It was with some
concern that when the 16 year-old student Derrion Albert was killed
recently by other youth wielding wooden clubs in Chicago, the White
House responded by deciding to send Attorney General Eric Holder
and Schools Chief Arne Duncan into the fray. First
of all, we should be pleased that this incident attracted action
by the White House at all, but my concern is that at base it is
really not an issue of policing or one of school administration,
since 400 youths have been killed in Chicago in the past year.
The missing piece of this was
the White House Office on Urban Affairs. In his latest book, More
than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (Issues of
Our Time), Professor William Julius Wilson’s legendary research
on Chicago poverty concludes that people behave the way they are
socialized and structural racism has had a big role in developing
the culture through which blacks view and engage the world. He means
by structural racism, segregation – isolation - from other races
through systematic patterns of housing placement and discrimination,
the lack of productive work and its replacement by illicit activity,
intractable poverty and the psychological reinforcement of negative
status stereotypes, and other things. These things undercut positive
parenting and shape the response of youth to events in their environment.
Where Wilson
comes out then is where many behavioral scientists do; environment
has a strong influence on behavior and most often, one institution,
such as the school is not strong enough to change it. This points
back to doing something about the urban environment which has a
systemic impact on the behavior of youths and others. With a 50%
unemployment rate in most big cities for youth 16-18 years old,
most youths now days leave school not headed for jobs, so what about
using the Stimulus money to create more jobs for them? With the
home foreclosure rate bringing down the price of housing, why not
make it more attractive for low-income families to get normal mortgages
and get out of apartments? And with the Stimulus grants now emphasizing
the greening of public housing and other facilities, why not begin
robust job training programs for youths who live in these areas?
This
has to do with Urban policy, but when I look at what the new White
House Office is doing, it seems from the tour in which Director
Adolfo Carrion has initiated, stopping in Philadelphia, Denver, Kansas City and Portland, emphases
fostering regional economic growth or “sustainability.” That is
fine in one sense, because it fits in with my emphasis on jobs,
and we should be especially vigilant to see that models such as
Kansas City’s “Green Zone” that is designed to transform low-income
communities becomes nationalized.
Well, on one hand I get it,
Urban policy has been so maligned in the past 30 years by conservatives
that it has been ignored because it was problem oriented and peoples
of color were pegged as the reason for the problems as opposed to
the conditions under which most were forced to live. The Obama Administration
is attempting to change the image of cities by connecting them to
metro areas and placing them in the role of the engines of growth
for the country and for their impact on the global economy.
This fair enough, but I don’t
see how it works with Blacks and Hispanics becoming a larger share
of the population and constituting populations that experience many
of the social problems that drove whites away from cities into the
suburbs in the first place. And now that whites are coming back
into many cities and Blacks are moving to the suburbs, the problems
that were once considered strictly “Urban” are now part of the Metro
areas. So, there still needs to be strong programs dealing with
poverty elimination, job creation, excellent education in the public
schools, and the like. All of the research I have seen suggests
when this happens and the environment improves, violence will decrease.
Without urgent action, the White House had better get ready for
an increase in such violent incidents among youth in other cities
as the unemployment rate for Blacks moves from 16% now to over 20%
by next year.
So, I would hope that the White
House does not make the Chicago situation a “drive-by” event but uses it as a paradigm for its
new approach to urban-metro America.
BlackCommentator.com
Editorial Board member
Dr. Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director
of the African American Leadership Center and Professor of Government
and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. His latest book is: The Price of Racial Reconciliation (The Politics of Race and
Ethnicity) (University
of Michigan Press). Click here
to contact Dr. Walters.
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