to real work opportunities. In some instances, poor folks may have to start at lower wages to get into the marketplace, but there are some opportunities for upward mobility. The thing that has often been lacking in many of the historical employment programs has been good thinking about the sort of continuum that the participants need to be on. If we begin to think about that, and begin to organize our communities around both getting people working and keeping them on that continuum, we'd begin to see some real change there. I don't think we can do that by looking strictly at place-based strategies alone, but if we don't start at the neighborhood level, we will miss the people who really need the assistance the most.
Ken Greenberg
I would like to bring, momentarily, a different perspective
to the whole thing, both as somewhat of an outsider, although
I hope a very sympathetic one, who works here a lot; and also
from the standpoint of someone who is interested in the history
of cities. The proposition I'd like to put forward really starts
with someone's comment at the beginning of yesterday about the
American dream being about social mobility. My suggestion is,
take out the word social and the dream is about mobility; and
that's at the root of the problem. What we see in present day
American cities, in the manifestation that is peculiar to the
United States, is a tendency toward segregation by class, race,
and ethnicity, expressed as a city/suburban or city/periphery
city issue. If we look back a couple of centuries, we see that
this is simply a precise reenactment of the way this country was
settled in the first place. People raced across the continent
to get away from each other: Read de Toqueville, read the Turner
hypothesis on the frontier. Every time there was a perceived difference
between people--even within one ethnic group, or theology--they
split and moved on. By the time they got to the Pacific, and there
was no place else to move, centrifugal pattern around cities started
to develop.
The question of visible difference, skin pigmentation, is simply
playing itself into this older template, which is a very deep-seated
cultural reflex, the instinct for flight. If we look at other
countries, differences of race and class are not played out in
exactly this way; not to say that they don't exist, but they're
not played out in flight. This whole question that we're talking
about, evident in symptoms, is really the undertow of a much more
profound phenomenon that has been present throughout the entire
four hundred years of the settlement of this part of the continent.
What was suggested yesterday by Curt Johnson of the Met Council
is something that I think is happening everywhere: the realization
that there are simply limits, imposed by the environment on the
one hand, by the economy on the other, and by a sense of social
justice as a third prong, to the extent to which one can continue
to indulge that pattern. If we go right to the end of the story
and say, "It can't go on any more, it's non-sustainable in
the broadest sense of the word--in human terms, in environmental
terms, in economic terms" then we have to face those cultural
reflexes, go back to their origins, and start to do something
about them. Many of the suggestions that have been made by various
people here are starting to get at that, and I would suggest that
there are five interlocking characteristics to look for in the
city region to begin to counteract that multi-century process
of settlement.
As we move from the city-region, to the district, to the neighborhood,
to the block, to the individual dwelling unit, a series of concepts
have to be worked on simultaneously. At the largest scale is the
one that David Rusk has written about a great deal and spoken
about here, which is the concept of elasticity, or a common
framework for governance of the entire de facto community. Equally
important, as we move down the scales, is the issue of connectivity.
A series of enclaves, however they are defined, even with governance
at the city-regional level, can defeat the purpose. So, things
have to be connected; the physical aspects of place, the natural
systems, the street networks, the transportation networks, the
social networks, and the health networks.
As we move down one more scale, the question of juxtaposition,
of things being placed in close proximity to one another at a
finer grain--that is, different types of housing, and employment
opportunities, in a deliberate strategy to mix things up--becomes
extremely important, so that there aren't defined boundaries and
separations. We go right down to tenure options within building
types, as we get to the finest scale. The last has to do with
a notion of flexibility, which relates to the changing
nature of the urban economy; the adaptability, all the opportunities
for informal self-help and change over time, such as the community
development corporations and all of their efforts. To focus on
any particular point in the spectrum in isolation from all of
the others is ultimately self-defeating. It is necessary to take
on the challenge simultaneously at all those levels, to be consciously
connected, to work from the extremely local to the regional and
beyond city-regionally. Underlying all of this is the hard realization
that the legacy of a settlement pattern which is based on the
idea of mobility is fundamentally flawed.
John Foster-Bey
In the late fall I happened to be in Paris, and while much
of what you're saying has validity, we need to look a little deeper
into how other countries have dealt with issues of poverty. In
Paris, the poor people aren't in the inner city, they're in the
suburbs. A lot of these other countries have dealt with it in
a different way: they've taken poor people and put them in different
kinds of reservations away from the city center. So, all of what
you're saying is important to think about, and it could be very
important to organizing some of our own thinking, but we might
want to be careful about how we look at some of these other models,
because I'm not sure they tell us a whole lot either.
