Place Matters,and So Does Race

I want to thank the reviewers of this symposium and authors of Place Matters for such a thoughtful and productive conversation. Concerning the central thesis of Place Matters, I support the idea of regional equity and their analysis that place matters for people’s differing life prospects. However, to paraphrase Cornell West, I think “race matters” more than geography. It helps us understand why people of color, especially Blacks, are in places that became bad and it is also why it is difficult to move Black people out of these places. Has the United States changed so much that White working-class suburbanites are ready to unite with Blacks and Latinos to force a more equitable distribution of resources from the wealthy suburbs? The current campaigns of Sanders and Clinton point in different directions on this question, yet it does not mean that the fight for regional governance can be avoided. Beyond the need to reduce gross inequalities within regions, regional governance and planning is sensible and effective from the perspective of transportation, health, housing, economic development, ecology, and politics. Politically speaking, African-American and Latino mayors and other minority elected officials, while serving an important role in voicing the opinions and grievances of low-income urban communities, have lacked the power and resources to do much else. Most distressing, the deep divide between the White workers and communities of color has been a four-lane highway for the rise of corporate oligarchy, the destruction of unions, and the escalation of wealth inequalities along both class and race lines, to the point democracy itself is threatened. I believe that without rethinking our conceptions of race and class, we will not understand how to achieve regional cooperation needed for democracy and well-being.

I do not agree with Place Matters’ statement, retained from the initial edition of the book, that regional coalitions can be built by making, “clear, effective, substantive policy appeals to White, Catholic, blue-collar suburbanites . . . [while] mobiliz[ing] emerging black and Hispanic suburban populations with nonracial appeals that speak to the same kinds of needs,” and by “[e]mphasiz[ing] issues that cross group boundaries . . . rather than heightening intergroup polarization” (Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2001, p. 246). Although it is promising that Obama successfully built (ephemeral) metropolitan voting coalitions based on nonracial appeals in 2008 and 2012, race was a potent subtext in both elections, and there was mighty backlash. Newt Gingrich called Obama a “food stamp president”; Rick Santorum said, “I don’t want to make black peoples’ lives better by giving them someone else’s money” (McAdam and Kloos 2014, p. 277). Doug McAdam and Karino Kloss’s review of polling data found that

racial resentment must be seen as central to the Tea Party and, by extension, to the GOP as well. . . . It was also reflected in the party’s transparent efforts to disenfranchise poor and minority voters in the run-up to the 2012 election. It may well be that the country has never seen a more coordinated national effort to constrain the voting rights of particular groups than we saw in 2012. (McAdam and Kloos 2014, p. 280)

African-Americans were highly energized by the prospect of electing the first Black president; many conceded to Obama’s approach as necessary to not alienate White voters. But as a result of this strategically nonracial approach, Obama tied his own hands in directly addressing issues of race and poverty until very recently—as his second term nears its end. Obama’s reluctance to take these issues head-on had real and immediate impact for African-Americans, teaching a lesson they will be loathe to repeat: Between 2010 and 2013, Black median household wealth ($11,000) dropped 34% while White median household wealth ($141,900) increased slightly (Kochhar and Fry 2014).

An underlying theoretical supposition of nonracialism is the popular neoutilitarian idea that voters form alliances primarily on the basis of economic interests. While saying we “should not dismiss . . . the power of the moral argument that our present system of economic segregation and sprawl is fundamentally unfair and antidemocratic,” the authors say its focus is “on how a range of interests can be mobilized behind a new metropolitan political agenda” (Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2014, p. 330). The interests they cite turn out to be largely economic, with the addition of “high quality public services [and] . . . differential exposure to crime and unhealthy environments.” This narrowly constructed range of interests is based in part on the assumption that the underlying racial group identity of White working-class suburbanites is less significant than their economic (and other material) interests. The argument links to a strand of utilitarianism with a long history. Marx wrote, describing capitalist ideology in his Rheinish Newspaper (1842),

The representation of private interests . . . abolishes all natural and spiritual distinctions by enthroning in their stead the immoral, irrational and soulless abstraction of a particular material object and a particular consciousness which is slavishly subordinated to this object.

Yet for Marx, the capitalist ideology of what we might today call consumerism, itself a branch of utilitarian materialism, was an ideal that was not to be confused with an analysis of actual consciousness. In “The German Ideology,” he wrote with Engels, “Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life process” (Marx and Engels [1845] 1968, p. 6). In real life in the United States, race consciousness—the product of centuries of conscious social and cultural practices of White supremacy, including the corporate-backed direct government imposition (Plessy v. Ferguson) of legalized racial segregation at the height of a rising interracial populist movement in 1896—has long trumped identity and undermined movements based on economic similarity. Marx, perhaps in frustration, later weakened his argument about “actual consciousness” by saying that southern working-class Whites, because of their racism, had “false consciousness.” Saying there are “true” and “false” constructions of identity is anti-political; it suggests that a scientific or correct kind of social consciousness will emerge outside of political struggle over ethics and morality. Ethics and morality is precisely about the construction of human intentions toward others; it underlies all policy and is the core stuff of politics. Du Bois (1992) wrote, “So long as the Southern White laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South made impossible” (p. 608). Du Bois was careful with language; he said that southern White workers chose poverty over equal relations with Blacks, and it was an ethical choice (whether we ethically agree or not)—so much for solidarity based on commonality in material interests. What Du Bois called a “labor movement” is essentially the same interracial coalition that Place Matters hopes will emerge in metro areas. The obstacle to such a coalition, the importance of whiteness to White workers, is also the same. We might glean from over 150 years of experience that it cannot be overcome with simple appeals to material similarities in “interests.” To put human ethics and morality back into politics, I prefer the word “reasons” rather than “interests” to describe how people think and act; “interests” implies more rigidity and fidelity to acquisition of material goods than is warranted. Materialism is a cultural phenomenon in the United States, and it competes with other cultural phenomena, like racial identity. Whites and Blacks may have similar economic interests but often hate each other for other reasons that are more important to them. On a practical level, sustained interracial coalitions are not likely without addressing race centrally.

