The Ghetto, the State, and the New Capitalist Economy
Wacquant, Loï'c J. D.
People in ghettos don't create [the ghettos]. Those who have and don't give create them. Most people are prejudiced. Those on the outside just play games with poor people's lives. They try to keep...
...Just over half of them live in a household that declared less than $7,500 of yearly income, and an overwhelming majority of 79 percent have experienced either a degradation or no improvement in their financial status in the previous three years, that is, during the supposedly sturdy economic growth of the mid-eighties...
...And that's not all drug money—that's desperation for food money...
...38 Cited in Bob Blauner, Black Lives, White Lives, p. 175...
...Cited in Bob Blauner, Black Lives, White Lives, p. 174...
...Brick, young resident of Chicago's South Side.' In the two decades since the urban riots of the mid-sixties, the black ghettos of large American cities have undergone a sharp deterioration...
...Today's inner city is in good part the accumulated and contradictory product of the effects, intended and unintended, of the urban, educational, and social policies followed by federal, state, and local governments in the postwar era...
...This being said, there is no denying that the accelerating decline of the inner city finds its deepest roots in the ongoing structural transformation of American capitalism...
...Social isolation means that ghetto residents lack parents, friends, and acquaintances who are stably employed and can therefore function as diversified ties to firms, critical at a time when labor recruiting practices are becoming more and FALL • 1989 • 515 more formal, by telling them about a possible opening and assisting them in applying and retaining a job...
...For example, from 1958 to 1982, the number of production workers in New York City dropped from 670,000 to 311,000 ( — 54 percent...
...In the past four decades, the American economy has not only grown erratically, experiencing seven recession years and posting a secular increase in unemployment and stagnation in real wages...
...Public policies in transportation and housing have been directly or indirectly instrumental in (re)creating and concentrating persistent poverty in the ghetto...
...10 Quoted in Robert Blauner, Black Lives, White Lives, p. 185...
...277-78 and pp...
...credentialed position...
...For comparable evidence on another city, see Harriett Taggart and Kevin Smith, "Redlining: An Assessment of the Evidence in Metropolitan Boston," Urban Affairs Quarterly, 17(1), 1981, pp...
...The persistence of poverty, particularly among black Americans, can be addressed only by new universal policies—and correspondingly broad political coalitions—that transcend the limits of the New Deal system...
...9 Shut out by the schools and unable to obtain legitimate employment, inner-city black males drop out of the labor market in droves, turn to hustling, crime, and to the underground economy: "The drugs are the only place our folk can get jobs or earn money...
...Here, we want to emphasize how its internal constitution has also been altered...
...34 The dwindling presence of regularly employed households and individuals makes it more difficult for those who remain mired behind to sustain resident institutions...
...For sociolinguist William Labov, the fact that "the majority of inner-city blacks are diverging from and not converging with the dominant linguistic pattern" is evidence of their decreasing contacts with the dominant culture...
...4 June Axinn and Mark J. Stern, Dependency and Poverty: Old Problems in a New World (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1988...
...See, I was there when you could sleep in the park all night and nobody wouldn't bother your pocketbook...
...2° Not surprisingly, many of those who are wary of inner-city black males are more favorably disposed toward black females, whom they see as more reliable and willing to take on low-paying jobs because of the weight of their family responsibilities...
...Young people should be able to get jobs, young people need to be given an opportunity not to become animals...
...An important mediation of educational and job success (especially in an economy increasingly oriented toward personal services that require frequent face-to-face interaction and extensive social skills of self-management and communication) is language...
...When a child enters school and faces the problem of learning to read and write the standard language, unknown and unrecognized differences in the structural base can interfere with the cognitive process of learning to read and deepen the problem of establishing sound social and emotional relations to the school system...
...A mere 14 percent of them belong to a household with incomes above $25,000 per annum (compared to a national median annual income of $31,000 for white families and $18,000 for blacks...
...Whether this marks the "end of organized capitalism," the exhaustion of the mass production paradigm, the transition to a "postindustrial" form of capitalism," or one component of an inevitable cycle of economic "long waves" a la Kondratieff, there has occurred a recentering of the political economy of large American cities around services and credential-intensive industries, dispersed production sites, and high-velocity capital...
...Any realistic attempt at progressive reform here needs to take into account the peculiar legacy of American state formation and social policy experience...
...9 Designs for Change, The Bottom Line: Chicago's Failing Schools and How to Save Them, Chicago, Chicago School Watch, Research Report #1, 1985...
...Not only did some 5,000 factories close down or leave Chicago in this period...
...The gravity of the situation of the ghetto calls for bold experimentation, of the mind and in reality, not for fine tuning and modest expansion of existing interventions...
...196-199...
...Troy Duster reports that there are now more black males in America's jails and penitentiaries than in classrooms on four-year college campuses...
...8 Interview by LoIc J.D...
...We also observe a resurgence of racism at the bottom of the job ladder which hampers the efforts of inner-city blacks (and young black males in particular) to enter the labor force...
...Thus in the San Franciso Bay Area, a black community worker reports: "See those guys standing over there in the street right now...
...44-56, quote p. 50...
...32 The Transformed Social-Institutional Structure of the Ghetto According to the model of urban sociologists Logan and Molotch, "[N]eighborhood futures are determined by the ways in which entrepreneurial pressures from outside intersect with internal material stakes and sentimental attachments...
...Banks, for instance, have pumped and continue to pump money out of black neighborhoods by taking in far more deposits than they give out in the form of home mortgages and they have, over the years, financed a disproportionately small amount of home purchasing in the inner city...
...The panic created among city and state politicians and officials by Sears's threat to move out of Chicago is emblematic of this strategy...
...those that stayed on or developed there had a different occupational mix and a notably greater capital intensity, so that the number of employees per establishment dropped by 11 percent while the number of blue-collar jobs per firm declined sharply from 46 to 33 production workers on average (a 28 percent cut...
...36 Pierre Bourdieu ("Les trois etats du capital culture]," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 30, 1979, pp...