Charles Smith
The points that were just raised on common elements of a comprehensive
strategy need to be clearly addressed, because what we've tended
to do over a period of time is arrive at where we are from different
points of view. From what I've seen, very few examples have come
from strategies that take on a multi-pronged approach. I heard
the Shorebank one yesterday, and I was very excited about that,
because it's starting to look at how to combine various elements
in an overall strategy to really bring in supports that deal with
social development, community development, economic development,
and so on.
We need to look a bit broader, at what the components are of
a common strategy that can deal with the issues of family, income,
mobility and the limits to mobility, employment and labor, and
the changes that are occurring in the labor force as a result
of our moving from a post-industrial age into an information-technology
age. The limits on resources were pointed out yesterday by Curt
Johnson. People are saying it is no longer possible to expand,
it's not sustainable. Those are the things we should be thinking
of: what are the elements that need to be brought to bear, so
that all angles of the difficulties, and we've heard incredible
enumerations of the problems, can be addressed in a comprehensive
approach. There will be different ways it will be implemented,
but the common elements will be helpful in terms of how the approaches
get developed.
Avis Vidal
I conclude from this that we tell the troika, "Leave the
spending levels where they are." It's clear there is no agreement
on how to take three times the current level and spend it in a
way that has consensus behind it and a conviction that we will
come out in a better place than where we are. Each of the speakers
has come up with a variety of points of view with which I could
find agreement. If we really want to get at the issue of dealing
with the convergence of poverty and race, however, we need to
fundamentally change the terms of the conversation. We are speaking
to one another, and despite the quality of the individual comments,
I have the feeling of being in a bit of a film loop. I'm not confident
that we can implement any of the good ideas for breadth of programming
that are on the table, no matter how effective they might prove
to be. I believe that current patterns are not sustainable, but
I do not believe that is the majority view. In a democracy, that
makes it hard to produce public policy that embodies that conviction.
Similarly, comprehensiveness has much to recommend it; but everybody
who has been associated with a comprehensive plan that has been
successful will tell you that it is a precious example, highly
idiosyncratic, and extremely difficult to replicate.
So if I had these three folks listening to me, I would be looking
for ways to provoke them to try to think about experiments that
would change the terms of the conversation. I don't pretend to
know what those are, but one that came into my head as I heard
people speaking was a system in which everyone is required to
do two years of public service in an environment other than the
one in which they live. The environment must be multi-colored,
and the service of a sort that everybody who came out of the program
was guaranteed to have had some work experience, in much the same
way as did the army veterans at the end of World War II. Basically,
it is a way to limit people's choices. If current patterns of
interaction--segregated neighborhoods, defining the marriageable
pool for African-American women as single, non-incarcerated African-American
men, rather than men--if that sort of choice is what defines the
problem, then perhaps we need some very selective ways to constrain
people's choices temporarily in ways that position them better
to address the questions that are on the table, that lets them
hear and speak differently than they speak today.
Roderick Mitchell
After listening to the many experts both yesterday and today,
I'm more convinced of the position I articulated yesterday than
ever before. The issue is a very simple one. The solutions may
appear to be complex, but I don't think even the solutions are
complex. The issue is one of economic parity of black folks in
this country, who have experienced many, many years of economic
and civil oppression. The fight mechanism to gain economic participation
in this country is an in-place strategy. Why do I say that? I
refer back to my brother Steve Biko and paraphrase him: "Liberation
begins with the liberation of the mind." The same thing holds
true with economic equality for black folks in this country.
The whole civil rights struggle in this country was an in-place
strategy. As it evolved, it began to take on collaborations with
those people who were like-minded. When Rosa Parks decided that
she wasn't going to go to the back of the bus, that was an in-place
strategy. The acceleration of the civil rights movement, and the
direction of it, did not come from a regional strategy, from nice
government policy that was put into place; it came from struggle
at the community level. It was accelerated and aided by those
people who saw the value of working together, but it was definitely
an in-place strategy. The struggle for economic parity by black
folks in this country will make the civil rights movement look
like child's play. In order for that strategy to be effective,
it will be an in-place strategy; because direction of how the
problem is attacked must come from the people who are in a position
in the community to know what is actually going on. As that movement
begins to take on a character and direction, certainly there is
much room for discussion and for participation by those who are
like-minded. What I'm espousing is not exclusivity: in fact, it's
just the opposite. It's inviting full participation, but as I
said before, at a table at which we are talking as equals.
