A Way Out: America's Ghettos and the Legacy of Racism

Part 1
WHAT SHOULD BE DONE FOR THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN LEFT BEHIND?--Owen Fiss
There is so much to celebrate in America. The nation is the strongest and most prosperous the world has ever known. We have enjoyed the blessings of a constitutional democracy for more than two hundred years. Civil society is endowed with effective and vibrant private institutions. The United States economy is highly productive and is the locomotive that drives the world economy. With a remarkably high standard of living, we are imbued with the sense of power and satisfaction that comes from having so many of the things that money can buy--travel, leisure, cars, and beautiful homes.
In the shadow of this glory, profound problems persist, some close to the core of our civilization. Perhaps the most glaring is the presence in our cities of communities known as ghettos. The persons living in the typical ghetto are black, but, even more significant, they are poor. Many are on welfare, and even those who work tend to earn amounts that place them beneath the poverty line. As a consequence, the housing stock is old and dilapidated, retail establishments scarce, crime rates high, gangs rampant, drugs plentiful, and jobs in short supply.
Living under such adverse conditions tests the human spirit. It demands resiliency and ingenuity, and a fair measure of faith. The survivors are often strong and determined individuals, who, through hard work and the elemental bonds of love and friendship, have made a life in the inner city for themselves and their families. The ghetto is their home. It has also been home for some of America's most talented writers and artists. Yet alongside these individual truths is a collective one, vividly and poignantly described by James Baldwin forty years ago in Letter from a Region in My Mind. The ghettos of America were produced by the most blatant racial exclusionary practices. As a vestige of our unique and unfortunate racial history, they continue to isolate and concentrate the most disadvantaged and, through this very isolation and concentration, perpetuate and magnify that disadvantage.
Since the time that Baldwin wrote and during the Second Reconstruction--the period in American history begun by Brown v. Board of Education--some black families have managed to flee the confines of the ghetto, as Baldwin and the most gifted of his generation once did. These families now live in more upscale neighborhoods, a few integrated, the others predominantly black. The poor and jobless have remained behind in the ghetto, their numbers swollen and their plight worsened as both jobs and those who succeeded economically left the inner city. Housing stock aged, social institutions deteriorated, and crime escalated. By concentrating and isolating the poor and jobless, the ghetto turned neighbors on each other and, over time, created a sector of the black community known as the underclass. The members of this class suffer from a multitude of disadvantages that can ultimately be traced to racial discrimination and its economic consequences. Those disadvantages prevent them from enjoying the splendor of America or improving their position. They are the worst off in our society, and their plight stands as an affront to the ideal of equality embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment.
Many strategies have been devised for addressing the needs of the underclass, some even tried. All are imperfect. The disparity between the magnitude of the problems and the modesty of the proposed remedies is simply overwhelming. The most tempting are those that leave the ghetto intact while attempting to improve the day-to-day life of those who remain confined there. Examples of such remedies include creating jobs, allocating new resources to local schools, and strengthening the enforcement of the criminal laws. What all these remedies overlook, however, is that the ghetto itself is a structure of subordination, which, by isolating and concentrating the most disadvantaged, creates the very dynamics that render the quality of life of those forced to live in it so miserable and their prospect for success so bleak.
The only strategy with any meaningful chance of success is one that ends the ghetto as a feature of American life. Pursuing this remedy requires providing those who are trapped in the ghetto with the economic resources necessary to move to better neighborhoods--black or white--if they so choose. With the means to move, most will leave, and that will be enough to break the concentration of mutually reinforcing destructive forces--poverty, joblessness, crime, poorly functioning social institutions--that turn the ghetto into a structure of subordination. The physical space that once belonged to the ghetto quickly will be reclaimed by developers and transformed into a new, up-and-coming neighborhood.