Blauner, Robert: Racial Oppression in America. New York: The Viking Press, 1972.
Browning, Rufus P., Marshall, Dale Rogers, and Tabb, David: Racial Politics in American Cities. New York: Longman, 1990.
Dahl, Robert A.: Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970 [1961].
Dubois, W. E. B.: Dusk at Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Schocken Books, 1968 [1940].
_____. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. New York: The Free Press, 1992 [1935].
Greenberg, Cheryl: “Or Does It Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Katznelson, Ira: City Trenches: Urban Politics and the Patterning of Class in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Mollenkopf, John H.: The Contested City. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Moynihan, Daniel P.: The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington: Office of Public Planning and Research, United States Department of Labor, 1965.
Pinderhughes, Dianna M.: Race and Ethnicity of Chicago Politics: A Reexamination of Pluralist Theory. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Piven, Frances Fox and Cloward, Richard A.: Regulating the Poor: The Function of Public Welfare. New York: Vintage Books, 1993 [1971].
In 1961 Robert A. Dahl published his well-respected study, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. The city he studied was New Haven, Connecticut–a city which not only surrounds Yale University, Professor Dahl’s academic home, but could be described by him as “in many respects typical of other cities in the United States” (v). This typical city had a very small population of non-whites; only 6% of the residents were African-American, and there were few Latinos or Asians.
Dahl’s primary interest was in showing why economically advantaged people tended to participate less in city government and politics than economically disadvantaged people did (see pp. 293-295). That is, Dahl’s interest in blacks was instrumental to understanding the behavior of whites. As to the condition of black New Havenites itself, Dahl contented himself with saying that discrimination was declining and that they were rather well-integrated into the politics and government of the city.
Who Governs? is a very informative book, still useful to read. But it could not be written the same way now. A city with a nonwhite population of 6% could not be represented as “typical” in America today; even in cities with small minority populations, more care would have to be taken to treat whatever such populations existed as important ‘in themselves,’ not merely as illustrations of some putatively larger point. Inasmuch as Americans have made much of ‘race’ throughout their history, the new approach is truer, or at least potentially truer, to the way citizens in cities actually think and feel. The new approach is therefore likely to have more explanatory power regarding ‘on-the-street’ conditions in the city or cities studied. But as with all scholarly approaches, this one has its dangers, particularly those associated with the concept of ‘race’ itself. Precisely because ‘race’ is a notion deeply felt, but notoriously difficult to define precisely, it can involve scholars in a maze of traps.
Take, for example, the pioneering study by W. E. B. Dubois, The Philadelphia Negro. DuBois deplored the lack of “organization” in the life of urban blacks, a deficiency that put them at a competitive disadvantage in America. He accepted the view that democracy was “premature” for American blacks. Left to their own devices, they would be governed by oligarchs or even dictators. Hence the need for the “talented tenth” of urban blacks to guide a racially insulated (not integrated) population through the hazards and complexities of modern civilization. This is not so much Jeffersonianism as vanguardism; insofar as it is Marxist-Leninist it is a Marxism without much faith in the proletariat as the agency of change. DuBois perhaps thinks of urban blacks as lumpenproletarians, too far removed from modernity to organize themselves effectively. The argument is implausible because before and at the very time DuBois wrote, no less agrarian peoples, often under the tutelage (as it were) of political bosses who had no pretensions of vanguardism, were acculturating their ethnic groups to American city politics. DuBois operates under the spell of a commonplace ideological trope of the time, the claim that civilization in the modern world was a thing so complex that one needed an extraordinarily long apprenticeship to grasp it. DuBois was applying the underlying theory of European imperialism to American urban politics.
DuBois’s major contribution to the study of race isn’t so much in the specifics of his analysis, now understandably ‘dated,’ but in the challenge he issued to his fellow Americans in his later book, Dusk at Dawn. The race problem is “the central problem of the greatest of the world’s democracies and so the problem of the future world” (vii). The race problem may be seen in what DuBois takes to be the fact that “in America, not the philosophy of Jefferson nor the crusade of Garrison nor the reason of Sumner was able to counterbalance the race superiority doctrines of Calhoun, the imperialism of Jefferson David, nor the race hate of Ben Tillman” (139). Whether or not the indictment is too sweeping, it is an indictment and served as a call for future research, to say nothing of future reform.
For a long time this challenge was not answered by mainstream political scientists who looked at urban politics, as may be seen in Dahl’s study. But the urban unrest of the 1960s could scarcely be ignored, and it shattered any complacency with respect to race relations in American cities.