At this point in our existence, whether we like it or not,
no matter how many statistics we lay on the table, the fact is
that if we begin to put into place a policy of deconcentration
of black ghettos in this country, what we're basically doing is
following a policy of political castration and plantation economics;
because what effectively takes place is that people who have no
economic power, who have no base, are put into a community in
which they are even more powerless, and more disconnected than
they are in the so-called black ghettos, or homelands, that exist
today. If 10 percent of the population moves out of Bed-Stuy into
suburbs in Connecticut or New Jersey, what will they be connected
to? Where will the jobs come from? Are we talking about putting
people in jobs as janitors and clerks at the major supermarkets
and malls? Is that what we mean? What's the base of power for
a group like that? What's the economic generator that will give
these people the ability to become productive participants in
the overall economic game? I don't think policies that are based
upon deconcentration will be successful.
The fundamental solution must be based upon ownership. First,
ownership of the problems of areas in which there are high concentrations
of black poverty; secondly, ownership of the community itself.
That ownership can come in a variety of ways. One panelist earlier
made an allusion to the fact that CDCs could not do it alone.
I don't think anyone would have ever thought that a CDC could
change three hundred years of economic oppression. That was never
the objective of a CDC. The CDC is one way, along with other institutions
in the community, like black churches, fraternities, and other
organizations, to begin to define solutions to the problem, and
to put together ownership of certain assets and solutions that
can begin to make a difference. To use this as an opportunity
to condemn an institution that's only been in place for twenty-nine
years, and redefine it in terms of its mission and purpose relative
to something it was never intended to be, is rather disingenuous.
Nancy Denton
Roderick Mitchell and I had part of this conversation last
night, so it's nice to follow him this morning. One of the things
that comes to my mind repeatedly in my work is how effectively
white Americans have set up a social structure to keep blacks
poor. White Americans have seemed to be able, at every advance
of the black population, to change the nature of the game just
a little bit, so that blacks are poor: We went from slavery to
the Jim Crow laws. Blacks decided to leave the South and move
to the North, because they wanted opportunities there; but the
cities, which had been vehicles for advancement for European groups,
became traps for blacks. There's a recent piece out by my colleague
Doug Massey which shows that the pattern of segregation has changed
over the course of this century. First, segregation was at a very
high level in terms of large macro units like states. Then, as
the segregation across the states evened out, and became lower,
segregation moved to a neighborhood level.
These conferences are a good place for people who are working
on these issues to share work and ideas, but I feel manipulated
by the question posed by the politicians. Everyone in this room
shares the goal of economic development for African Americans.
What we disagree on is the way that is going to come about. African
Americans can begin to accumulate wealth through housing desegregation,
because then they t n begin to participate in this enormous government
handout that all white Americans participate in: namely, the income
tax deduction. Now, say racism has disappeared, and blacks get
to take an income tax deduction if they own their own house. One
might say that's fair. I would argue it's not fair, because when
blacks own a house, the way the current housing market works,
they do not gain as much equity as whites do, so they can't leverage
that equity into a bigger house in a better neighborhood, and
they cannot leverage it into wealth accumulation. When I'm arguing
in favor of a mobility strategy, people who are into community
development say, "You're going to disperse the black community
and destroy it." I don't want to destroy the black community.
I want the black community to gain wealth, so that they can participate
as equals at the table.
The reason I feel so manipulated is because I know from my
conversation with Rocky last night that we share the same goal;
yet we are constantly forced into a situation of fighting amongst
ourselves, as opposed to agreeing that obviously after this many
years of concentrating black people in places, and concentrating
poor black people in poor places, something has to be done for
those people and those places. You cannot have strategies that
just ignore them. At the same time, the hopelessness, the concentration
has been there for a long time. So, I cannot see how, without
some dispersion, some deconcentration, we will ever be able to
overcome the effects of that concentration, which will overcome
any efforts that go on in those communities. Public housing, as
David Rusk mentioned a little while ago, is a good example. Currently,
to get into public housing, you have to be poor. So by definition,
you cannot change the poverty level of a neighborhood that is
dominated by a public housing tract. There are all kinds of people
living in an area like Bedford-Stuyvesant, which is a large area
of Brooklyn. But there is something to be said for not having
all of one race, or all of one income of people living in one
area, as a way of getting a strategy going.
Roger Clay
I have a question that is based on one from the audience. It's
not a perfect breakdown, but there seems to be a different view
depending on the race of the speaker. It seems that more of the
black speakers embrace an in-place strategy. The question from
the audience is "How do the researchers' races affect their
thinking?" I was wondering if it's possible that if you're
black, or some other person of color, that you may embrace more
of an in-place strategy, because you place a different value on
control of your destiny, and what goes on in your current community.
john powell
Not disparaging the question, I don't find it quite as interesting
maybe as you do. Roger and I had this conversation last night,
and again this morning, in which Roger said, "There's no
such thing as a pure in-place strategy. It's not possible. You
get people jobs, and some of them, not all of them, leave."
