Archives
Neoliberal policies of the '90s have worsened Rust Belt's black ghettos
Andrea Lynn,
Humanities Editor
217-333-2177; andreal@illinois.edu
|
Released
3/27/07
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —
The brighter that city-centers in the northern U.S. glow, the rustier
the ghettos in those cities become.
Such is the price for globalization.
Unemployment, underemployment, hopelessness and poverty have been “searing”
the inner cities of Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia and St.
Louis for 40 years, but the neoliberal policies and programs that began
in the 1990s, fueled by the luster of globalization, have further marginalized
the residents of the Rust Belt’s black ghettos, further balkanized
and stigmatized them and further deepened their poverty.
Those are among the findings in a new book, “Cities and Race:
America’s New Black Ghetto” (Routledge), by David Wilson,
a professor of geography at
the University of Illinois.
According to Wilson, “Today, in the shadows of gleaming downtown
skyscrapers and showy gentrified neighborhoods, many impoverished black
ghettos in America’s Rust Belt have substantially worsened.”
Wilson, the author of multiple studies of Chicago, argues that the push
to “concentrate and expand ‘compatible’ land uses
and populations is, more meticulously than ever before, mooring black
bodies in a complex of inferior schools, decrepit homes, isolated social
spaces and glaringly underfunded institutions.”
And while he concedes that U.S. ghettos have long been “warehouses
for the racial poor,” and that being stigmatized by “negative
representations” is nothing new for the residents of ghettos,
Wilson says that a “more pronounced deprivation” now marks
these areas: Ghettos are increasingly being “narrated through”
the metaphor of an “animate place plagued by consumptive degeneracy,
where living beings have fallen into a state of habitually ‘eating’
social resources – goods, service and subsidies.”
For his study, Wilson analyzed newspaper stories about city growth and
redevelopment in six major daily papers in the Midwest and in The New
York Times; conducted discussions with local planners, city officials,
city program heads and representatives, community activists, residents
and youth in Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, St. Louis
and New York; and conducted an analysis of the narrative used by syndicated
neoconservative radio commentator Mancow Muller.
Neoliberalism, defined by Wilson as the form of governance that “more
profoundly prioritizes the capabilities of the individual, limited government
and the politics of attracting resources rather than the politics of
redistributing resources,” spawns what Wilson calls a “growth
machine”: a constellation of local agencies and institutions,
prominent builders, developers, government, real estate agents, the
media and local utilities that form a coalition to “attract more
business and industry, build more conspicuous consumption neighborhoods
and vibrant, lavish downtowns and re-entrepreneurialize local business
climates.”
In building these showcase city centers, these coalitions also are bricking
in the “glocal black ghetto,” a term Wilson coined for the
“increasingly impoverished and impugned crystallized zone of human
discard” in the global era.
As leaders and residents of the “new black ghetto” are struggling
to upgrade their communities, they face a formidable task: “the
accelerated push to make and protect downtown revitalized landscapes
of consumption, pleasure and affluent residency.”
Such landscapes already have emerged: the Loop-Gentrification Complex
in Chicago, the Circle Centre Mall Axis in Indianapolis, Soulard-Gentry
Boulevard in St. Louis and the Public Square-Historic Gateway Cluster
in Cleveland.
Among the programs, policies and institutions that Wilson scrutinizes
in his examination of the American black ghetto is something he calls
the “prison industrial complex,” another “warehousing
instrument,” he wrote, that, now, with crushing overcrowding and
significantly reduced funding, is beginning to implode.
Other forces that are wreaking havoc on the ghetto today include the
Faith-Based Resource Provision and Workfare.
But one of Wilson’s most disturbing findings involves the consequences
of President George W. Bush’s 2002 initiative, “No Child
Left Behind.” Tried first in Texas, the program, now national
in scope, was funded at the rate of $1 billion a year for five years
and challenges states, schools and districts to carry out the president’s
notion of an “educational miracle.”
In reality, the program has become “the new unhidden hand in educational
settings that unleashes a ‘get-tough-entrepreneurial’ wrath
on black, poor kids,” Wilson wrote.
Since school aid is tied to performance, schools have discovered that
they are “rewarded” for removing or expelling bad test-takers
and other students with a range of “problems” large and
small.
“Select purging” – both on a short- and long-term
basis – is “widespread” in our cities’ ghettos,
Wilson wrote.
“Key decision makers, compelled to protect their school’s
lifeblood - money - are ironically turning against the most vulnerable
students to protect the possibility of providing a more enriching experience
for the generic ‘student.’ "