There has been considerable difficulty among urbanists not so much in trying to define ‘race’—those conundrums have been left in the (ham) hands of anthropologists—but in how exactly to assess its political importance. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward begin their book, Regulating the Poor, by emphasizing not race and ethnicity but institutional/legal control of ‘the poor.’ They associate racial focus with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his critique of ‘the black family,’ a critique to which they take strong exception (193). But then, two-thirds of the way through their book, they begin to consider African-American poor in the cities, bringing race and class together under their overall thesis, which is to describe how politicians—in this case, Democrats, who run the cities—have attempted to bypass their own local political machines and to offer a bureaucratic system of poor relief in order to dampen social unrest. This approach makes sense, but it comes rather too late in a book whose authors feel they must engage in elaborate rhetorical and methodological maneuvering just to get to their main point.
Cheryl Greenberg’s “Or Does It Explode?’ has no such inhibitions about addressing race, but commits the opposite error, using ‘race’ too unproblematically, almost as an independent variable in the urban equation. Greenberg tries to account for the fact that newly-arrived European immigrants in the period 1900-1930 rose faster in the economic order than newly-arrived blacks, despite “equally low levels of education in the two communities” (21). This is a continuation of one of DuBois’s questions. She observes further that even well-educated blacks found only menial jobs, and public jobs were in large measure off-limits to blacks during the 1920s. The Depression accordingly brought greater hardships to urban blacks than to urban whites, with blacks accounting for 15% of New York City’s unemployed, even as they were but 5% of the population at the time. Greenberg’s account is descriptively powerful but analytically weak. She explains these discrepancies by citing the racial prejudices of whites as the blockade faced by New York blacks. She does not show the whys and wherefores of such prejudice, which presumably did not just exist as a force of nature.
Robert Blauner interprets the crises of the late 1960 and early 1970s in American cities sociologically. Urban life reflected the American social structure; minority racial groups (Blauner does not overlook Latinos) and their oppression by whites are central features of a social dynamic not reducible to class or economics. Rather, race privilege is a matter of status. Racial groups are not classes but Weberian “status groups,” monopolies of honor, “packet[s] of privilege” (27, 31). This tends to falsify Dahlian optimism, and leads to a more realistic assessments of future prospects. Races will not be assimilated at any time in the near future, Blauner predicts. He was right.
Blauner observes that cities have been centers of industrialization. White immigrants competed successfully for industrial jobs against emancipated Southern blacks and poor Southern whites—a datum that complicates any easy assumptions about racism as an explanation of the condition of urban blacks (64). More ambitious, Blauner argues, racial minorities are colonized, Third-World peoples, “part of the world-historical drama” of Western conquest (74), peoples who may unify as a worldwide political movement (52). Such peoples do not fit “the collective self-image of democracy for all men” established by whites in Europe and North America (52). Third-World peoples did not immigrate to America; they were colonized. This overlooks the fact that Latinos do in fact immigrate to the United States, and many, especially those who arrived prior to the recent ‘waves’ of immigration from Mexico and Central America, seem to be tracking the progress of previous ethnic, notably Italians. If Blauner were to argue that Latinos were colonized by Spaniards and Portuguese adventurers before arriving here, the answer is obvious: Welcome to the club. What ethnic group wasn’t colonized by some more powerful group, before arriving here? Even the English were mastered by the Romans.
Further, Blauner doesn’t show exactly why industrialism would single out racial minorities for long-standing oppression, or why democracy would single them out for exclusion from its “self-image.” There is a somewhat Procrustean attempt by Blauner to fit urban racial politics into a global Leninist network (evidently in imitation of Fanon), an attempt that, though impressive, seems too polemical by half.
Similarly, Blauner’s critique of the McClone Commission report on the 1965 race riot—or, as he prefers to put it, the Watts rebellion—in the Watts section of Los Angeles combines insight with polemical distortion. The McCone Commission report, he charges, assumed that the disorder was simply a matter of law-breaking caused by unemployment and poor education, along with bad public relations by the Los Angeles Police Department. The report ignores the way police were used as controllers of a ‘ghetto.’ The report also ignores the issues of nationalism raised by the ‘rebellion.’ This has the unmistakable hint of special pleading: If the ‘rebellion’ were as politicized as Blauner wishes it were, it would have issued in more explicitly political organization by blacks, in the aftermath of the riot—and not only the blacks who showed up a few years later in Mayor Tom Bradley’s administration. Blauner starts out as a sociologist, but ends by looking at politics in the wrong place, namely, among those excluded from the political process who subsequently made no attempt to enter it.
