Disintegration (15 page)

Wilson’s work is often cited as an answer to the theory,
espoused by some conservatives, that welfare payments targeted at helping mothers who were living without male partners created an even clearer economic incentive for women not to marry. Those looking for a noneconomic explanation for the decline of the traditional nuclear family in Abandoned black America have often pointed to the dearth of sex education and the infrequency of condom use among African American teens. But when a Pulitzer Prize–winning colleague of mine at
The Washington Post
, the journalist Leon Dash, spent a year living in one of Washington’s most distressed housing projects, he found that the young girls who became pregnant were not confused in the least about how babies were made, and that condoms were readily accessible. Dash found that girls made the conscious decision to become pregnant for a variety of reasons. Single motherhood was often a multigenerational phenomenon. Some girls felt confined living with their mothers and siblings, and knew that having a baby would allow them to establish their own households—perhaps in a subsidized apartment just a courtyard away. Others were responding to a less practical but far deeper need for proprietorship: in a transient and precarious world, the sense that
I made this and it will always be mine
.

Whatever the principal reason, the phenomenon itself is undeniable. When Katrina hit the Lower Ninth, well over half of all households with children under eighteen were headed by a woman with no husband present. Only about 25 percent of children were living in households with both parents—about the same as the percentage of children in the Lower Ninth who were being raised not by a parent but by their
grandparents.
⁷
The traditional family had broken down.

Other scholars have argued that “spatial mismatch” alone
is not enough to explain how neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth devolved into the islands of extreme poverty and dysfunction that constitute the archipelago of Abandoned black America. At the same time that jobs were moving out of the cities, African Americans were winning unprecedented rights and freedoms. Those who were best prepared to take advantage of the new opportunities moved away from places like the Lower Ninth, leaving the least-prepared behind. The 1960s riots hastened an exodus that had already begun. As the black Mainstream made for the exit, what had been economically diverse African American neighborhoods became uniformly poor.

Out-migration of the Mainstream doesn’t seem to explain the full extent of the transformation, however. Some studies indicate that a greater effect may be produced by the movement of poor African Americans—people who, for whatever reason, have to find a new place to live. Poor black people, when they move, are likely to move into neighborhoods that are poorer and more racially segregated than the neighborhoods they are leaving. So what happens is a kind of distillation that effectively cooks off the middle class and the working class until only the Abandoned remain.

At the same time, though, these “destination” neighborhoods have thinned out: Low density, compared to the pre–civil rights days, is characteristic of Abandoned zones throughout the country, with block after block dotted with derelict buildings and vacant lots, like the gaps in a six-year-old’s smile. This winnowing has been taken to an extreme in Detroit and its satellite industrial cities such as Pontiac and Flint, where the big question now is which parts of town to let nature reclaim. Like most cities from which industry has fled, New Orleans
before Katrina had a much bigger geographical footprint than it needed—the city’s population was about 475,000, down from a peak of 627,000 in 1960.
⁸
The Lower Ninth Ward still had the fabric of a real neighborhood, but it was frayed and moth-eaten.

* * *

One last key factor in creating the conditions that Katrina exposed—the conditions in which Abandoned black America lives—is racial segregation. That sounds trivially obvious—in that we are considering black neighborhoods, not integrated ones—but it’s not. All else being equal, we should expect to find poor black, white, and Hispanic people all living together in poor neighborhoods. But that is not the case. Princeton sociologist Douglas S. Massey argues that racial segregation is the most important factor in the concentration of black poverty because African Americans have fewer housing options and are especially hard-hit in any economic downturn.
⁹

All these factors had conspired to set the scene for Katrina. They did their work like experienced stagehands—efficiently and out of sight.

One reason the scenes from devastated New Orleans were so shocking is that in many metropolitan areas, the inner city isn’t what it used to be. Quite often, it isn’t even
where
it used to be.

