A half-century of progress and black America’s still burning: Saunders

Doug Saunders on the endemic problem of racism and studies that show the impact of deprived neighbourhoods on outcomes:

The answer is found in the cities and towns where these explosions of violence and deprivation are taking place: Once an institution (a city, a police force, a school system, an economy) is set up to create a racial divide, it will continue to do so, regardless who’s running it, unless there’s a dramatic intervention.

Too many Americans don’t see these institutions, but only their victims, who then get blamed for the outcomes: It has become popular again on the North American right to claim, in pseudo-scholarly language, that “that’s just how they are” – that African-American culture, or families, must be to blame (even though culture and family structures are always consequences, not causes, of larger ills).

This view has been decisively disproven this month in a vast and expensive study by economists Raj Chetty, Lawrence Katz and their colleagues at Harvard University, in which thousands of randomly selected low-income (mainly black) families were given vouchers in the nineties to move out of deprived neighbourhoods (and thousands more stayed put as control groups).

The results, a generation later, found that poor, crime-addled families prone to intergenerational poverty and broken homes become, within a generation of leaving their context, prosperous, educated and marriage-prone families, with outcomes similar to those of average Americans.

The Obama administration has attempted the sort of big interventions (such as the ones of the sixties and nineties) that are needed turn around this trajectory of inequality. The post-2008 stimulus and the “Obamacare” medicare system have stopped the rise in inequality and poverty. But many large urban-policy and education programs have been blocked by a recalcitrant U.S. Congress. It might take flames from the cities, as it did 50 years ago, to provoke a change.

A half-century of progress and black America’s still burning – The Globe and Mail.