William Julius Wilson talks about the difference between "the
community" whatever that is, in the 1950s and 1960s and today.
What he says is that there has been a substantial exodus. Black
people with the most economic resources have left the community,
and the people who are in the community are not all there entirely
by choice. They have been denied the opportunity to leave.
One way of looking at it is to say, to me or to any of the
panelists, since all of us up here, I think, have a race, "How
does your race affect your thinking on this?" Another approach
is, what do we know about these different strategies, and about
people's behavior--not the researchers, not the audience, but
people who have been given a job, people who have substantial
economic resources--what do we know about their behavior? What
do we know about the behavior of those who stay? Certainly most
people of color would argue that it is important for a number
of reasons, not just economic but cultural, spiritual, whatever,
to maintain a base; but I would argue that base is not one wheres
0 to 90 percent of the people are poor and unemployed. That's
not a healthy community. That's not the way people would constitute
themselves.
When people left the South, and they left in droves, millions
and millions of black people left the South, leaving their communities,
where they had been for two or three hundred years; they left
looking for jobs, and they went where they thought the jobs were.
My parents are from the South. I was the second or third child
born in the North, and I have relatives now who are saying, "Are
there jobs in Minnesota?" If there are, they will come here.
I say, "Bring your coat, but come." There may be different
resources that people value. Wealth accumulation is one, but culture
is another, spiritual cohesiveness is another.
My daughter has been applying to colleges. She applied to Carleton,
at my insistence, among other schools. When I thought about it,
I decided I didn't want her to go there. Given the small number
of blacks at Carleton, even though I don't think they're rabid
racists, I didn't want her there. If she wanted to go there, fine.
It would be great to have her in college an hour away from me.
But I decided that the human cost of being the only one, and as
Maya would say, "with no one to watch your back" was
just a tremendous cost that I went through thirty years ago. If
she can avoid that, can go to a school where there are a critical
mass of blacks, and some whites, Latinos and Asians, because that's
what the world is about; then that's the ideal. That is something
people of color value very highly. I don't think, when we talk
about in-place strategies, we're talking about that. I'm from
Detroit, and I don't think those communities produce that. They
produce something else. We've drawn the division too sharply,
and it's a false division. I don't think there is such a thing
that can work, or that's even descriptive of a purely in-place,
or a purely regional strategy.
Ellen Burzynski
It wasn't until I came to this conference that I realized I
had to make a choice between regional and local initiatives. To
be honest with you, I would take a little bit different position:
I would like to see in-place strategies supported by regional
initiatives. One of the difficulties that we have out in the field
is the reality of the fact that governmental or publicly mandated
policies are subject to change over time, and it is extremely
difficult to get consistency when, as administrations change,
as activities change, as public policy debates go on and on, we
are still in the field, dealing with the issues every day. I have
yet to meet a statistically normal low-income person living in
a disinvested community. If any of you have met this person, please
give me their name and address. I deal with people, and if I had
to make a decision, it would be that local strategies need to
go on during the course of this debate to support the everyday
needs of the folks who are there while we're debating all of these
decisions for them. I'd like to see support that allows at least
the opportunities for local initiatives to have more than, as
Mr. Mitchell put it, twenty-nine years to try to work. Everyone
is changing funding sources, everyone is changing policies, everyone
is changing direction, except the people who are impacted in the
neighborhood.
John Foster-Bey
On this issue of where we probably start, based on our race,
I am not a major advocate of pure in-place strategies. The record's
not real positive, and, as Nancy pointed out, just on an operational
and conceptual basis, they don't work well. However, I'm also
aware that it is very easy to come up with any number of strategies
focused on building healthy communities that will overlook people
of color who happen to be poor and concentrated in certain places.
So, it is critical to focus on these places, to make sure that
these other types of strategies actually do produce some benefits
for those communities. In the absence of that, you're likely to
get all sorts of interesting strategies, as in the conversation
earlier about models of development in Europe. Yes, they have
very vibrant cities, and that's because they've segregated all
of the poor, and increasingly, people of color, into the suburbs.
That's not a direction we want to go either. I want to keep focused
on the people this debate and all these discussions are about;
but realistically, we can't do it by trying to build the local
places without creating a real connection to the larger society.
