The Real World / Patriotic Materialism
Wattenberg, Ben J.
acter." It also places a premium on what amounts to the maintenance of segregation, since integration makes it more difficult to draw districts by race. It assumes that...
...White attitudes toward blacks have also changed...
...It's where schools aide better...
...My sense is that blacks are making progress because of their own hard work in a society that rather suddenly "opened up" for them...
...In the course of 20 years, half move out, either to suburbs or to better in-city neighborhoods...
...Oddly enough, that same very healthy move to the suburbs has created bigger-than-ever problems in the worst areas of the big-city slums...
...And despite all the recent talk about cuts in " t h e programs," the reality of black life in America has much improved in recent years...
...A neighborhood whose bright, ambitious, and stable members have moved upward and onward is a sick area, even if the statistics are better...
...in a district election, a citizen is confined to influencing only his district's outcome...
...When that opportunity was made available, millions of blacks took advantage of it...
...Whitney Young of the Urban League once told me that Martin Luther King had told him, "Never forget that Negroes in America are materialistic, religious, and patriotic...
...And some of the whites are just moving to farther-out suburbs to be away from blacks...
...Now, it would be terribly misleading to suggest that these six million black people are all grilling steaks in the spacious backyards of four-bedroom split-levels with full two-car garages...
...This would be a splendid alternative...
...During the same time the number of blacks went up by 44 percent...
...Remember, that's where June Allyson and Fred MacMurray wanted to get the little white house with the picket fence...
...All in all, it's a pretty good statistical index of where, to use an ugly phrase from market research, the up-scale people live...
...And people living in small apartments...
...That explains a lot...
...today, there are six million...
...E-?, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1982 27...
...But when you visit a neighborhood of worst-area-stayers, that is not what you sense or feel...
...The move to the suburbs shouldn't surprise anyone...
...So, too, in the suburbs...
...There is no shortage of doctors in suburbia...
...Civil rights lobbyists started out last year by saying tha:t they wanted the Voting Rights Act extended as is, no changes allowed...
...In addition, minimum wages went way up, Social Security has also escalated sharply and in a way that particularly helps the elderly poor...
...Try to visualize it: Suppose 100 blacks lived in a " b a d " inner-city slum neighborhood in, say, 1960...
...There is also little doubt that they have been catching up...
...And crime...
...Most folks there own a spot of green...
...percent of blacks living in suburbs...
...Few politicians have had the courage to ask many questions, and the Reagan Administration is, given its handling of tax exemption for racially discriminatory schools, in a tenuous position to rally opposition...
...By 1978 the white Americans holding that essentially nonracist view had climbed to 70 percent...
...the 1980 data shows 23 percent...
...Two thoughts occur to me about these developments, one about blacks in suburbs, another about blacks in slums...
...The white noose has become a polka-dot scarf...
...In the society as a whole, there is no question that blacks are still behind whites...
...Interestingly, the statistical portrait not only of leavers but of stayers may have improved...
...There were about four million blacks in suburbs in 1970...
...race--precisely what the legislation would prevent voters from doing...
...It is ungracious and unfair to suggest that those black advances were simply bestowed by an almighty government passing out goodies to assuage earlier guilt...
...What happens is that in a s t r a n g e way both the appearance and reality by Ben J. Wattenberg of those worst neighborhoods become even worse...
...The House bill thus invites a sort of separate but equal politics--hardly what the architects of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 envisioned...
...Which is not a bad description of whites, either...
...The ones who leave are the ambitious, the educated, the healthy, the well-employed, the leaders of the church, and the Boy Scouts...
...But in the short term, the hurricane swirls into the vacuum...
...The blacks moving to the suburbs are machinists, policemen, salesmen, teachers, computer programmers, and auto workers, many of them in families with both husband and wife working damn hard to make ends meet, with children who are, or will be, attending college at almost the same rate as whites...
...Disproportionally, the aged, the unemployed, the ill-employed, the sick, the broken families, as well as the social and criminal derelicts--winos, bums, junkies, muggers...
...Afrer all, in the last two decades a vast array of services has been introduced to help the poor: Medicaid, rent supplements, food stamps, to name but a few...
...That unfortunately still leaves about 30 percent of whites who don't like blacks, but the numbers have changed in a big way...
...They have poor people...
...Further, the House bill unfairly implies that at-large systems are inherently inferior to district electoral schemes...
...Its economy and its values both erode...
...Civil rights leaders have turned the House bill into an emotional issue, urging its passage with sermons, marches, and so on...
...A Louis Harris poll from 1963 showed that about half of the whites in America (47 percent) would be upset "only a little" or "not at a l l " if "blacks moved into this neighborhood...
...The move-to-suburbia numbers show that quite clearly...
...The issue seems to be in the hands of the Senate, but fortunately there may be an easy way out for all those senators nervous about opposing the House bill...
...For whatever solace it is, that seems to be the way social progress in America works, for blacks and for whites...
...The census results show that from 1970 to 1980 the number of whites living in suburbs went up by 13 percent...
...Blacks are still proportionately less likely to live there than whites, but the trend is clear...
...Who stays...
...The 1970 census showed 18 Ben J. Wattenberg is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...It assumes that proportional representation by race will result in greater legislative benefits for blacks and other minorities, although for this to happen minority representatives would have to form coalitions not based or...
...1761761761 THE REAL WORLD PATRIOTIC MATERIALISM The lily-white suburbs aren't...
...You don't have to love "big government" to accept the fact that these programs have helped poor people become less poor...
...But it's also true that suburbia was, is, and will be the locale of the American dream...
...Those are opinions, but those views are backed up by data concerning housing, jobs, and education--and income too, although the data there gets tricky...
...Blacks have made progress in America...
...In an at-large election, a citizen can cast votes in every election, and thus influence every outcome...
...Wattenberg's hi-monthly United Feature Syndicate column...
...Suburbs aren't like that...
...Blacks were denied that equal opportunity in America for centuries...
...In an NBC-Associated Press public-opinion poll of blacks last year, 60 percent of the respondents said that blacks in America are "better off" than ten years ago versus 17 percent who said blacks were "worse off...
...If opportunity long denied becomes available, if many blacks take advantage of opportunity, if they accordingly leave the bad neighborhoods in which they lived--what happens...
...Historically, when Americans become better off, they move to the suburbs...
...Do well, move o u t . Over the long haul it works out pretty well...
...This article is adapted from Mr...
Vol. 15 • April 1982 • No. 4
