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Underclass": Confronting America's Enduring Apartheid

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Underclass Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 1995 Integrating the "Underclass": Confronting America's Enduring Apartheid Olatunde C.A. Johnson Columbia Law School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, and the Law and Race Commons Recommended Citation Olatunde C. Johnson, Integrating the "Underclass": Confronting America's Enduring Apartheid, 47 STAN. L. REV. 787 (1995). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2207 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BOOK NOTE Integrating the "Underclass": Confronting America's Enduring Apartheid Olati Johnson* AMERICAN APARTHEID: SEGREGATION AND THE MAKING OF THE UNDERCLASS. By Douglas S. Masseyt & Nancy A. Denton.t Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 1993. 292 pp. $14.95. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton's American Apartheid argues that housing integration has inappropriatelydisappeared from the nationalagenda and is critical to remedying the problems of the so-called "underclass." Re- viewer Olati Johnson praises the authors' refusal to dichotomize race and class and the roles both play in creatingand maintaininghousing segregation. However, she argues, Massey and Dentonfail to examine critically either the concept of the underclass or the integration ideology they espouse. Specifi- cally, she contends, the authorsfail to confront the limits of integration strate- gies in providing affordable housing or combating the problem of tokenism. Massey and Denton also fail to explain why, given the intractabilityof racism, they believe integration is more likely to be successful or politically viable than economic investment in inner cities. Ms. Johnson concludes that the book's proposals would not aid most poor African Americans. In recent years, liberal and conservative scholars alike have argued that race-specific policies such as antidiscrimination laws and affirmative action are ineffective methods for improving the plight of persistently poor African Amer- icans.1 To many critics, the civil disturbances in Los Angeles following the acquittal of the police officers charged with beating Rodney King demonstrated the immense frustration of the "underclass": the people the civil rights revolu- * Third-year student, Stanford Law School. BA., Yale University, 1989. Thanks to Professor Jerry L6pez, Professor Sally Dickson, and the editors of the Stanford Law Review for their insights and support. Thanks also to my parents and Amani Martin. Finally, thanks to Marian Wright Edelman for teaching me about "class" and Connie Rice of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund for reminding me about "race." t Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania. t Assistant Professor of Sociology, State University of New York at Albany. 1. 1 use "African American" interchangeably with "black" to refer to Americans of African descent. STANFORD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 47:787 tion left behind.2 The civil disturbances sparked calls by policymakers and community leaders not for greater enforcement of race-specific civil rights laws to counteract discrimination, but rather for enterprise zones and other space- specific3 and class-specific remedies to rebuild economically depressed inner cities.4 Similarly, President Clinton has emphasized need-based, race-neutral policies to aid poor and working-class African Americans, arguably avoiding the divisive issue of race.5 Even many civil rights leaders who seek to chal- lenge persistent racism in our society have called for a reevaluation of tradi- tional civil rights strategies. For example, Professor Derrick Bell has questioned whether traditional civil rights litigation can address the fundamen- American society, and whether civil rights tal racism and classism that pervade 6 laws have offered any real benefit to poor African Americans. 