On Being

Proposals for Change in the United States

Desegregation
By far the most important thing that must happen in the United States is desegregation, both racial and economic. As long as there are ghettos, Jonathan Kozol has written, there will be ghetto desperation. If one puts all of the poorest people together in one area, removes the jobs, decimates the social organization, and so forth, generational poverty is simply inevitable. Affluent people must move into poorer neighborhoods, and (somewhat more likely) the affluent need to allow poor people into their neighborhoods.

The "specter" of poor people moving into affluent neighborhoods is threatening to most middle- and upper-class Americans. We fear that the problems of the inner city will accompany the people. Over the last twenty years, however, there has been a fascinating research study, the Gautreaux Project in Chicago, the importance of which has not been generally recognized. Chicago public housing has always been highly segregated. As part of the settlement of a Federal civil rights suit in the 1970s, the city of Chicago agreed to fund a study of approximately 5,000 families from a public housing project that was being razed. The tenants were, for all practical purposes, randomly assigned to two groups. Both groups were offered Section 8 housing vouchers (to pay the rent), but one group (the inner-city group) was offered housing in another part of the city, while families in the second group (the suburban group) were given the opportunity to move into middle-class and affluent white neighborhoods in the suburbs. Other than locating the eligible apartments (where landlords would accept Section 8 certificates), neither group was given any special help. These two groups were then followed closely and have been statistically compared over the last twenty years.

To over-simplify, the mothers of the families from the suburban group had results not so different from the mothers in the inner-city group. They were employed about as often, made about as much money, and had to go back on welfare about as often. Interestingly enough, neither group of mothers felt more socially isolated than the other, which is to say that the poor, black mothers in the white, middle-class neighborhoods felt no more socially isolated than their counterparts in the city. It was not that the suburban mothers did not often feel isolated: they did. It was just as true, however, that inner-city mothers felt forced to chose self-isolation as a way of protecting their children from the dangers of the ghetto.

It was in the children that the important differences were noted. As might be expected, during the first several years after moving into the more advanced suburban schools, the children struggled. They had much to catch up on, in many cases years of work, because their inner-city schools had simply not been teaching at the same level. After three or four years, however, the school performance of the suburban kids changed. They began to do as well compared to their suburban peers as the inner-city kids were doing compared to their inner-city peers. Said another way, if black inner-city kids were making A's in the inner-city, they were soon making A's in the suburbs; those with B's in the inner-city had B's in the suburbs, and so on. The children had "jumped the track" from ghetto educational standards to suburban educational standards.