...Many expanding companies transfer their establishments out of central cities or locate new plants and offices in areas where few blacks live so that they can avail themselves of a predominantly white work force that will be more pliable and less likely to unionize (historically, blacks have often proved more prone to unionize and engage in collective action to defend their economic rights...
...As historian Kenneth Jackson has noted in his Crabgrass Frontier, 25 the de-urbanization of America was considerably aided by the Highway Act of 1956, which intensified the dispersal of urban residence and employment and accelerated the downward spiral of public transportation...
...Oh, boy...
...47 Most important, we must no longer be fainthearted in our defense of demoFALL • 1989 • 517 cratic social policies by the state and we must never again let the free-market dogmas and delusions of conservatives set the tone and terms of the debate...
...28 Similar observations could be made about the role of school policies: Sustained public action toward educational integration of ghetto blacks never materialized either at the federal or at the local level...
...to Capital Mobility, the Deconcentration of Metropolitan Economies, and the Casualization of Labor The plight of the ghetto is the outcome of a complex interaction of economic, social, and political factors and no monocausal theory will ever satisfactorily account for it...
...They lie and say people don't want to work...
...Instead of addressing the structural factors that are producing inner-city dislocations, including the tenacious and rising economic insecurity of meager pay and joblessness, policy advocates have fastened on the personal 516 • DISSENT characteristics of ghetto residents...
...thirty years later, a mere 6,200 blue-collar workers remained and 73 percent of the residents were out of a job...
...There is no way to quantify the demoralization effect of persistent economic and sociocultural exclusion but everything indicates that it is one of the heaviest human costs of the marginalization of the ghetto...
...As a result, numerous inner-city adolescents routinely become involved with gangs and crime rather than work at an early age...
...With all the CETA programs and everything, we have not raised the level of ninety percent of the young blacks out there...
...in Detroit from 145,000 to a mere 59,000 ( — 59 percent...
...in Richard B. Freeman and Harry J. Holzer, eds., The Black Youth Employment Crisis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp...
...3-6...
...Threefourths cannot claim to possess even a single one of the following financial assets: a personal checking or savings account, an individual retirement account or pension plan, stocks and bonds, or a prepaid burial...
...1-2...
...147, my emphasis...
...By 1982, the 510 • DISSENT Table 2. Deindustrialization in Chicago, 1954-1982 1954 1967 1977 1982 Manufacturing establishments 10,288 8,455 6,378 5,203 Total manufacturing employment ( x 103 ) 616 546 366 277 Production workers in manufacturing ( x 103 ) 469 382 241 172 Employees per establishment 59.9 64.6 57.4 53.2 Production workers per establishment 45.6 45.2 37.8 33.0 Source: U. S. Bureau of the Census, County and City Data Book (Washington, D. C., G. P. 0., various years...
...12 In the meantime, the industrial fabric of the suburbs and exurbs of Chicago was flourishing: from 1963 to 1982, the number of manufacturing establishments doubled to 8,700, one and a half-times the city figure...
...Wacquant and William Julius Wilson, "The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in the Inner City," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 501, January 1989, pp...
...the internal structure and societal position of the black population...
...265-284, quotes pp...
...As the recent "racial transition" of Austin, an area located on the edge of Chicago's West Side, demonstrates, racial and class isolation in the ghetto is also helped by, and expands, as an outgrowth of the routine practices of panic peddling and racial steering of the real estate industry, of the redlining of banks and insurance companies, and of laws that encourage unscrupulous "slum lords" to milk their property for tax benefits while the federal government sits idle in the face of blatant and repeated violations of fair-housing laws...
...The historical roots of this vision, which turns a societal problem into a question of individual attributes and incentives, is explored provocatively by Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward in "Sources of the Contemporary Relief Debate," in Fred Block et al., The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State (New York: Pantheon, 1988...
...771-792, quote p. 789...
...19 David Bensman and Roberta Lynch, Rusted Dreams: Hard Times in a Steel Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp...
...Robert Blauner's remarkable collection of interviews with blacks over a twenty-year period, Black Lives, White Lives: Three Decades of Race Relations in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), brings out time and again the notion that "this is a worse kind of ghetto...
...Highrise housing projects, created, in large part, to rehouse FALL • 1989 • 513 fugitives from "renewed" areas, literally lined up State Street for miles as a new, vertical ghetto supplemented the old...
...Both of these trends were in turn abetted and aggravated by state retrenchment: By reneging on the promise of equality of access to housing and education, by limiting eligibility, and by rolling back sorely needed welfare programs, federal and local governments have contributed to the deepening and concentration of ghetto poverty...
...In 1950, fully one-third of all black workers in Chicago were operatives...
...their residents have suffered a reduction of real income, sharp increases in joblessness, and record rates of welfare receipt (even though the real dollar value of AFDC in the state was halved between 1970 and 1987...
...The ensuing 1954 Housing Act "oriented the urban renewal program toward central-city business interests and the needs of other dominant institutions like hospitals and universities...
...This mass bleeding of industrial jobs in the central city was further amplified by a loss of trade employment (a 33 percent cut, from 332,000 down to 221,000 jobs) that the mild growth in selected services (an additional 55,000 jobs or + 46 percent, excluding health, financial, and social services in which few uneducated blacks find employ) could not offset...
...157-174, and "Bein' Wrapped Too Tight: When Low-Income Women Drop Out of High School," in Lois Weis, ed., Dropouts in Schools: Issues, Dilemmas, Solutions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988...
...Such disciplining, in Foucault's sense of the term, will do little to alleviate the plight of inner-city minorities, for "it is not deviance—culture of poverty—that is keeping most poor blacks down, but the persistence of unemployment and the spread of low-wage, unsteady employment...
...40 Through a rough, practical "spontaneous statistic," ghetto residents come progressively to evaluate their objective chances of escaping poverty and to adjust their social and economic conduct to the closed opportunity structure they face...
...42 The current debate on the so-called "black underclass" has been paradigmatic of this myopia...
...17 Daniel T. Lichter, "Racial Differences in Underemployment in American Cities," American Journal of Sociology, 93(4), January 1988, pp...
