In the early weeks of this newsletter, I want to make sure people understand the story that led to writing my book. At the end of each newsletter, I will reference specific, relevant issues from the book and, when relevant, connect them to current events.
When I was getting ready to move to Washington, DC, in 1988, I had been told that it was the most segregated city in America. Although segregated, for sure, there were certain cities even more segregated: Milwaukee, Detroit, and Chicago, to name a few.
I moved at a time when the District’s population had been declining for decades. The city’s population peaked in 1950 at just a smidge more than 800,000 people: 64% White, 35% Black. By 1960, it was already majority Black, as White flight to the suburbs had already begun. By 1980, the city had lost 164,000 people in only 30 years; more starkly, it had lost 346,000 Whites but added 168,000 Blacks.
By the time I arrived, the city had been majority Black for nearly 30 years. The city’s tax base had been decimated by White flight. Unemployment among Blacks was high. The crack epidemic had struck hard and deep, and the murder rate had risen to more than 1 per day.
Yet, I found deep pride in the city among Blacks—and delight in its brand: Chocolate City! Yes, you could easily find deep poverty in many of the city’s Wards—especially Wards 7 and 8. Still, you could just as easily find members of a rising Black middle and upper middle class in the city, residents and commuters both.
Although I had lived in Philadelphia in 1987 and 1988, when it had a healthy-sized Black population (about 38%), I lived in a large duplex in Mt. Airy, a predominantly wealthy White section. During that time, I only interacted with African Americans when I played pick-up basketball at various parks and playgrounds.
I made a conscious decision in my move to Washington to change my mono-racial experience. That was made easier because, for the first time, I worked in a couple of organizations that employed African Americans at professional and staff levels beyond just a single individual or two.
In my first decade in the city, I sought out, developed substantive and honest relationships with, and befriended many African Americans. I had dinners, went out for drinks, and hung out at apartments with Black friends and colleagues. At times, I was called out on my biases and prejudices. I learned to live with a certain amount of discomfort in conversations that tackled race and racism. I learned to see better the experience and perspective Black friends and colleagues regularly had in White-dominant spaces.
I began to read books that touched on race that I had never encountered before—by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Ellis Close, Octavia Butler, Malcolm X (yes, for the first time), Michael Eric Dyson, Nathan McCall, Nikki Giovani, Terri McMillan, Walter Mosley, Cornel West, and William Julius Wilson, among others.
I became far more informed—and sensitized—to what White America had subjected Blacks to, well beyond enslavement. My high school curriculum never covered any of these topics. I never took a history course in college, let alone a Black studies class. This territory was all new to me. I was puzzled at why—just like I had seen in North and West Philly—too many parts of Washington were just as poor, rundown, and, frankly, depressing – and deeply, deeply segregated.
I wondered how this could still be in the 1990s. It took me a long time to put the puzzle pieces together.
In 1999, I visited a friend who had moved out to Salt Lake City and changed his politics from liberal to conservative/libertarian in the few short years he had lived there. In conversations with him over several years, I was just stunned that he had concluded that the current predicament that Blacks found themselves in (e.g., so many living in high-poverty neighborhoods) was all their own doing because, he argued, America had been a level playing field ever since we passed the Civil Rights laws in the 1960s.
I argued with him as cogently as I could, but I still did not know enough to counter how fundamentally wrong I thought his views were on race and our nation’s trajectory regarding race since the 1960s. We ultimately agreed to disagree. Eventually, over a few years, I ended our friendship over his continued insistence to argue his points and his accusations that I was “muzzling him.”
In the 23 years since, I have talked to him only once. During that time, I became ever more committed to genuinely understanding how the playing field Americans love to imagine is predominantly fair and level remains almost the complete opposite.
DIG DEEPER:
If you want to read more about the history and consequences of continued residential segregation, try these two think-tank articles:
William Frey’s “Neighborhood segregation persists for Black, Latino, and Asian-Americans,” Brookings Institute - neighborhood segregation.
M.A. Turner and S. Greene’s “Causes and Consequences of Separate and Unequal Neighborhoods,” Urban Institute - causes & consequences.
If you want to dig even deeper, consider reading Jessica Trounstine’s academic-oriented book on segregation: Segregation by Design - Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities.
Finally, The Child Opportunity Index offers one of the more revealing sets of measures that map out the quality of neighborhood conditions to which America’s children have access - or not, in too many cases. The index integrates 29 different neighborhood-level “opportunity” measures - think of things like access to food and safe housing. These 2.5 dozen measures map to three primary “domains” that matter for children - Education; Health & Environment; and Social & Economic.
The index gives every neighborhood in America a score between 1 (the lowest) and 100 (the highest). Below, for example, you can see a map of the region where I live (metro D.C.), with a specific focus on the District of Columbia and the two largest Maryland counties - Montgomery to the north of the city and Prince George’s (where I live) to the east. The lighter the colors on the map, the lower the opportunity score.
The lowest scores occur in easternmost D.C. (Wards 7 and 8, the poorest parts of the city and where each has 90+% African American residents) and inside the eastern beltway in western Prince George’s (jurisdictions with the highest poverty rates in our county). On the other hand, the higher scores land in places like western D.C. (particularly Ward 3) and many areas of Montgomery County (and some areas of Prince George’s further from the city) that are quite wealthy and in DC and Montgomery, predominantly White.
You probably won’t be surprised that in areas with low opportunity scores, you find low-performing schools, food deserts (really, food apartheid), insufficient transit, a minimum of good and accessible parks, banking deserts, high rates of poverty, higher rates of particulate pollution, and higher rates of crime. All the legacies of racial and residential segregation get rolled into one in this index.
If we’re interested in making change, the index, in particular, helps us define critical areas of low opportunity for our youth and, thus, lower prospects for the thousands of children subjected to those social and economic conditions just in the DC area (fortunately, the index covers every neighborhood in the U.S.).
We must do far better. The latter section of my book explores a range of transformative solutions, all of which I’ll explore further in this newsletter in the months to come.
To read more of this 2022 report from Children’s National Hospital & The HSC Health Care System, read it HERE.
Chocolate City image courtesy of Chat GPT 4.0