“All Blacks Are Angry”

This chapter examines the continuing disparities between Whites and Blacks through extensive social science data and studies of the impacts of systemic racism. It first utilizes what demographers call the dissimilarity index to measure housing segregation in major metropolitan areas; cities with heavily Black populations, such as Detroit, have become “hyper-segregated” with almost total “social isolation” of Blacks. The chapter then examines the long-standing academic and political debates over the causes of systemic racism, beginning in 1965 with a government report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, by a young Labor Department aide, Daniel Patrick “Pat” Moynihan. He found the main cause of Black poverty and increasing single Black motherhood in the “pathology” of a “matriarchal” Black family structure in which males are neither needed nor welcome. Moynihan’s report spurred an angry rebuttal in a book by psychology professor William Ryan, Blaming the Victim, which found the main cause of Black poverty in the systemic racism of White society and culture. The chapter then looks at social science studies by William Julius Wilson (explaining the “racial invariance” of White and Black crime); psychologist John Dollard (explaining the prevalence of Black-on-Black crime with the “frustration-aggression-displacement” theory); and Black psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobbs (explaining “Black rage” as rooted in White control of institutions that exclude or discriminate against Blacks). The chapter concludes with a look at the War on Drugs of the 1980s and 1990s and the resulting mass incarceration of Black men.

Conscription and the Color Line: Rawls, Race and Vietnam

This article revisits one of John Rawls's rare forays into activist politics, his proposal presented to the Harvard faculty, calling for a denunciation of the “2-S” system of student deferments from conscription. In little-studied archival papers, Rawls argued that the draft both exposed “background” structural racial injustice and constituted a burdening of black Americans that violated the norms of fair cooperation. Rather than obscuring racial injustice and focusing exclusively on economic inequality, as Charles Mills has claimed, Rawls rejected the ascendant conservative views that naturalized black poverty or else attributed it to cultural pathologies in black families. Thus Rawls found nothing illicit in taking the position of a disadvantaged racial group as a relevant comparison when applying his ideal theory to nonideal circumstances. However, I contend in this article that Rawls's account of political philosophy as an attempt to find a consensus may be similarly ideological, leading him to displace the reality of conflict through begging descriptions, expressivist formulations, and historical romanticism.

The News Media and the Racialization of American Poverty

Poverty in America today is widely viewed through a racial lens. But that was not always the case. Throughout most of the nation’s history, public discussion of poverty ignored African Americans. In this chapter, the authors examine the racialization of poverty in the US news media. Building on previous research, they focus on the 1960s as the critical time in which the American media began to focus on Black poverty. Based on a collection of over twelve thousand news stories on poverty from four major daily newspapers, they find that both coverage of poverty and attention to Black poverty in local news largely paralleled the trends revealed in earlier studies of national newsmagazines. Specifically, they find that attention to poverty (irrespective of race) increased dramatically in the mid-1960s (a time when actual poverty rates were in decline); that poverty coverage became racialized during this same period, with a substantial increase in references to African Americans between the mid- and late 1960s; and that, for the most part, the racialization of poverty coverage followed similar patterns in newspapers with lower and higher proportions of African Americans in their metropolitan areas.

A Culture of Poverty

Chapter 3 traces the history of the idea of a culture of poverty while unpacking its racist content. Of particular importance is Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his report on the black family, known as the Moynihan Report. Chapter 3 explores how Moynihan distilled various tropes and memes in articulating a theory of black poverty that placed the primary blame on the supposed pathologies of the black family and community. Chapter 3 also explains the background of that idea and how the various versions of it differed, looking at the writing and work of Oscar Lewis, Michael Harrington, and Kenneth Clark among others. Also emphasized is how the culture of poverty idea allowed liberals to sidestep the issue of the role of capitalism and the market in black poverty, making it very effective for maintaining racial capitalism even during the height of the challenge from below the civil rights movement presented.

Introduction

The Introduction lays out the subject matter of the book, identifies key assumptions and methodological choices, presents the core arguments, and identifies the intended audience for the book. It opens with the story of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s famous speech on black poverty at Howard University to introduce the subject matter. It then articulates the argument that liberalism is historically entwined with racism, and that American liberalism is much more intertwined with conservativism than is generally recognized, and that the concept of racial capitalism is particularly useful for understanding this. The Introduction makes clear that the book is an intellectual history of postwar liberal thinking on black poverty, particularly the idea of a culture of poverty.

Justice and Residential Segregation

The built environment in cities and the distribution of individuals within it have profound implications for the prospect of justice. Racial residential segregation raises issues of justice because of both how it came about and how it limits the quality of life for many African Americans. Some scholars argue that the solution to the disadvantages of concentrated black poverty is to “deconcentrate” the urban poor through housing vouchers. This chapter criticizes this approach as both impractical and as entailing significant costs to African Americans that are too often ignored or down-played. A better approach is to improve conditions in poor neighborhoods.

The Lack of Political Activism Among Today’s Black Student-Athlete

The period of 1968-1972 was the only period in American sport history that black athletes were outwardly committed to the struggle for liberation and equality. Throughout American history, the black athlete has been socialized to be politically unconscious, inactive, and docile. During the era in which Dr. Harry Edwards led the revolt of the black athletes, the activism of the athletes matched the injustices that existed in American society. With the rise of the prison industrial complex, racial profiling, the extraordinary racial disparities in the criminal justice system, the disdain of our former black president, ubiquitous black poverty, and the incessant incidents of police brutality, this article examines how the activism of today’s black student-athletes does not match the glaring injustices that exist in American society. The protest by the University of Missouri’s football team in 2015, which resulted in the president of the university resigning, highlighted the power of black student-athletes when their voice is collective, animated, and purposeful. NCAA Division I athletics has become a $10 billion industry and black-student athletes are responsible for generating a significant amount of this revenue. Today, they have the leverage, influence, and power to change many policies that affect their own development and the condition of those in their communities. This paper examines the lack of activism and political consciousness among today’s black-student athletes.

Epilogue

This epilogue considers the developments in racial progress since the decades covered in this volume. It shows how millions of African Americans find themselves mired in poverty and trapped in a world shaped by post-industrial urban decline and the retrenchment of the welfare state, their chances for a better future severely constrained by the failure of public education and the persistence of discriminatory practices in employment, housing, credit and insurance markets, the criminal justice system, and a range of public institutions. Having more African Americans holding elected office, working in corporate management positions, owning their own businesses, or working and studying on college campuses over the past few decades has not substantially undermined structural inequality or cyclical black poverty.

Surrogate Suburbs

The story of white flight and the neglect of black urban neighbourhoods has been well told by urban historians in recent decades. Yet much of this scholarship has downplayed black agency and tended to portray African Americans as victims of structural forces beyond their control. In this history of Cleveland's black middle class, Todd Michney uncovers the creative ways that members of this nascent community established footholds in areas outside the overcrowded, inner-city neighbourhoods to which most African Americans were consigned. In asserting their right to these outer-city spaces, African Americans appealed to city officials, allied with politically progressive whites (notably Jewish activists), and relied upon both black and white developers and real estate agents to expand these "surrogate suburbs" and maintain their liveability until the bona fide suburbs became more accessible. By tracking the trajectories of those who, in spite of racism, were able to succeed, Michney offers a valuable counterweight to histories that have focused on racial conflict and black poverty and tells the neglected story of the black middle class in America's cities prior to the 1960s.