Ron Krietermeyer
I want to ask a question, but first I want to assume that we're
talking about a synergy between inside and outside. Some of you
may know that while we were meeting here yesterday, the president
of the AFL-CIO was only a couple of miles up the street at the
state capitol, holding a session about the working poor and economic
insecurity in wages. John Sweeney, the past president of the service
employees union, was focusing on a population that is, in many
cases, the same group that we are talking about. What are the
possibilities or the obstacles, in terms of alliances with organized
labor, that would confront us in trying to form a political base
to win on some of those broader wage and income issues for those
at the bottom 20 or 30 percent? I'm directing this first at john
powell, since he raised some of those issues.
john powell
There was an important article written several years ago called
"The Gordian Knot," about the way poor people's issues
are framed sometimes in ways that totally isolate them from anyone
else. On the other hand, we have to be careful of what I call
the "universal" framing of issues, because most universal
programs, from welfare, to the War on Poverty, really did not
address the issues of poor people of color. It's not just that
people aren't smart and haven't thought about this. Part of the
difficulty we see when we look at Tom Watson, at the turn of the
century, who talked about creating an alliance between poor white
farmers and blacks. Eventually he decided that, given the racism
in our society, it was not in his best interest, in terms of trying
to organize poor whites, to align himself with poor blacks. So,
he changed his tune, and became a very effective speaker in favor
of racism. That's discouraging. Hopefully we're beyond that. So
we have to look for opportunities, and there are some, but it's
a lot of hard work. Some of the opportunities have to be constructed.
There has been some fanning out. The black middle class, by
and large, has left these core communities that we're talking
about. They may have moved to other black communities, but they
don't live in these communities; that's one of the things that's
so devastating about these communities now. Their leaving is not
a bad thing: many of the poor people who are still there would
leave if they could. Some of the fanning out means there is more
interaction. Some of it is problematic interaction, but most of
the people I work with on a daily basis are white; so there's
some opportunity for coalition building. For example, the tremendous
energy that Colin Powell generated was complex on a number of
levels, but it demonstrated that we want, as a society, an opportunity
to talk about some of these issues, to reframe these issues in
different ways, and to have a chance for people to come to the
table.
Part of that is really hearing each other's concerns, and not
discounting each other's concerns. Certainly in a society that
is organized around racism, whites are privileged by category.
But they're also not privileged. Talk to a working class white
person, or a middle-class white person; they don't feel privileged.
They feel that the economy is being snapped away from them, and
the dream is deteriorating. That's a legitimate concern, and we
have to be willing to meet that concern and talk about it. The
other thing, which I have not developed, but which I have been
calling for, is ways to deliberately make racial discrimination
and class discrimination more costly. We need to figure out ways
to spread the costs, so that it is costly for Newt Gingrich, or
Clarence Thomas, or whoever you will. There are a lot of neo-segregationists
and neo-racists getting a free ride. They say and do things that
would have been just unthinkable twenty years ago, and there's
almost no response. So one thing is to figure out the positive
things, but the other is to figure out how to make everyone participate,
make them deliberately stakeholders in moving toward a more racially
and economically just society.
Ellen Burzynski
I would like to address the issue of building constituencies
on the issue of wages. One of the difficulties in discussing this
issue is that until there is an economic benefit that is perceived
by all parties involved in the issue, it will continue to be a
debate with no substantive action. Rather than focusing on the
concept of minimum wage, which seems to be the measurement category
that everybody uses, we need to focus on the concept of what wages
purchase, particularly if what we are talking about is moving
individuals, whether they are working poor, or are, at this point
in time, receiving transfer payments. The issues that we run into,
particularly as we move single female head of household individuals
into the work force, is that there is no economic benefit to them
in working. The reality is, if I had to choose between taking
care of my children, providing adequate day care for them, knowing
that I could get them to a doctor when they were ill, and feeling
confident and comfortable that they would be cared for by staying
on some form of transfer payments, AFDC, however you want to define
this; and taking a job that is part-time and provides no benefits,
I know the choice that I would make, individually.
So as we frame this whole issue of living wage, we need to
talk in terms of incentives to employers for providing child care.
We need to re-look at changes in work patterns for part-time employees,
and the kinds of benefits that are available to them. Because
if we're really substantively going to address the issues of the
unemployed and the working poor, we can't just talk in terms of
annual income, we need to talk in terms of purchasing power, at
the percentages of income that need to be spent for housing, child
care, and insurance. Last but not least, I've got 150 jobs that
are available out in my suburbs, but how do my low-income residents
get there and get back? Transportation issues are important. We
need to identify the incentives on both sides of this issue and
find a way to bring those together so that the value provided
is consistent with all of the different financial impacts that
both sides of the issue are facing.