A narrowly construed notion that substance determines form, or base determines superstructure, or economic circumstances determine consciousness, leads to the idea that a unified interracial movement will arise in metro areas because White, Black, and Latino workers share economic interests. To the contrary, consciousness does not arise directly from economic conditions but from the whole of people’s being. Base may not determine superstructure; often it is the other way around. This requires that we look at political culture. The idea that group social-economic differences are a product of inherited characteristics (either biological or cultural) runs very deep in Americans’ thinking. It is the opposite of belief in equality, and for many Americans, it effectively explains race, class, and gender differences. It has a strong intellectual pedigree, having been promulgated by the likes of Edward Banfield, one of the academic fathers of urban studies. Banfield believed that social position was determined by the inherited disposition of individuals and groups themselves, “no one knows how to change the culture of any part of the population—the lower class or the upper, whites or Negroes, pupils or teachers, policemen or criminals” (Banfield 1974, p.14). Such biological and cultural determinist ideas have trumped utilitarianism, Marxism, and modern science in influencing how working-class White Americans think. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia voiced a similar point of view while hearing a Texas affirmative action case in December 2015; he said,

There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well. (Kopan 2015)

Challenging this way of thinking is critical to winning the fight for regionalism and democracy writ large.

After two years of nation-wide protests against police killings of Blacks and mass deportation of Latino immigrants, the level of long-standing frustration in Black and Brown communities cannot be denied. Place Matters devotes virtually no attention to these issues. Instead, it argues that “place trumps race in explaining why crime is concentrated in certain neighborhoods,” as shown by the fact that many of the same neighborhoods near downtown Chicago have had elevated crime rates for 100 years, despite the waves of distinct ethnic groups—Irish, Italian, Polish, Black, and Latino—that populated them (Dreier, Mollenkopf, and Swanstrom 2014, p. 83). Yet, if the problem has not changed in a century, why is its treatment so different today? Put differently, why were the Irish and Italians not incarcerated en masse? Were Irish and Italian youths summarily executed by Chicago police for minor infractions year after year, covered up by police conspiracy, as we are learning happened to Blacks in Chicago with regularity? Race plays a key role: The painful fact is that the White majority subjugated Blacks and Latino immigrants using the criminal justice apparatus. Moreover, racially biased policing practices affect Blacks and Latinos in all neighborhoods including all income groups. This is not to deny that police harass and imprison some Whites or that class differences do not separate poor and upper-class Blacks in many ways. Rather, upper-class Blacks are differentiated from upper-class Whites similarly to how elites in colonized nations were differentiated from European elites in dominant imperial nations: Worrying about police brutalizing their children is a universal Black parental concern; it is something upper-class Whites tend not to experience. Moreover, even when poor Whites encounter the criminal justice system and go to prison the racial divide is not healed; it often gets worse. Understanding how race structures experience in the United States among all income groups takes us beyond superficial similarities in material circumstances.

The appeal for a nonracial approach is thus itself a racial appeal; the strategic target I suppose are Whites uncomfortable dealing with race. Perhaps this is because race discussions often put White people, including nonracist progressives, on the defensive. Yet, even within our racially skewed popular American narrative is a remarkable history of White antiracism. To give full voice to this tradition, the stories of heroes such as John Brown, Thaddeus Stevens, General Tecumseh Sherman, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo, and racial progressives like Hubert Humphrey, must be lifted up and given pride of place rather than honoring genocidal racists, such as Andrew Jackson, as democratic heroes.

Advocacy for not dealing with race directly can be complicated. A large White-led trade union, for example, recently launched a campaign to organize fast food workers. The campaign focused on Black and Brown neighborhoods where fast food companies pay wages under $15/hour. The campaign organizers never consulted with local community groups. Had they done so, they might have learned about an epidemic of diabetes and hypertension affecting even Black high school students. For this reason, many local groups in the neighborhoods they targeted had already been organizing against fast foods. The union could easily have joined these local campaigns and helped focus them on improving the food and raising wages. Had they done so, they might have gained much community support. Yet, the union chose not to. Having watched this pattern time and again, I suspect it is because the White leadership of the union (in this case) is afraid of losing control of the campaign to local Black and Latino activists. They want Black and Brown bodies in their organizations, but they fear that Black and Brown leaders will challenge their leadership. That might happen, and sometimes the contesting Black and Brown leaders are as egocentric and power hungry as the White leaders. There are similar struggles over power and control in many organizations and institutions around the country: It is a fierce and racially polarized civil society politics that divides Blacks and Whites from the environmental movement to the labor movement. Keeping race off the table is not innocent in this battle; it empowers some people while disempowering others. It is not going to work as a unifying strategy. A different understanding of politics is needed.