...14 Barry Bluestone, "Deindustrialization and Unemployment in America," The Review of Black Political Economy, 17 (2), Fall 1988, pp...
...102-103...
...Half have not completed their high school education and six in ten are currently on the welfare rolls...
...See LoIc J.D...
...Owning a home and an automobile, two staples of the "American dream," also remain out of the reach of an overwhelming majority of ghetto blacks...
...It be a fast way...
...33-67), for a particularly lucid and sophisticated restatement of this ecological model, and David T. Ellwood, 518 • DISSENT "The Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis: Are there Teenage Jobs Missing in the Ghetto...
...They don't realize they are cutting their own necks too...
...24 Whether it be through regulatory programs (zoning, growth control, environmental impact reports, and so on) or federal incentives (public housing and urban renewal programs, urban development action grants, block grants and revenue sharing, tax increment redevelopment and industrial bonds), local and federal governments have pushed urban policies that have overwhelmingly benefited entrepreneurs, land rentiers, and other local and regional elites at the expense of poor residents...
...18 Thomas D. Boston provides evidence of this in his Race, Class, and Conservatism (Boston: Unwin and Hyman, 1988...
...This was done by shifting capital from one corporate division to another, by disinvesting in one industry to reinvest in another, and FALL • 1989 511 by relocating in those southern states with "right-to-work" legislation, to rural regions, or to cheap foreign production sites.I 4 The proliferation of enterprise zones and subcontracting, the resurgence of sweatshops and domestic labor from the mid-seventies on, evidence these efforts to escape standard labor legislation and lower the wage bill...
...and the public policies that mediate between them and help shape both...
...16 See Alejandro Portes and John Walton, Labor, Class, and the International System (New York, Wiley, 1981), and Sassia Sassen-Koob, "Recomposition and Peripheralization at the Core," Contemporary Marxism, 5, 1982, pp...
...In the core of the city's South Side, blue-collar workers (operatives, laborers, craftsmen and foremen combined) numbered over 42,000 and over half of all adults were employed...
...Its centerpiece would have to be "a qualitatively defined full employment,"46 including provision of public employment when necessary, and, short of this, a national guaranteed minimum income of the kind instituted by numerous Western European countries to weather the transition to the new world and domestic economic order...
...In the third part, I argue that this new configuration of forces—economic, social, and political—has effected an institutional transformation of the ghetto that effectively dooms ever-larger numbers of inner-city residents to prolonged social marginality and economic redundancy...
...70-102...
...520 • DISSENT...
...6 These data are based on a survey of a multistage random sample of black residents of Chicago's poverty areas, ages 18 to 45 conducted by the Urban Poverty and Family Structure Project at the University of Chicago (under the direction of William Julius Wilson...
...The prevalence of joblessness weakens the perception of a meaningful connection between education and work and decreases academic aspirations accordingly, making it exceedingly difficult for the school to compete with other available sources of income and status, including illegal ones...
...First, the system has become the near exclusive preserve of the most underprivileged categories of the urban population: The current enrollment of Chicago's public schools is over 82 percent black and Hispanic and 70 percent of all pupils come from families who live under the official poverty line...
...Shortly after Sears announced it was considering relocating its 6,600 jobs elsewhere, possibly to Raleigh, Charlotte or Dallas, Mayor Daley and Republican Governor Thompson joined hands in packaging an assistance plan (some might call it a hand-out) worth an estimated $300 million, including 80 acres of prime property near O'Hare Airport virtually for nothing, free site and infrastructural improvements, new highway access, a property tax abatement, job training subsidies and enterprise zone incentives (Chicago Tribune, June 15, 1989, Business section, pp...
...26 This is particularly conspicuous in Chicago, where the primary beneficiaries of the "slum clearance" campaign included, inter alia, the large Loop business concerns, the Michael Reese Hospital, the New York Life Insurance Company, and the University of Chicago, all of which contributed to the destruction of surrounding black neighborhoods of the South Side...
...5 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, The New Class War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982...
...cit., p. 192...
...21 Many of these new forms of racial closure indirectly affect the inner city by shutting it out from economic development and are difficult to discern as they cloak themselves in the more acceptable and seemingly meritocratic language of class prejudice and lack of proper cultural credentials...
...Rather than revive once more the perennial conservative discourse of moral obligations and individual initiative, we must muster the imagination and political will to try out new ideas and to pass innovative legislation by learning, not turning away, from the successes of other capitalist democracies...
...Both of these premises do not withstand for one second the test of careful empirical investigation, historical analysis and cross-national comparison...
...1 -13...
...For while the programs that are urgently needed to expand social and economic opportunity and turn the tide of inequality—in the inner city and beyond—will no doubt be costly to the public coffers, they do not begin to compare to the economic, social, and human costs of the current do-nothing policy...
...you know, uh . . . They make a lot of money, fast...
...Members of any group suffering from an unusual degree of unemployment or underemployment have the problem that friends will be disproportionately un- or under-employed, and thus in a poor position to offer job information" 38 or to recommend them for a position...
...Those are young men—they don't have any jobs...
...27 The devastating impact of urban renewal on poor urban minorities is beyond question and we continue to pay its price today, for it has entrenched ghettos, solidified segregation, and concentrated poverty...
...See my discussion of the fate of the adjacent neighborhood of North Lawndale in "Poverty, Joblessness, and the Social Transformation of the Inner City...
...Wacquant for the Urban Poverty and Family Structure Project, summer 1987...
...Blacks now are beginning to go into banks and rob...
...43 David Ward has unearthed the "long ancestry" of such views, "going back to the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when the first wave of mass immigration from Europe exacerbated anxieties about the social order," in his remarkable book, Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840-1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989...
...46 Michael Harrington, "The First Steps and a Few Beyond," Dissent, Winter 1988, pp...
...275-302...
...When we look at the divergence of black and white vernaculars in the inner city, we see conflict without contact, and therefore conflict without structure...
...This displacement of manufacturing by service industries and the geographical relocation of firms is part of the globalization of production processes, the internationalization of competition, and the attenuation of regional economies...