Question
I'd like to make two comments: The first is flip, the second
is serious. The flip comment to David Rusk is "We don't have
to disperse poverty. We can keep people in public housing if we
give them a generous amount of subsistence that makes sure they're
not poor, including all the support services." That may be
politically impossible, that's why I consider it a flip comment,
but it leads me into my other question, which I think follows
up on what Ron Krietemeyer said. Yesterday we heard some discussion
at the panel on Integration and Regional Issues about white hierarchy
and the power structure in our society that really gets to the
heart of a lot of what we're talking about here. It's not just
white hierarchy; there's also a class element, in that people
who are doing very well don't see any reason to change the system,
the policies, the structures, that work for them. Ron said, "How
do we build alliances to work on issues like minimum wage?"
We have to build alliances that work at much deeper levels and
on more issues, to think about how we convince people who currently
have power and freedom to do what they want in this society that
it's in their best interest that more people have more of that
ability across all the different income levels. That's the real
challenge. What do the various panelists think are the types of
arrangements and strategies we can pursue to make those changes?
Panelist
I agree with the speaker that that's indeed a major political
challenge. Intellectually, one way to approach that is to try
to increase our understanding of the connections between cities
and suburbs and national/international economic competitiveness.
If we can show that it hurts the entire nation, including the
privileged, to develop a spatial pattern where we have a variety
of what are defined as social problems by the larger society,
and that thereby a potential work force is underutilized permanently;
if we create a spatial situation in which we have to waste tons
of resources, in a very highly dispersed residential and job pattern;
if we create a situation where the reputation of many of our cities
is smeared by these social problems and thus international capital
is less likely to flow to those situations; then we can build
the case that it's in everybody's self-interest to redesign metropolitan
space, and to start making steps toward building coalitions across
class and race lines.
Roderick Mitchell
Practically, one way to do that is generating ownership. Ownership
means everything in this society, and it certainly means everything
within the black community as well. From a policy standpoint,
there is a real and legitimate need to redirect policy away from
subsistence payments and welfare and toward generating ownership
and real business opportunity for locally-based entrepreneurs
and would-be entrepreneurs. The other aspect of that is to help
to develop, create, and distribute capital that goes beyond debt
capital, but including equity capital, that facilitates ownership.
It's very difficult to oppress someone if they own the means of
production. That's the central issue here, if we're talking about
full participation by economically oppressed people.
Charles Smith
I'm glad that you phrased the question in terms of talking
about a hierarchy and a white hierarchy. Another thing we've been
trying to get at over the past couple of days, and which we certainly
try to get at when we go back to our places of work, is the issue
of power, and how resources are distributed. This is not a new
problem. It seems to be a problem of history, and we're living
it in the current age. One of the difficult parts is how to develop
the sense of self-interest by those who have, and will likely
continue to have; who can feel that they do not need to pay attention,
because they are not threatened. The issues of in-place strategies
are very important when we look at how pressure is developed,
built, and sustained, in order to say, "There are costs.
There are social costs, there are economic costs, and so on."
The other question is where do we see models of change?
One of the interesting things I find when I come down to the
states is to hear the word apartheid used as an active term, one
that people relate to, one that people see as operative, and one
which defines a certain social reality. It compels us to look
at apartheid in South Africa. I remember years ago reading an
article about the phenomenal costs of running dual and triple
school systems to deal with "whites, coloreds, and blacks,"
and the incredible cost that was to the taxpayer, to sustain a
phenomenally ridiculous system. As john mentioned earlier, we
have to examine the social and economic costs of poverty and racism.
At the same time, in-place strategies are so important, because
we tend to be the ones who raise the issues. We have very little
choice but to raise the issues. It's our lives that are at stake
here, it's our well-being that's at risk. We're the ones who are
without the means of production, without wealth, and who need
things in order to live comfortably, or at subsistence levels,
in some cases. Those strategies need to be fostered, developed,
and they need to link with allies to get the attention of those,
who now walk away from it as if it's okay that everything is currently
supporting their role in life, and not everyone else's. So we
have to look at the costs, but maintain the support at the community
level that raises the issues.
John Foster-Bey
There does exist now some very interesting data that suggest
that regions with poorer central cities tend to do less well than
those regions with better-off central cities. The National League
of Cities, for example, has documented some of that. It's probably
also important to take into account that there are some very powerful
demographic forces at work in this country right now. Many of
the key players in our economy are beginning to recognize that.
Incredible support that much of the business sector has for school
reform, particularly school reform in inner cities, has to do
with a recognition that their work force is going to be coming
from a group to which they've never paid attention before. The
same forces are at play in labor unions. While we all may have
a certain romance with labor unions, labor unions were not always
the great hope for people of color, and they often stood in the
way and were barriers. In fact, labor made some very conscious
choices to keep people of color out of certain professions, in
order to maintain their own membership's well-being. However,
those same demographic forces are causing them to have to take
a look, as well, at forming coalitions; and it's important to
recognize, not that it's easy, but that those demographic forces
are creating self-interest in sectors of our society that never
would have seen that as an opportunity before. What we need to
do is try to figure out ways to take advantage of that.