The more successful efforts focus not on ‘race’ or ‘society’ or economics in isolation or in combination, but on those things as exploited by the political structure of the city. As John H. Mollenkopf notes, whether market-oriented or Marxist, earlier economics-oriented accounts of city life did not allow for political differences; two capitalist cities might differ more from each other than from a capitalist city and a socialist city (8). “[G]overnment intervention follows its own logic rather than that of private interests” (9). Mollenkopf emphasizes the interventions of federal government agencies and of the Democratic and Republican parties in urban politics, and is very informative about politics ‘from above.’ He has no feel for street-level politics. But this isn’t a problem specifically caused by his use of race as a key factor in urban politics.
Dianna M. Pinderhughes, like Blauner, questions pluralist accounts of racial and ethnic groups, observing that pluralism tends toward optimism, partly because it focuses on white ethnics, not racial minorities. Pluralism ignores such governmental practices as redlining and restrictive covenants to confine minorities to certain parts of the city; deliberate division of the labor force along racial lines in order to minimize bargaining power of labor groups; the use of violence and/or heavy police activity; and restriction of black leaders within Democratic political machines to their own neighborhoods, with none of the citywide influence enjoyed by white ethnic leaders. “Racial status so pervaded the Chicago environment that it affected every sector of the economy and the polity (234); Pinderhughes shows how this politics of exclusion backfired in the end, leading to the political cohesion among blacks which resulted in political victory in the 1980s, once blacks had sufficient numbers to form effective alliances with sectors of the white community.
For a survey of urban politics in a number of American cities, a survey that enables the reader to compare the circumstances in a variety of places, Racial Politics in American Cities provides the best-balanced view of any of these studies, deserving of the stature it has earned as a standard text in the field. The authors eschew polemics and repeatedly show exactly how and why blacks and Latinos succeeded (or, in the case of New York, usually failed) to acquire political power commensurate with their numbers. The authors identify two basic strategies that can be used: the “outside” strategy of interest-group pressure on government and the “inside” strategy of obtaining direct power via elections. They lay out the different phases of successful uses of each strategy, based on the specific case studies presented in the volume (12). They discuss various factors influencing outcome: size of minority populations; the extent of support from liberal whites; and what might be described as the political styles (often linked to the political purposes) of black leadership. (To understate the matter, the Black Panthers in Oakland generated a different sort of political atmosphere than moderate-liberal mayor Wilson Goode in Philadelphia.) The authors present information on the political success is assuredly ‘worth the effort’—as measured in the establishment of such long-held minority goals as civilian police review boards, government appointments, city contracts, and government jobs (24). Fully integrated governments are demonstratively more responsive governments. In short, the authors actually ‘do political science’ as it relates to racial politics in cities.
The results show the importance of not assuming that ‘objective conditions’ will flow into a more just urban political order. Political organization building is crucial, both within and among minority communities, and between minority and white communities, especially politicians. As in any democratic regime, the demographic transformation of racial minorities into racial majorities within a city is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success in the election of black, Latino, and Asian mayors and city council members, who can then strengthen coalitions with influential white minorities within the cities. And of course what is made can be unmade. As in Chicago in 1989, a biracial coalition can fall apart if political acumen is missing, or if co-optation occurs.
When done intelligently, the new focus on racial issues in urban politics politicizes urban studies, not in the sense of making them more partisan than they have been, but of getting urban studies away from the technocratic, sociological approach seen in a focus on housing problems, transportation, and finance considered as ‘things in themselves.’ Rather, the study of urban politics becomes ‘political’ in its focus on structures of political authority. Unjust disparities of political power yield unjust disparities in housing, transportation, and finance. In City Trenches, Ira Katznelson worries that race-oriented studies may neglect social class—which can and should be treated politically. Class is particularly salient in understanding the white ethnics, many of whom have thought of themselves as ‘labor’ while in the workplace or union hall, but as Poles, Italians, Irish, etc. as soon as they get back home. This bifurcation of urban life among white ethnics helps to explain the lack of socialist politics in American cities, Katznelson thinks; he might well go on to think that this indicates a deficiency in socialist politics and the ideologies which animate it.
Such cautionary points as Katznelson makes are well taken, but they really suggest only the commonsense observation that any well-delineated picture must include some things at the expense of excluding others. Any single approach to the study of politics, urban or otherwise, will see some things clearly, others obscurely or not at all. That is why one needs to read more than one kind of study of politics.
Recent Comments