...late 1970s and 1980s, as the American economy replaced its crumbling industrial base by a plethora of low-wage and part-time jobs...
...Sheila B. Kamerman and Alfred J. Kahn ("What Europe Does for Single-Parent Families," Transatlantic Perspectives, 19, Spring 1989, pp...
...2 The woes of the inner city are the result of profound changes in three interrelated sets of factors: the economic forces that impinge upon the urban core...
...As of 1986-87, conditions in Chicago's ghetto continued to worsen in spite of the national economic recovery and reached unprecedented levels of hardship and deprivation (See Table 1...
...For moving accounts of how joblessness erodes the ability to be a father, a husband, and to maintain a sense of self-worth as "a man" in the black community, see the interviews in Blauner, Black Lives, White Lives...
...45 Thus the peculiar paradox of the politics of American social provision: It is necessary to provide for the majority in order to help the most disadvantaged minority...
...88-100...
...Living in a neighborhood plagued by material decay and continued exclusion from the economy makes it arduous to maintain a commitment to the labor force and a belief in the rosy promises of "mainstream" society...
...48-58) also discusses the impact of male joblessness upon family life...
...39 All of these objective transformations are in turn further reinforced by changes in the subjective experiences and aspirations of ghetto residents...
...There is more than a touch of irony in the fact that the term "underclass," which has recently been consecrated as the new label to designate an allegedly new, if ill-defined, "group" of inner-city poor, is also used in criminology to refer to the regular jail population —unbeknownst to most specialists of the "underclass...
...While it would be preposterous to maintain that some authority has deliberately plotted to manufacture the current ghetto havoc, it would be equally naive to overlook the considerable degree of historical and political agency involved in its creation...
...42 This aspect of the transformation of American politics is discussed by Thomas Byrne Edsall in The New Politics of Inequality (New York: W.W...
...Poverty concentration and social isolation thus exert a cumulative negative effect on work opportunities and mobility that goes well beyond the mere shortcomings of aggregate job supply...
...In their report on the collapse of the steel industry in South Chicago, for instance, Bensman and Lynch note that "the impact on black steelworkers was even greater because the mills had been an even larger source of jobs for them...
...The sixties gave us people in higher places," reflects a former inhabitant of Chicago's ghetto, "but the rank and file is worse off than they was then...
...48 Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, "The Future of Social Policy in the United States: Political Constraints and Possibilities," in their edited volume, The Politics of Social Provision in the United States, op...
...29 Instead of instituting comprehensive schooling and job training measures, the state has responded to the rise in social disorientation and crime that has come along with the increased marginalization of ghetto youth with a de facto penal policy, i.e., by stepping up incarceration...
...Decaying neighborhoods were torn down, their inhabitants were shunted off to other quarters, and the land upon which they stood was used for middle-class housing and institutional expansion...
...33 We have seen how, in the last half-century, economic and political pressures have downgraded the commodity status of the inner city in the urban system (especially in the rent-generation process) and undermined its traditional material underpinnings...
...In the first place, the ghetto has lost much of its already limited economic and social resources as a consequence of the outmigration of working- and middle-class black families...
...The combination of suburbanization and city incorporation patterns emphasizing home rule, for instance, has sufficed to create fiscal disparities that aggravate and entrench the geography of privilege and set off a vicious cycle that keeps fueling racial and class segregation in the metropolis...
...The lowering of the class composition of the student body and of the volume of "cultural capital" that children bring into the classroom from the outside has substantially diminished objective chances of academic success...
...3 To be sure, this is only part of a broader shift toward a hardening of class and racial cleavages in the This paper in based in part on a lecture entitled "Capitalist Transformation and the Hyperghettoization of the Inner City," delivered at Harvard University in February of 1989...
...Long and repeated spells of forced unemployment, a succession of low-paying jobs, and the persistent economic insecurity that come with them are experiences that go a long way toward explaining the reluctance of many inner-city blacks to keep making efforts at finding stable employment...
...And they still come in...
...Mercer Sullivan ("Absent Fathers in the Inner City," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 501, January 1989, pp...
...Today, less than one percent of the federal budget is expended on either training and job programs or education...
...Furthermore, the job tenures of the privileged minority who are employed are frequently too short for them to accumulate useful job contacts...
...Not only have employment openings been drastically reduced in the ghetto due to the demise of hundreds of local businesses, service establishments and stores...
...We have dropouts...
...58-78...
...8-25, for further precisions on this survey and a more detailed sociography of Chicago's ghetto that contrasts it with other working- and lower-middle class black neighborhoods...
...6 In the communities that make up the historic core of Chicago's Black Belt, most adults do not hold a job and only a tiny fraction of them (6 percent) enjoy employ in a white-collar, Table 1. Economic Exclusion and Deprivation in Chicago's Ghetto (1986-87) Percentage All respondents Females Class position not employed 61 69 working class 33 21 middle class did not finish high school 6 51 10 50 Public aid on aid when a child 41 44 currently on aid 58 69 receives food stamps 60 70 Assets household income 51 59 <$7,500 finances not improved or worse 79 80 has checking account 12 10 has savings account 18 14 household owns home 121 8 household owns a car 34 26 Source: Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey, 1987...
...John Mollenkopf has highlighted federal responsibility in suburbanization through the subsidizing of suburban factories and home building...
...31 Cf...
...corporations found their profit margins squeezed out by the pincer of increased foreign competition and rising domestic costs due to employee gains won through union bargaining and the new social legislation...
...See, e.g., John Irwin, The Jail: Managing The Underclass in American Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985...
...He has established that the National Housing Act of 1949, which was to have afforded "a decent home and a suitable living environment to every American," was in fact harnessed to serve the property investments of the urban establishment...
...Historical analysis demonstrates conclusively that the pattern of social and economic intervention launched during the New Deal, anchored by the sharp bifurcation between "social security" (aimed mainly at the stable working class and middle class and blessed with strong administrative capacities and a broad base of public support) and the disjointed patchwork of programs known under the rubric of "welfare" (serving mainly minorities and the poor, and thus devoid of strong popular and institutional backing), continues to stamp state programs and thinking in dealing with poverty and that, as long as this bifurcation persists, there is little hope for meaningful change...
