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Race and Place in America

Empowering local institutions can strengthen communities divided by distrust.
Ferguson community

In 1993, Jesse Jackson told fellow Chicago activists: “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

On Brown v. Board of Education’s 50th anniversary, Bill Cosby reminded the NAACP how we all get upset about black “people getting shot in the back of head over a piece of poundcake” and “we’re outraged. The cops shouldn’t have shot him.” But we don’t ask “What the hell was he doing with the poundcake in his hands?”

Responding to criticism from younger protestors about calling for restraint after the recent police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton replied: “To our young folk, we understand the anger. We are angry, but you are not more angry than [the 18 year old shot by a policeman, Michael’s Brown’s] parents … This is not about generation. There are young people who want justice who protest peacefully. Some are angry and out of control, other are taking advantage of it … But let me tell you there is a difference between an activist and a thug.”

There certainly is racism and hatred in American communities but the normal stereotypes are not all that can be said about the matter.

Harvard University’s Ryan Enos has conducted a little experiment in Boston that is relevant. He had two young Mexicans stand on a station talking in Spanish and then board trains leaving in rush hours to white suburbs with few Hispanics over a two-week period. Travelers were given questionnaires before and afterwards and tested against a control group of commuters without the Hispanic testers. They were asked their views on amnesty programs for illegal immigrants, more legal immigration from Mexico, and making English the official language.

Enos’ paper for the National Academy of Science concludes that “exclusionary attitudes can be stimulated by even very minor, noninvasive demographic changes, here even the introduction of only two persons.” Those who witnessed the Mexican travelers were “far more likely” to oppose amnesty and more legal immigration and “somewhat more likely” to support official English. He predicted that the continuing demographic changes throughout the West expected in the future will increase “intergroup exclusion” and conflict, although it may be ameliorated somewhat by the pass of time. Critically, it was not that conservatives became more anti-immigrant but that liberals and moderates came to think more like those on the right, a finding Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Sapolsky found “pretty depressing,” especially coming from Boston.

This, of course, merely confirms Robert Putnam’s classic “E Pluribus Unum” and James Q. Wilson’s “Bowling with Others” research a decade ago that this phenomenon goes well beyond race. As Putnam summarized, “inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors regardless of the color of their skin … to expect the worst of their community and its leaders, to give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith they can make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

A recent survey by Dorceta Taylor of the University of Michigan and paid for by the liberal environmental group Green 2.0 found that even the top progressive private and governmental environmental organizations were race conscious. Of the 3,140 paid staff of the leading groups such as the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Nature Conservancy, 88 percent were white. On their governing boards 95 percent were white. Only 15 percent of staff at green government agencies was non-white. Even the Environmental Protection Agency increased minority representation only for a bit after it was created a half-century ago but could not retain it even with government affirmative laws requiring it to do so.

The Russell Sage Foundation’s Residential Segregation by Income, 1970-2009 by Kendra Bischoff and Sean F. Reardon found that residential income segregation grew by 29 percent over these years. In 1970 only 15 percent of Americans lived in areas of either concentrated poverty or wealth. Today, a third of families live in those extremes and only 42 percent live in middle-class neighborhoods.

While claiming that neighborhood segregation had “ended,” Manhattan Institute for Policy Research’s “The End of the Segregated Century: Racial Separation in America’s Neighborhoods, 1890-2010” by Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor also conceded: “The decline in segregation since 1970 has been no less dramatic than the earlier rise. As of 2010, dissimilarity had declined to its lowest level in a century and isolation to its lowest level in 90 years. This shift does not mean that segregation has disappeared: the typical urban African-American lives in a housing market where more than half the black population would need to move in order to achieve complete integration. The average African-American lives in a neighborhood where the share of population that is black exceeds the metropolitan average by roughly 30 percentage points.”

In education, with all of its laws and efforts directed toward diversity, low-income black children’s isolation has increased. It is a problem of both poverty and race. The share of black students attending schools that are more than 90 percent minority grew from 34 percent in 1989 to 39 percent in 2007. In 1989, black students typically attended schools in which 43 percent of their fellow students were low-income; by 2007, this figure had risen to 59 percent.