Question
This turns out to be a follow-up to the previous two questions.
Everyone would agree that resources are necessary. Even Roderick
Mitchell, who has argued for very strong in-place strategies,
agrees that resources have to come in, and be generated within
the community. In trying to persuade people who have to contribute,
for whatever reason, to areas that have not, how do you do that,
given the tremendous cognitive dissonance that whites have about
race? For example, I was in Houston, and there were two different
headlines in the newspaper. One said, "Whites Question Affirmative
Action" and the other said, "Blacks Receive Ten Times
as Many Tickets in White Areas as Whites." These two articles
were in the paper with no relation to each other, but it indicated
how whites see race. The wedge issue on race is affirmative action.
My question is, how do we persuade people that it's in their interest
to put resources into these areas, when the one area in which
we've tried to do that, affirmative action, is so controversial,
and so repugnant to so many whites? What do you say to the $5
an hour factory worker, whose only sense of redistribution of
resources is that affirmative action is a threat?
Roderick Mitchell
I'm not so sure that "even Roderick Mitchell" would
agree with that statement. Historically, with all due respect
to you and to our foundation panelist, the liberation of black
folks in this country in the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement
did not begin with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. It began
with the consciousness of those people who were oppressed that
something had to be done. So that even from a biblical standpoint,
it was a question of using what you had, picking up that stick
in your hand, and moving ahead, generating activity around an
issue for a specific purpose. Once that activity was generated
and had gained momentum, then other people began to participate
in the process. The economic struggle is no different. Yes, other
resources are needed, but I don't think those resources are absolutely
necessary for the initial momentum to be started. There is absolutely
room, and there is absolute necessity for collaboration, cooperation,
for people working together to solve these problems; but I don't
think you have to wait for a benevolent philanthropist to come
in and throw ten million dollars at your feet before you get started.
john powell
Another note about history: To some extent I feel we're back
in the W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington debates, the first
debates of what one could call in-place and mobility strategies.
There's some history behind this. We got the Tuskegee Institute
and some other stuff in support of Booker T. Washington. But again,
the sharp framing of it is just fundamentally wrong. History doesn't
support that, conception doesn't support that, and there's always
the danger of taking what is given us as inevitable and natural--so
the white society creates apartheid, then we embrace it and romanticize
it. Whites and blacks in this country are incredibly interrelated.
There would not be whites without blacks. There would not be blacks
without whites. I lived in Africa for several years, and outside
the cities, people don't even define themselves in terms of black.
That's a European concept. It's not a natural concept. Black people
here throw off the yoke of slavery and adopt Islamic names. Islam's
one of the first religions that enslaved Africa. Islam is not
an indigenous African religion. There's a lot of romanticism,
from my perspective, that really distorts history.
On the question of how we move on this, again, looking at the
Civil Rights Movement: Jacob Lawrence had an exhibit over in the
Weisman Art Museum, including twenty pictures of John Brown. The
curator had a description under one of the pictures that said
"John Brown had this fanatical obsession with freeing the
slaves." I said, "I don't think Jacob Lawrence thought
it was fanatical." John Brown had a religious epiphany about
freeing the slaves. In many ways, we are connected. Our identities
are connected. We don't realize it, but we are fundamentally connected.
Whether you see a white person or a black person daily in your
life, we shape each other's identity; and the church, throughout--the
abolitionist movement, the Quaker movement, and certainly internal
movements, and the gospels--was fundamental in shaping the consciousness
for resisting racial hierarchy in the United States. We're at
a critical time. The southern Baptist Church has come out and
apologized for its role in racism and slavery. That's something
the United States hasn't done. That's the southern Baptist Church.
Obviously the Civil Rights Movement was very well seeded and structured
within the church; and this reaction and retrenchment, in terms
of much of the Civil Rights Movement, is coming from the religious
right. One of the institutions that is still relatively intact
in the black community is the black church. We should reach out
to the church communities, and pull them into this issue. If we
can involve the church, and other institutions like labor on this
issue, the possibility for coalition is substantial.