...32 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, p. 254...
...And our business is gone...
...38 Mark Granovetter, Getting A Job: A Study in Contacts and Careers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 136...
...Our schools is gone...
...28 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, p. 243...
...A former Chicagoan explains: You couldn't give me a place in Chicago...
...29 On the failure of federal school policies, see Gary Orfield, "Race and the Liberal Agenda: The Loss of the Integrationist Dream, 1965-1974," in Margaret Weir, Ann Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, eds., The Politics of Social Provision in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988...
...Although he may want to take issue with some of my analyses, they bear the mark of his thinking in more ways than I can acknowledge here...
...They're on a destruction course...
...I Quoted in Arne Duncan, "Profiles in Poverty: An Ethnographic Report on Inner-City Black Youth" (paper presented at the Urban Poverty Workshop, The University of Chicago, October 1987), p. 14...
...38 John Agedorn (People and Folks: Gangs, Crime, and the Underclass in a Rustbelt City, Chicago: Lakeview Press, 1988) has turned up a fairly direct link between deindustrialization, social isolation, and gang activities in Millwaukee's inner city...
...13 The key deficiency of the literature on the so-called "mismatch hypothesis" is that it mistakes the description of the outcomes of political-economic processes and of ongoing class-racial struggles over their social allocation for their explanation, in effect "naturalizing" them...
...Instead, networks based on cooperation in illegal activities such as drug dealing, petty theft, or fencing stolen goods provide a readily available alternative for many teenagers from these communities to obtain the income they need...
...2 See Fred Harris and Roger W. Wilkins, eds., Quiet Riots: Race and Poverty in the United States (New York: Pantheon, 1988) for a synopsis...
...Also Norman Fainstein, "The Underclass/ Mismatch Hypothesis as an Explanation of Black Economic Deprivation," Politics and Society, 15(4), 1986-87, pp...
...On the persistence of near-total racial segregation in Chicago, see for instance Joe T. Darden, "Socioeconomic Status and Racial Residential Segregation: Blacks and Hispanics in Chicago," International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 1(2), 1987, pp...
...A second major impact of the concentration of inner-city poverty is on the school...
...37 William Labov, "Language Structure and Social Structure," in Siegwart Lindenberg, James S. Coleman, and Stephan Nowak, eds., Approaches to Social Theory (New York: Russell Sage, 1986), pp...
...It is possible that the recent decline of black college attendance, which has puzzled many observers, constitutes partly a response to this decreased commitment of the state to provide paths of occupational ascent for blacks...
...Places or neighborhoods, understood as social entities, are produced institutionally, within ecological and technical constraints, by social and political struggles over competing uses of space, resources, and people...
...Asked what is the best way to get ahead in Chicago today, a young black dishwasher, who lives with his mother and four siblings in a cramped apartment in Grand Boulevard and struggles to survive on $4.85 an hour at a suburban job that offers no health coverage and no security (he has now been working three years running without a single day of vacation for fear of being dismissed), answers bitterly: "I hate to say it, but it, it look to me dealin' drugs, 'cause these guys [gestures to the outside where a band of youth gathered on a porch can be seen] make money out there...
...Robbin', prostitution, drug sale, anythin...
...Silencing in Public Schools," Language Arts, 64(2), FALL • 1989 • 519 February 1987, pp...
...Since ghetto poverty is the product of economic and political forces and struggles, not the result of the aggregation of free individual choices or moral failures, remedies to it must likewise be economic and political...
...First they push you on welfare, then they cut the programs...
...21 The ferocity of the employer drive to eliminate and prevent unions is documented by Rick Fantasia in his remarkable Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action and Contemporary American Workers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), chapter 2. Michael Golfield, The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1987) has shown that de-unionization is the result, not of sectoral or occupational changes driven by technology, but of concerted anti-union attacks of the part of corporations...
...Today, not only do labor markets remain strongly segmented racially, blocking the inter-sectoral movement and occupational reconversion of employed blacks and the penetration of new minority workers in certain service sectors...
...In the past three decades, they have harbored growing numbers of poor blacks despite rapid depopulation...
...it has also undergone major sectoral, occupational, and spatial changes...
...For an analysis of this new "factory regime" in advanced capitalism, see Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production (London: Verso, 1985), chapter 3. One could list here tens of examples of cities or states blackmailed by large employers into providing more collective investment for private profit...
...I outline several dimen508 • DISSENT sions of this process of "hyperghettoization" that has ravaged the inner city before suggesting policy directions...
...The ghetto was to be reinforced with taxpayers' dollars and shored up with the power of the state...
...I ' See Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988...
...Now my sister's house is barred up like a jail...
...4° It is perhaps particularly acute (or more visible) among black men, for whom masculinity remains defined essentially in terms of steady employment and the ability to provide for their family...
...27 Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 10...
...36 The high density of low-achieving students undermines teachers' morale and discipline...
...It should be stressed that gangs and crime are not, public perceptions to the contrary, coterminous with one another...
...Urban blacks have been especially hard hit by this spatial and sectoral restructuring of the American economy because they have been disproportionately represented in those industries that have stagnated or declined, and in the central cities that have lost economic muscle...
...Barely one ghetto resident in ten has a current checking account and fewer than two in ten can afford to maintain a savings account...
...The degradation of the housing stock, of the transportation infrastructure, and of municipal services in the inner city, combined with rising levels of crime and street violence, have created conditions of living that are more evocative of a muffled civil war than of life in the richest land on the face of earth...
...Such depressing expectations flow from a realistic assessment of the paucity of economic and financial resources available to ghetto blacks in Chicago...
...It rests on a depoliticization and a dehistoricization of the problem that denies its collective nature and origins...
...3° Troy Duster, "Social Implications of the 'New' Black Urban Underclass," The Black Scholar, 19(3), May-June 1988, pp...
