[lbo-talk] the neoliberal, Clintonian way

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Wed Nov 19 11:09:06 PST 2008


This is on my to-read list. It looks like an excellent book for illustrating how structural racism works. I especially appreciate the "neoliberal, Clinton way" where we have to sift through a morass of information, fill out a thicket of forms, and maybe, just maybe but highly unlikely we might get the kid into a magnet school....

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The Mixed-Income Myth

Northwestern prof Mary Pattillo on why even the black middle-class can't save a poor black neighborhood in Chicago

By Harold Henderson June 15, 2007

MAYOR DALEY'S BRAVE new Chicago doesn't work for everyone. Eric Klinenberg tried to make this point five years ago with Heat Wave, his examination of who suffered and how during a 1995 natural disaster. Now Northwestern University sociologist Mary Pattillo nails it with Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City -- though she doesn't begin to bring the hammer down until about halfway through the book.

Pattillo's participant-observer study of slowly gentrifying North Kenwood-Oakland began in 1998, when she bought a house at 4432 S. Berkeley. The house provides a point of entry into the history of the neighborhood; she traces NKO's fortunes from late-19th-century prosperity to 1970s poverty and back to relative prosperity, then focuses on the uneasy position of the growing population of middle-class black professionals, who often find themselves acting as brokers between "the Man" downtown and the "littlemen" back in the hood.

...

Black gentrifiers usually say they want their presence to benefit long-time neighborhood residents, who are usually poor and working-class. And sometimes it actually does. In NKO early-arriving middle-class blacks had to pull out all the stops to get mortgages from redlining financial institutions, and their success forced financial institutions to play fair with those who followed. But the benefits aren't so clear when it comes to education.

...

Once a struggling parent's main job was to make sure the kids attended school. Now parents face the catch-22 of having to negotiate a maze that favors those who already have writing skills, verbal assertiveness, and knowledgeable friends. This is the Daley way -- the neoliberal, Clintonian way. "The model has changed," writes Pattillo, "from one in which cities 'deliver' public services like education, health care, and protection from crime, to one in which residents 'shop for' these goods in a service landscape that includes more nongovernmental, private subcontractors."

... Pattillo's take on housing is more complicated but equally unsettling. She cuts through the clutter of the ongoing 41-year-old Gautreaux desegregation lawsuit, identifying the 1981 concession that in effect ended the original crusade to reverse decades of planned segregation with planned integration. In that year the plaintiffs' lawyers, desperate for results, agreed to allow some new public housing in so-called revitalizing areas that were mostly black. That shifted the battle to places like NKO and pitted middle-class blacks (who said their neighborhood was overburdened with public housing already) against poor blacks (who didn't want to be pushed out) in a cage match while everybody else pretended the cage hadn't been constructed by white racism in the first place. ...

"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."

-- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08

-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws



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