One last thing: When I talk about the cost, I'm talking about
changing the cost. How do we make it more costly to ignore these
problems? Look at what's going on in California, for example,
on affirmative action. Whites have been against affirmative action,
certainly the Board of Regents has been against it for years in
California; but they could not move on it. When did they move
on it? They got the black regents to take a leadership role that
gave them cover, then they could move on it. Look at city after
city. In St. Louis, they're talking about going back to neighborhood
schools. We could discuss whether that's good or bad. I think
it's problematic; it will resegregate the schools. They could
not do it without the black mayor in St. Louis. I know the mayor
down there, and I think he's a good guy, but he gave cover for
people who had a lot of other interests, despite the fact that
the black community wasn't behind him on this. On our side, from
my perspective, we're not thinking strategically. How do we raise
issues, build coalitions, make the costs of doing certain things
untenable? How do we make the appointment of Clarence Thomas to
the Supreme Court untenable? We stopped Robert Bork. We could
not stop Clarence Thomas. I was in the ACLU when this happened.
The Civil Rights community sat that out. They did not participate.
So, what people who want to retrench race do, is they get a Clarence
Thomas, and they say "This will freeze the opposition. This
will freeze the Inc. Fund [NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund,
Inc.] and the ACLU, and then we can run this agenda. Clarence
Thomas will be our point person on rolling back racial gains."
We have to stop that. We have to figure out a strategy to stop
that and invigorate the church.
Question
In the spirit of continuing action on the subjects that we've
all been addressing, I'd like to make a suggestion. The world's
women just did this in China. Before you leave today, all of you
sit down in a circle, with the objective of taking the issues
as you see them, and writing a mission statement that perhaps
everybody in this room would be given to comment on and to use
to start talking circles in their different communities. I would
suggest you take an interdisciplinary approach, with about four
of five objectives, such as understanding poverty in various regions,
or governmental regulations, or institutional violence against
women, or the computerization of poverty. Draw up a mission statement,
with all of your expertise, and give it to all the participants,
as an absolute action that the participants could see if they
agree with, and take back to their different communities, to see
what the reactions in their respective communities are. Then maybe
gather again to say, here's where we need some very concrete action
and suggestions.
Roger Clay
Maybe that could be done in some of the breakout groups which
are going to follow.
Question
There's a tension that underlies a lot of this conversation
that we're not addressing, because we're discussing community
health in terms of economic health. Part of the tension between
in-place and mobility strategies is really a tension about what
it means to have a community. The question I'd like to pose is,
what is the relationship between community and space, or community
and neighborhood? It seems to me that one of the concerns is what
is it going to do to political power to deconcentrate? Another
aspect is what is it going to do to the health and the nature
of the African-American community to deconcentrate? What those
issues are raising is what does it mean to be a community, and
what should be the relationship of the African-American community
and other minority communities to the mainstream society?
Nancy Denton
I don't think it can be answered shortly. I would point out
though, that when we think about what a community is, we have
to remember that there are class differences in how we form communities.
People with more money, more resources, who can buy more services
for themselves, can afford to have community with people who are
located distantly. People who are poor are more limited in satisfying
their needs for community to people who are close. We would probably
never all agree on the definition of a community, because that's
a personal thing to each of us; but this tension over community
is reflecting class at some level.
Avis Vidal
You hit on an issue that is one that many place-based initiatives
have to struggle with, particularly vis-à-vis neighborhood.
If you ask people what they think of as their neighborhood, they
tend to respond with a unit of geography that is much too small
to be a basis for any kind of effective collective or political
action. They tend to respond with, "Well, it's my block"
or "It's my block and two other blocks." That's clearly
not a basis around which you build effective political engagement.
On the other hand, if you ask people who their community is, they
are all over the map. African Americans will often respond in
terms of "the black community" regardless of where it
is, and Mexican Americans or Puerto Ricans respond similarly.
The issue is probably one that gets worked out individually, neighborhood
by neighborhood, in terms of how to pull people together, by getting
an intersection of social construct and physical space.
Roger Clay
I'm going to take one more question, then I'm going to ask
the rest of you to ask your questions in the smaller groups that
are going to follow.
Lezlee Matthews
This may be a question that's more appropriate for a smaller
group. In some ways it dovetails with what the other speaker asked
for, which is some sort of mission statement, and in this case,
some discussion about policies that are in place. I was originally
going to direct this question to David Rusk, and perhaps I could
speak with you later to get the answer. I come from Los Angeles,
where I work as a researcher. In an area like L.A., it has been
difficult for the objectives of region-wide job creation strategies
to reach people in poor neighborhoods. Are there specific state
or county policies to make sure that poor neighborhoods get a
fair share of regional jobs?
David Rusk
Was that what you wanted to address in the other groups? I'd
be happy to talk with you, but I thought we were at the point
of moving on.
Roger Clay
I think we'll address that in a smaller group. What's going to happen now is that there will be breakout groups, and panelists will participate in various groups. I'd like to thank the panelists and the audience for participating.