...By thus exacting widespread wage concessions from weakened unions and freezes or cutbacks in salaries and effective tax rates, the corporate sector has set in a drastic and cumulative process of casualization of employment, whereby full-time jobs are reorganized into "contingent labor," typified by part-time, seasonal schedules, dwindling benefit packages and growing precariousness...
...25 Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 233...
...Freeways in every major city cut through the middle of black settlements in order to connect the central business district to the outlying white suburbs or were deliberately planted as buffers to protect white neighborhoods from the "contamination" of the expanding ghetto (as did, and still does, the Dan Ryan expressway that shelters Mayor Daley's lily-white neighborhood of Bridgeport from the threat of Grand Boulevard...
...Starting in the late sixties, U.S...
...also Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, London: Sage, 1977) discusses the three forms of cultural capital —embodied, objectified, and institutionalized— involved in the transmission of cultural inequality...
...Michael J. Piore and Charles F. Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity (New York: Basic Books, 1984...
...46-62...
...In Chicago, public housing became the cornerstone of private redevelopment and was deliberately funneled to maintain the existing color line...
...presently, blacks are jailed at a rate eight times that of whites3° and inner-city blacks are massively overrepresented among inmates...
...23 Ted Robert Gurr and Desmond S. King argue in The State and the City (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1987) that, even in the United States, national and local states play significant material and regulatory roles that have as great an impact on cities as private economic activities...
...The Chicago Housing Authority acted as the bulwark of racial and class segregation: 99 percent of the 10,300 housing units it built after 1955 (which represented a net addition of only 467 housing units to the city's housing supply because of the simultaneous mass destruction of buildings) were located in all-black, slum areas...
...33 Logan and Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place, p. 123...
...They try to keep a cage around poor people...
...Wacquant and William Julius Wilson, "Poverty, Joblessness and the Social Transformation of the Inner City," in Phoebe H. Cottingham and David Ellwood, eds., Welfare Policy for the 1990s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp...
...What would such a comprehensive, socialdemocratic agenda include...
...Recently, liberals and conservatives have reached an agreement that the problem of the ghetto should be tackled primarily by means of welfare reform, that public assistance should be based on "reciprocal responsibilities" between society (represented by the state) and public aid recipients, and that able-bodied adult recipients should be coerced to work or to prepare themselves for employment if necessary...
...The apparently neutral and wellfounded requirement of work experience is in fact a circular argument that sets up a catch-22 situation for inner-city youth: they cannot find work because they do not have sufficient job experience, which they do not get because employers do not hire them...
...Unlike earlier generations of inner-city minorities or contemporary poor whites who live in predominantly workingclass neighborhoods that are sheltered from acute poverty, ghetto blacks cannot build the "reservoirs of personal contacts" that Granovetter has shown to channel job entry and mediate occupational mobility...
...I would like to thank Paul Peterson and the Department of Government for their invitation, as well as the Franco-American Foundation for financial support through a Tocqueville Fellowship...
...Child and health care must be universally provided, along with low-cost housing, and expanded educational chances...
...You go through about three iron doors before FALL • 1989 509 you can get inside the house...
...26 John Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 121...
...Means of formal and informal social control have declined along with these organizations...
...This section also draws upon Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Great U-Turn (New York: Basic Books, 1988), as well as on a lecture by Bennett Harrison, "How the Lower Half Lives," delivered at the Urban Poverty Workshop, the University of Chicago, March 1988...
...by the fragmentation of the labor process that has made possible new forms of sourcing...
...I will first sketch the plight of this city's ghetto, then turn to examine the causes that are driving its fateful evolution, including epochal changes in the economy, failed public policies, and the retreat of the American "semi-welfare state" following the "new class war" waged by conservative forces over the past decade,5 and the subsequent crumbling of public institutions such as low-income housing and schools...
...The other is to steal, knock open heads...
...Far from being born of the alleged disincentives of (at any rate dwindling) welfare handouts, a self-reproducing "culture of poverty" or the moral defects of poor individuals mystified by the spell of an all-powerful (and mythical) "welfare mentality," the disposition towards the future and towards the economy of inner-city residents, and the discouragement and hopelessness that their conduct often manifests, are nothing other than a realistic expression of their objective future:" Toward a New Policy Debate Public discussion of poverty and welfare has been severely hampered by the recent barrage of conservative rhetoric and by the rapid erosion of the influence of the poor and working class upon government, attendant upon the reorganization of the linkages between corporations, the ruling class and political parties...
...22 According to Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987...
...For an effective critique of the uses of this term, which owes its success more to its ideological malleability than to its analytical usefulness, read William Komblum, "Lumping the Poor: What Is the Underclass?," Dissent, Summer 1984, pp...
...And no contemporary urban form demonstrates this more incontrovertibly than the black ghettos of America...
...Norton, 1984...
...The frantic mobility of capital that has come with the new "hegemonic-despotic" phase of American capitalist development,' 5 in which organized labor is compelled to consent to the demands of firms under the threat of investment withdrawal, has brought about the peripheralization and recomposition of the core...
...Conditions in Chicago's ghetto neighborhoods are emblematic of the dramatic changes that have swept through inner cities and undermined the "Black Metropolises" of yesteryear...
...44 Insofar as the range of policy solutions envisaged is largely predetermined by how one defines the problem, the first item on the political agenda is to recognize that the false consensus that currently obtains between conservatives and liberals is hiding the real issues...
...23 International comparison reveals that the United States is quite unique in the way it organizes land, granting far more independence and autonomy to local authorities and private developers than most other advanced nations...
...41 See Lawrence Mead, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship (New York: The Free Press, 1985), for a statement of the conservative myth of the "welfare mentality," and Jay McLeod, Ain't No Makin' It (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987) on the complex (and sometimes counterintuitive) dialectic of objective chances and subjective aspirations among black and white youth in a Northeastern urban housing project...
...in Philadelphia from 208,000 to 81,000 ( — 61 percent...
...29-44, quote p. 38...