2. The American Underclass, a 1977 Time magazine article, provoked widespread awareness and debate of the concept of "underclass." The article described residents of inner cities in terms of patho- logical behaviors such as drug addiction, crime, teenage pregnancy, and high unemployment, rather than in terms of their poverty. See Michael B. Katz, The Urban "Underclass" as a Metaphor of Social Transformation,in Tn "UI DERCLASS" DEB3ATE: VIEWS FROM HISTORY 3,4 & n.2 (Michael B. Katz ed., 1993). The term "secured its dominance in the vocabulary of inner-city pathology" with the release of Ken Auletta's book The Underclass. See id. at 4. Auletta defined the "underclass" as a permanent minority consisting of: (1) the passive poor (long-term welfare recipients); (2) hostile street criminals; (3) hustlers; and, (4) the traumatized (including "drunks," the homeless, and the mentally impaired). KEN Au -A, THE UNDERCLASS xvi (1982). Like Michael Katz, I use the term to capture the social transformation described by William Julius Wilson. See Katz, supra, at 22. William Julius Wilson describes the "underclass" as those whom the civil rights movement "left behind." WILLIAM JULIUS WmsoN, Tn TRULY DISADVArAGED: THE IN- NER CITY, an UNDERCLASS, AND PUBLIC Poucy 7-8 (1987). He argues that terms like "lower class" and "working class" do not adequately convey that the poor who currently live in urban neighborhoods "are collectively different from those that lived in these neighborhoods in earlier years." Id.; see also text accompanying note 18 infra. I use the term critically, however (often I place it in quotes), because the term typically reflects superficial judgments about the cultural and social values and behavior of poor African Americans, rather than concern about urban poverty. See note 83; text accompanying notes 95-102 infra. 3. Space-specific programs are those limited to particular geographic communities. The concept of "space" is critical to an understanding of the underclass, because the underclass is defined not only by poverty and behavior but by the habitation of a particular geographic (urban) space. See Thomas J. Sugrue, The Structures of Urban Poverty: The Reorganization of Space and Work in Three Periods of American History, in THE "UNDERCLASs" DEBATE: Vraws FROM HISrORY, supra note 2, at 85 (examin- ing industry and poverty in Detroit). 4. See John C. Weicher, The Policy Implications of the Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis: Comment on "DeconcentratingThe Inner City Poor," 67 Cm.-KErN L. REv. 855, 858-60 (1991); Jean Dimeo, Fiddling While the Country Burns, AM. CITY & CotYrm', July 1992, at 12, 12; Vic Pollard, Los Angeles Strugglingfor Inner City Jobs, Gannett News Service, Apr. 25, 1993, available in LEXIS, News Li- brary, GNS File; Susan Yoachum, Clinton Revisits L.A. Riot Site, Announces Plan to Aid Cities. S.F. CHRo N., Sept. 17, 1992, at A5. 5. See Clarence Page, A PresidentialParadox on Civil Rights, Hous. CHnoN., Dec. 30, 1993, at A28; Yoachum, supra note 4. 6. See DERRICK BELL, AND WE ARE NoT SAVED: Tn ELUSIVE QUEST FOR RACIAL JUSTICE 52-55, 59-74 (1987). Bell, in critiquing civil rights litigation, points out the inadequacy of litigation as a means to remedy race and class subordination. See, e.g., id. at 71 (Bell's fictional character Geneva Crenshaw asks, "How long should we be kept, by continued reliance on litigation, from attacking the real causes of our subordinate status?"). Bell also questions whether civil rights legislation and remedies can improve the economic situation of poor African Americans. See id. at 121-39 (offering a fictional chronicle of reparations to African Americans as an alternative to civil rights laws that have failed to address the problems of poor blacks). Unlike William Julius Wilson, Bell suggests racism keeps the African Ameri- can underclass persistently poor. See id. at 162-65; see also notes 18-21 infra and accompanying text (explicating Wilson's position). For this reason, Bell criticizes the equal protection doctrine's emphasis April 1995] AMERICAN APARTHEID These criticisms of race-based remedies have evolved in part from the para- dox inherent in the existence of persistently poor African Americans at a time when African Americans have achieved formal legal equality. Sociologist Wil- liam Julius Wilson believes that this paradox suggests the limits of race-spe- cific remedies. Wilson argues that although such remedies have helped some African Americans by assuring formal legal equality, they are increasingly ir- relevant in addressing the economic problems of those who have nevertheless 7 remained poor. For Wilson, explaining this paradox of persistent poverty involves bifur- cating race and class, as well as past and present discrimination. Thus, the debate has focused on the question of whether it is contemporary racism or contemporary classism that perpetuates the underclass. This question itself fi- nesses the complex interplay between racism and classism. In American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton challenge this bifurcation of race and class and of present and past discrimination, arguing that contemporary racism shapes housing mar- kets and plays a major role in both creating and perpetuating a black underclass. Massey and Denton's
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