So, race is part of the problem of living together but so is economic and cultural choice to be with people like themselves. When diversity is forced or occurs naturally, the minority might be discouraged from becoming part of the community or decide themselves to remain separate, either way promoting alienation and distrust and, occasionally, ending in gunfire and riots. A half-century of national laws to enforce diversity and control its effects have neither increased integration nor community trust. The U.S. Attorney General came to small-town Ferguson representing national power but with little real authority to affect results other than identifying with the victim, inflaming police supporters, but not strongly enough to satisfy followers of Mr. Brown. The Governor flew in with the state police and the National Guard but looked like a foreign occupying power. Is there no other way?

One looks with hope to a new book discussing these and other problems of community titled Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity and Civic Life in Modern America by Wilfred McClay and Ted V. McAllister. The editors see themselves swimming “against the principle currents of our times,” globalized commerce, communications and transportation and trying to finding room for “place” because we are “corporal beings, grounded in the particular.” Sounds promising.

The book grew out of an academic conference, and unfortunately it shows. The editors and authors are very sensitive to their work being viewed as “just a symptom of backward-looking nostalgia” and so they cleave closely to academic specialties so as not to lose a proper scholastic tenor. The general result is very high-level discussion of very narrow academic issues but not much light on building or repairing civic life in modern America. Most pieces assume the current setting of national leadership, local followership and the current structure of local governance that has dominated such discussions for the past century.

Articles by McAllister, Peter Peterson, and William A. Schambra come closest to breaking the mold by tracing our current problem to the founders of modern public administration such as Woodrow Wilson who viewed it as a science to replace the decentralized “parochialism” of earlier America. Even these authors basically equate community to existing local governments, including very large ones. While the remainder of the articles tend to be narrowly academic although often interesting, most end as they initially feared, sounding too much like simple nostalgia. They mostly skirt that local governments themselves are too big, centralized, and bureaucratic—but mostly too big with power not local but at county, state, and national levels.

A Weekly Standard article by Christopher Caldwell is symptomatic of the problem. He traced the present Ferguson disorder to a 1876 decision by St. Louis City not to incorporate the rest of the county under its rule (as the progressives demanded) making “the shortsighted decision to slough their rural precincts” resulting in the 90 current municipalities with their “rinky-dink” forces unable to solve big modern problems. What escapes Caldwell is that the progressives took the other tack of expanding County power to control the municipalities, although St. Louis escaped the worst of the county bureaucratization so dominant elsewhere by allowing the municipalities to survive and have some say in administering the area.

Harvard’s, Indianapolis’, and New York City’s innovative Stephen Goldsmith is mentioned in the Place book but not his concept of “municipal federalism,” to break large and even small cities down to real community levels where citizens have actual power to make decisions. As long as Washington, Jefferson City, and St. Louis County are making the real decisions local citizens will not increase their participation as the Place authors hope. The black citizens of Ferguson saw—or thought they did—who was in charge when the U.S. Attorney General and governor took control. Blacks already have 70 percent of the population and could be in charge of the Ferguson police force already if they thought it was worth the effort. But they left it to Washington.

As Vincent Ostrom’s The Intellectual Crisis in American Public Administration demonstrated, centralization’s single solution cannot substitute for decentralization’s forcing of internal cohesion through compromise or for the external need for cooperation with other governments. Externally, small local governments can contract with other small governments to achieve efficiencies of scale, as noted by the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, and very many have. Small cities have privatized many functions unions would have frustrated in larger units. Small cities can create independent business districts that now represent a large proportion of the country’s office space. National governments simply issue orders to subordinates while locals must compromise with equals.

As George W. Liebmann’s Neighborhood Futures shows, face-to-face groups can resolve internal conflicts because they are facing each other. They can go deeper into the community to form neighborhood associations, street governance committees, amenity cooperatives, neighborhood councils, street closing regimes, block associations and the most popular, Residential Community Associations. Actually more people live under fully voluntary RCAs than live in cities over 200,000 in population; but they are basically invisible to progressive leadership even in counties, much less in Washington.

Empowering local institutions would be radical, questioning the whole progressive assumption that the experts know better. But how long can we ignore that forcing resolution from the top does not allay local fears and actually creates more discord? Militarized police and armed troops do not make for civic peace. Is it not time America finally recognizes what made it great, as the marvelous Alexis de Tocqueville taught us, was that people in free communities actually can resolve matters between themselves better than the experts?

Donald Devine is senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies, the author of America’s Way Back: Reclaiming Freedom, Tradition, and Constitution, and was Ronald Reagan’s director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during his first term.

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