Race and Class in American Cities
On Tuesday, September 26, 2023, The Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest virtually hosted VU alum Dr. Menika Dirkson (Morgan State), Dr. Rob Gioielli (Cincinnati), and Dr. Amanda Boston (Pittsburgh) for a panel discussion titled “Race and Class in the American City”, the second event in the Lepage Center’s Cities in Historical Perspective Series. The event was moderated by Dr. Paul C. Rosier, Villanova University History Professor and Director of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.
Watch the recording here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgqNYHdc9Eg&list=PL_Z9mt0HJeskBM8nPMx5IMz-WulxN7Ypm&index=2&pp=iAQB
On September 26th, The Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest hosted Dr. Amanda Boston, Dr. Rob Gioielli, and Dr. Menika Dirkson to discuss the interplay of race and class in American cities. The panelists addressed a variety of race and class issues that have historically plagued the United States like gentrification, white flight, and racial criminalization. These presentations analyzed different institutional roadblocks for minority groups when it came to class hierarchy, demonstrating the intimate relationship of race and class in American cities.
Dr. Amanda Boston started the discussion by addressing gentrification in her hometown of Brooklyn, presenting research she has conducted for her upcoming book The New New York: Race, Space, and Power in Gentrifying Brooklyn. Gentrification is the process of changing the makeup of a neighborhood by incorporating affluent businesses and people into the community, often changing the demographic makeup and cost of living of the community. Dr. Boston continued by defining the role of neoliberalism, the reduction of state influence in the economy by focusing on privatization and market deregulation, in urban development and how it works to broaden the economic gap between the upper and working class. By conflating whiteness, progress, and profit, predominantly black neighborhoods are labeled as neighborhoods in need of development. The gentrification of these neighborhoods facilitates serial forced displacement — the repetitive, coercive upheaval of groups — by perpetuating power and resource imbalances through practices like financial precarity, depressed property values, and foreclosure for the purpose of real estate speculation. Real estate speculation leads to property in primarily minority neighborhoods outpricing what longtime residents can afford, displacing them in lieu of businesses and affluent transplants.
Dr. Boston highlighted how Brownsville, Brooklyn (home of the highest concentration of low-income public housing in North America) is currently threatened by potential privatization of the New York housing authority, displacing the neighborhood’s primarily black population. In a more cultural sense, Dr. Boston pointed out how the Barclays Center’s utilization of Jay-Z’s involvement in the arena’s construction to disguise the displacement of black residents in Brooklyn by a capitalistic real estate organization. Conversely, black Brooklynites have shown resilience in the face of marginalization by protesting for environmental justice in black neighborhoods, maintaining black historical institutions, creating mutual aid organizations, and fostering collective land ownership. Dr. Boston’s economic and cultural dissection of Brooklyn’s gentrification provided perspectives on the human toll of gentrification in black neighborhoods, challenging harmful stereotypes of black neighborhoods as problems for gentrification to solve.
Dr. Rob Gioielli presented after Dr. Boston, offering an environmental historian’s perspective on the racialization of space in post-war American cities. By presenting two case studies, Dr. Gioielli viewed the role of race and class in environmental crises. The first case study focused on childhood lead poisoning in St. Louis, Missouri. Historically, northern St. Louis has been primarily black while the southern part of the city is primarily white due to redlining (denying services to residents of specific neighborhoods, usually based on race). In northern St. Louis, many houses were considered “substandard” and many of them had been painted with lead paint, which peeled off the walls and turned to dust. When ingested that dust effects children most, and many black children in northern St. Louis were affected. Despite the efforts of civil rights activists like Ivory Perry and scientists like Wilbur Thomas, lead paint remained a problem among black residents of St. Louis until the 1970s, constituting slow violence (a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight) against St. Louis’ black population.
Dr. Gioielli’s second case study was about public transit in Atlanta and automobiles’ effect on climate change. White flight (migration of white populations to suburbs from more ethnically diverse areas) after World War II drove many white Atlanta residents to suburbs, and Atlanta proposed a rail line in the 1960s to help these commuters access the city. To fund this project, Atlanta’s white leaders proposed a sales tax that would fund the project, but Atlanta’s black leaders refused to fund a project that benefitted only white Atlanta residents. This proposal failed and black residents of the city remained the most prominent public transit users. From the 1970s on, white Atlanta residents associated public transit with black populations. This perception of Atlanta’s public transit caused white suburbanites to drive. As a result, white suburbs became the most carbon-heavy neighborhoods because racial biases against public transport caused white Atlanta residents to rely on personal automobiles. In both case studies, Dr. Gioielli demonstrated the long-term environmental effects of racial and class biases in American cities.
Dr. Menika Dirkson spoke last, presenting research on the racial climate of policing in Philadelphia for her upcoming book Hope and Struggle in the Policed City. This presentation addressed how racial capitalism (an economic system of inequality based on racial labor exploitation while facilitating racial identity erasure) benefits from a culture of racialized incarceration where prisoners provide free labor. Dr. Dirkson provided some context for Philadelphia’s racial climate. During the Great Migration, a mass northern exodus of black southerners from 1916–1970, white Philadelphians moved to the suburbs during the 1960s. Philadelphia depended on its wealthy white residents’ taxes, so the city began to cut social welfare programs, expand real estate for businesses, and stopped white flight with the expansion of commercial and residential properties. To achieve these goals, the city expanded funding on police systems to facilitate tough on crime policing.
Dr. Dirkson asserted that gang violence among Philadelphia’s black and Puerto Rican teenagers during the 1960s and 70s was the result of poverty. Instead of investing in social welfare, police and prison funding spiked in the 70s. These measures were all instituted during Frank Rizzo’s tenure as mayor, and there was a major uptick in police brutality toward black youth during this time. To the modern day, police spending is still favored over social welfare, and Dr. Dirkson highlighted how a lack of social welfare funding disproportionately affects Philadelphia’s black youth.
In American cities, the influence and race and class effect every aspect of life, and this panel’s speakers perfectly encapsulated that. Common associations of whiteness and affluence have caused gentrification to affect minority neighborhoods, displacing many black residents of cities like Brooklyn. Racial segregation caused by economic factors like redlining and white flight effect long-term personal and environmental health of racial minorities. Racial capitalism commodifies incarceration to bolster the police system while devaluing social welfare programs that benefit marginalized youth. These observations are distinct, but they all identify how institutional factors marginalized groups based on race and class in American cities, providing a framework to dissect how to shape public policy moving forward.