...19 In a series of interviews conducted by the Urban Poverty Project with a representative sample of Chicagoland employers, it was found that many directors of personnel express considerable reticence at the prospect of hiring young black men and openly acknowledge that they, or their colleagues, do not consider them fit for employment because of insufficient work ethic, education, or proper work experience...
...economic hegemony by launching a systematic attack on wages, unions, and conditions of employment...
...15 Defined as the " 'rational' tyranny of capital mobility over the collective worker...
...And on most counts, black females are notably more disadvantaged than their male counterparts...
...There is no reason, other than political ones, for goods and services necessary to satisfy basic human and social needs not to be available to all...
...Other, private, institutions are party to the transformation of the inner city...
...34 William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged, especially pp...
...In this particular case, government urban redevelopment and renewal policies, as well as a massive public housing program reshaped, enlarged, and transformed the South Side Black Belt...
...9-11) do the same on family policies and their impact on poverty in single-parent households...
...and by technological innovation in the workplace and the reduction of the cost of transportation and electronic communication...
...47 Paul Osterman's Employment Futures (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) offers a stimulating reflection on job training policy alternatives by contrasting the German and Swedish models of comprehensive vocational education and flexible labor markets to the haphazard and disjointed U.S...
...16-17...
...Only 22 percent of the residents have never received their own public aid grant and 71 percent of them need at least one of six possible forms of food assistance to feed themselves and their family...
...44 Axinn and Stern, Dependency and Poverty, p. 118...
...and Fred Block, Revising State Theory: Essays on Politics and Postindustrialism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), for three insightful discussions of these theses...
...43 As a result, policy initiatives have mistakenly focused on devising renewed incentives or means of administrative coercion to reform the assumed habits of the apathetic, deviant, and destructive individuals that supposedly make up the "underclass...
...And the sad part about it is that they are breaking into blacks' homes...
...24 This paragraph builds on John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), passim and especially p. 153 and pp...
...Life in Chicago's Ghetto Today Author Studs Terkel has nicknamed Chicago's South Side and West Side the city's "Soweto...
...the prevalence of joblessness and the associated changes in the local social structure have also caused a transformation of both the structure and content of the job networks that sharply reduces the individual and collective employment chances of most residents...
...This is wrong, but...
...The relatively cohesive black community of the 1950s—itself the product of a unified historical experience stamped by the strict and often violent enforcement of a rigid color line—has given way to a deepening division between the relatively secure middle and working classes and an increasingly vulnerable and isolated segment of the minority poor...
...Because the consolidation of the black middle class and stable working class has been largely assisted by the growth of public employment, 22 the rolling back of state and federal payrolls (for example in the post office) has also reduced access to legitimate channels of upward mobility out of the ghetto...
...403-452...
...system...
...See also Douglas G. Glasgow, The Black Underclass: Poverty, Unemployment, and Entrapment of Ghetto Youth (New York: Vintage, 1981), and the vivid personal testimonies collected in Leslie Dunbar, The Common Interest (New York: Pantheon, 1988), chapter 3, "A Just Entitlement: That There Be Work...
...Yet another indirect source of black stagnation in the ghetto has been the economic retrenchment of the state...
...4 All of these developments have hit the urban black poor with special brutality...
...Today, schools are routinely and sometimes purposefully producing dropouts rather than giving inner-city children a chance to escape the destitution and desperation of poverty...
...It has been immensely facilitated by the existence of large pools of cheap, docile labor in the international and national peripheries...
...31 In conclusion, "Chicago's [post-war] ghetto is a dynamic institution, not a dead inheritance from the past," and one that is highly distinctive for the "deep involvement of government...
...Thus a circular process sets in that feeds back onto itself, whereby subjective expectations and hopes act to reinforce the objective mechanisms that limit their already meager chances of mobility...
...37 The single most significant consequence of the increased class segregation of the inner city, however, has to do with its disruption of the networks of occupational contacts that are so crucial in moving individuals into and up job chains...
...John Kasarda, "Urban Change and Minority Opportunities" (in Paul Peterson, ed., The New Urban Reality, Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1985, pp...
...35 Institutions that depend on local patronage to flourish have indeed either disapppeared entirely (as in the case of most banks and scores of stores and professional practices) or have sharply reduced their activities and programs, as with churches, block clubs, community groups, and recreational facilities...
...in one year alone (1979), 15% of all black youth ages 16 to 19 were arrested at least once...
...147-197) for a typical approach by an economist which "explores the so-called mismatch hypothesis as an explanation for the poor labor market experiences of young blacks" (p...
...Public Policies and the Class/Racial Closure of the Inner City But just as the trends that have metamorphosed the American economy are not wholly the product of a "natural," socially neutral necessity, the plight of today's inner city is not solely the result of blind, impersonal processes 512 • DISSENT ordained by technology, ecology, or the autonomous workings of the market...
...Roger Friedland (Power and Crisis in the City, London, Macmillan, 1982, and "The Politics of Profit and the Geography of Growth," Urban Affairs Quarterly, 19, 1983, pp...
...Such descriptions could be repeated over and over in inner cities throughout the country...
...91-107...
...An even more striking instance is that of Detroit's Poletown as recounted by Barry Bluestone in his article "Deindustrialization and Unemployment in America...
...In Chicago, deindustrialization reached such magnitude that it has meant nothing short of an uninterrupted "Great Depression" for ghetto blacks...
...on the institutional debilitation of ghetto schools and how they can deliberately push students out, see the remarkable research of Michelle Fine, including "Why Urban Adolescents Drop Into and Out of High School," Teachers College Record, 7, 1986...
...The preliminary results summarized in this table concern only the 364 black respondents who lived in tracts with more than 40 percent poor persons in them, 82 percent of which were located on Chicago's South and West Sides...
...See also Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse (New York: Basic Books, 1986...
...And these policies have systematically weakened the position of the ghetto in the urban system...
...Of those receiving welfare, fully one in five expect to remain on aid for a minimum of five years...
...It is a common occurence for residents of this neighborhood, one of the poorest in the city, to find themselves out of cash...
...20 Racial exclusion also operates more visibly at the level of firm location, as part of the larger corporate strategy of union breakup and casualization of labor...
