More Baguettes and Black Families

The other day I wrote this:

The root of all of this is not really the fight against racism and white supremacy. My expectation is that racism and white supremacy will win--and take this country down with it. Indeed I expect the worst of everyone to win--and take humanity down with them.

This bothered some folks and I tried to clarify what I meant in comments. For the past few months I've turned into an amateur sociologist. There's some really revealing work out there on racism, segregation and ghettoization being done by people like Patrick Sharkey, Douglass Massey and Robert Sampson. I also would recommend Robert Lieberman's book Shifting The Color Line, for those who are interested in the effects of white supremacy on the shape of social safety net.

A lot of this work follows the research of William Julius Wilson, and much of it is very depressing. I keep thinking of Edmund Morgan who persuasively argued that white supremacy did not stand in opposition to American democracy, it made it possible. "The most ardent republicans were Virginians," writes Morgan. "And their ardor was unrelated to their power of the men and women they held in bondage."

At the end of his masterful tome American Slavery, American Freedom, Morgan starts to wonder:

Was the vision of a nation of equals flawed at the source by contempt for both the poor and the black. Is America still colonial Virginia writ large? More than a century after Appomattox the questions linger. 

Morgan died while I was away. I keep wondering what he would have our transition from slavery to debt-peonage to mass incarceration, a transition so seamless that one could be forgiven for seeing the hand of an Author. Of course the Author is us. We are a congenitally racist country. We can improve around the margins. We can even progress. And perhaps we can some day learn to live with ourselves. But on some level, I suspect, we will always obey our terrible prime directives.

Today's exhibit of the prime directive comes courtesy of Patrick Sharkey and his deeply disturbing book, Stuck In Place. Here is a chilling thought: Over the past half-century or so, violent crime has spiked and declined in black communities. Teen pregnancies have spiked and declined. The out of wedlock birthrate spiked and then declined. The teen pregnancy rate is as low as its been since sometime in the 40s. One thing has remained stable--the woeful economic status of the African-American community.

As you can see from the data, a greater share of black America lives in the lowest quintile of income than in any other region. This was true in 1970  and it is true today. I suspect, given our recent economic crisis, the numbers in five years will look worse, not better. We aren't even beginning to talk about the yawning wealth gap between black and white America.

So yeah, if I seem a bit pessimistic about us ever closing this gap, forgive me. I hope I'm wrong. When I hear the president say that things are getting so much better, I know what he means. But these numbers just hit me like a punch in the gut. If you'd like to be more depressed you can read this earlier post I did on Sharkey's work.

In other news, I found that Côte Du Rhone I loved so much. $10.99 at Whole Foods. Not so bad. But then yesterday my wife and I tried to make an angel's food cake. The whole thing fell and stuck to the pan. Clearly, racism.