...She put fifteen-hundred dollars' worth of bars around her room—these are wrought iron bars—and she's still afraid to stay at home.' Jobs are so scarce that illegal activities have become the major source of employment and income in many ghetto neighborhoods...
...this has contributed in turn to the rising incidence of street crime and to spreading a sense of insecurity that helps further speed up the deterioration of the neighborhood...
...he views it as the linguistic correlate of "the formation of what has been called 'a permanent underclass.' " This deepening of black-white linguistic opposition is furthermore becoming less transparent and functions more often than not below the level of social awareness...
...8 Public education in the ghetto has slumped to such lows that it merely serves to solidify the social and economic marginalization of most inner-city blacks...
...This agreement is predicated on two patently false assumptions: First, that welfare can provide a way out of the predicament of the ghetto...
...Yet urban planning does exist in this country, if in a somewhat more chaotic form than in Western European societies, and what exists has "been at the service of the growth machine...
...The consequence is that muggings and theft are routine in this section of Grand Boulevard: "Oh, man, some of them steal, some of them kill, uh...
...I am therefore happy to record the privilege of his stimulation and intellectual influence...
...second, that it is not the economic and political structure of society that has produced the latter but, somehow, deficiencies in the moral or cultural makeup of individual poor persons...
...The sharp segregation and social dislocations visited upon these racial enclaves give him ample motive to do so...
...They result, rather, from the changing balance of power between classes and racial groups in the struggle over space, jobs, and political resources...
...Which is the lesser of the two evils, the drugs which is burning their brains out [or] knocking little old ladies in the head with their handbags...
...This downward mobility of large fractions of the work force has increased competition to the detriment of the most vulnerable workers and would-be workers, namely, inner-city residents with little education and work experience...
...Indeed, the staggering increases in joblessness, infrastructural dilapidation, and educational exclusion in the urban core reveal not merely a quantitative concentration of poverty but a transformation of the social and institutional structure of the inner city which places its inhabitants in a radically more constraining situation than their counterparts of earlier times or the poor of other neighborhoods...
...The Federal Housing Authority channeled loans to whites to build housing in the suburbs while officially denying them to anyone who would unsettle the racial and class makeup of a locale...
...Our churches is gone...
...In 1954, over 10,200 manufacturing establishments were located within the city limits, providing nearly half a million blue-collar jobs (production workers up to and including foremen) and over 600,000 in total employment...
...We had less of that kind of thing than we have now" (quoted in Blauner, op...
...The way to cut labor costs, add flexibility to the production process, and reduce tax liability, was simple: move (or merely threaten to move...
...This recomposition of the urban capitalist economy has translated into massive job destruction in the very sectors that have traditionally supplied the brunt of the employment accessible to the minority poor, and upon which they continue to depend heavily owing to the failure of public schools to prepare them for higher qualification jobs...
...One of the most worrisome implications of the increasing isolation of the ghetto is that the black English vernacular spoken in inner cities is growing more different from standard English...
...The ideas and results presented here are an outgrowth of the joint work I have been doing with William Julius Wilson...
...Corporations have used capital mobility as an instrument to force one group of workers to compete with another and even entire urban communities to scramble for competitive advantage...
...Tom Brune and Eduardo Camacho, A Special Report: Race and Poverty in Chicago (Chicago: The Chicago Reporter and the Center for Community Research and Assistance, 1983), pp...
...Abetted by government policies of both Democratic and Republican administrations, they sought to recapture the rates of profit of the earlier era of U.S...
...For this, a full employment federal tax and expenditure strategy must be combined with greater regulation of labor markets (including stricter legislation on plant closings and an increase in the minimum wage, which has yet to be raised since 1981 after being increased four times between 1978 and 1981), flexible industrial reconversion, relocation, and retraining programs, and the amelioration of the social wage by means of universal family allowances...
...We have more killings, more murder...
...A study of former South Works employees found that far fewer blacks found jobs after being laid off from the mills than had their white counterparts...
...281-282 respectively...
...And in this struggle, the industrial and financial strategies pursued by corporations have had a heavy hand...
...number of mills and factories had been halved, their overall payroll had gone down 55 percent, and blue-collar jobs had decreased to 172,000, a staggering cut of 63 percent (see Table 2...
...It has "hurt most those seeking their first jobs—young adults, particularly those who are black and facing greatly magnified competition by the rapid black concentration of this age segment in the central cities...
...As argued by William Julius Wilson, the exodus of stably employed residents has removed an important social and economic buffer and made the ghetto poor considerably more vulnerable 514 • DISSENT to the prolonged and rising joblessness that has plagued inner-city communities since the early 1970s, thanks to the periodic recessions and uneven growth of the American economy...
...I was there when you could sleep with your door open and nobody would bother you...
...It's hard to say, man: they probably do anything they can to get a dollar in their pocket...
...12 This is in no way unique to Chicago but characterizes all major Rustbelt megalopolises with large black ghettos, as was shown elsewhere (LoIc J.D...
...Second, educational failure is peaking at record levels: Barely 8 percent of the minority students who enrolled in ninth grade in non-selective segregated public high schools in Chicago in 1980 (and who represented two-thirds of the original class of 1984) graduated with nationally-average reading skills or better...
...It is important to recognize, however, that the accelerating spatial deconcentration and internal restructuring of the urban economy are by no means the result of a "biotic process" driven solely by the neutral mechanisms of the property and labor markets, as some of the proponents of the "mismatch" hypothesis would have us believe...
...3 See William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), and Martin Kilson, "Social Classes and Intergenerational Poverty," The Public Interest 64 (Summer 1981), pp...
...Consequently, programs aimed at improving the lives of society's most disadvantaged members must be inclusive in order to diminish, not aggravate, the political isolation of the poor, and particularly the black poor, from the working and middle classes in the American policy-making process...
...41-54) has found that urban renewal destroyed far more housing than it created at a time of great shortage of low-income housing, especially among ghetto blacks...
Vol. 36 • September 1989 • No. 4