Across the country, gentrification has turned dangerous, decrepit, close-in, once exclusively black neighborhoods into hip oases where the most outrageous crime is what coffee shops charge for a few drops of espresso mixed with some warm milk. This transformation is far from complete, it must be said, and there are cities where you could drive around for
hours and decide that it hasn’t made much of a dent at all. In Chicago, for example, vast sectors of the South Side are still unreconstructed ghetto, while in Baltimore whole neighborhoods of once-tidy row houses are abandoned, boarded up, and rotting away—the postapocalyptic cityscape familiar to viewers of
The Wire
.

It is also the case that only when the real estate market is booming do blocks of Harlem brownstones become prettified, and only when it’s
really
booming could a row of former crack dens in Washington metamorphose into a happening nightlife district, anchored by a chic bistro serving mussels, fries, and Belgian beer. When the housing market tanks, gentrification is put on hold. The process rarely goes into reverse, though. It works like a ratchet: Once seized, territory is seldom surrendered. Push by shove, eviction by foreclosure, poor people are moved from the center to the margins.

At the same time, the Abandoned are pushed to the margins of our consciousness. There was a time when the status of the poor was a much-debated issue in American public life, if only because the non-poor were so afraid of them. Crime was seen as such an urgent problem that a generation of politicians won office by promising “law and order”—which was shorthand, I would argue, for protecting the rich and white from the poor and black. Zero-tolerance policing was invented, “three-strikes” laws were passed, mandatory sentencing was imposed, and new prisons were built. A generation of young criminals either went straight, went to jail, or went to the grave, and the ultraviolent crack epidemic burned itself out. When was the last time any politician made “safer streets” the centerpiece of a campaign?

Since the early 1990s, the incidence of serious violent crime
in the United States has fallen by nearly 40 percent, from 747 such offenses per 100,000 population in 1993 to 467 per 100,000 in 2007, according to the Census Bureau.
¹⁰
Some believe the decline is mostly a function of demographic trends; others credit the draconian laws and tough prison sentences; still others see a collateral benefit of economic growth. Whatever the cause—and despite the impression of unabated, rampant depravity and mayhem conveyed nightly by the eleven o’clock news—most people understand at some level that when they walk down the street these days, they have less reason to fear getting mugged than they did twenty years ago. Poverty simply isn’t the menace it once was. Except in extraordinary circumstances—such as Hurricane Katrina—poverty just doesn’t command the nation’s attention the way it used to.

So to find Abandoned black America today, you have to look a bit harder. You have to go to the corners of cities, to neighborhoods often neatly bypassed by the freeways and avenues that commuters use to get downtown. You have to find your way into shabby little pockets of the inner suburbs, where refugees from gentrification have found precarious sanctuary. You have to travel to the rural South and visit communities where upward mobility is marked not by building a Mitchellville Mansion but by moving out of a shotgun shack into a reasonably new double-wide.

In Washington, the Abandoned have been pushed steadily eastward—and even out of town. In 1970, the city’s population was 70 percent black; today, the African American majority is down to 54 percent, and it’s still falling fast.
¹¹
In 2009, for the first time since the advent of local government in a city ultimately ruled by Congress, a majority of the elected city council
was white. The District of Columbia can be called Chocolate City no more.

Thirty years ago, the desirable Capitol Hill neighborhood was expensive, mostly white, and just a few blocks wide. During each successive real estate boom, imaginative realtors pushed the boundary of Capitol Hill first to the east, in increments of several blocks at a time, then north all the way to the H Street corridor, which since the riots had been considered one of the most dangerous places in town. These days, I have to admit that the sight of a young Caucasian couple pushing a baby stroller down artsy, avant-garde H Street gives me a jolt of cognitive dissonance. There was a time when I might have pulled over, asked if they had
any idea
where they were, and perhaps even offered them a lift. Then again, I might have done the same for a yuppified black couple, since H Street was an equal-opportunity mugging zone. One of its alleys was the scene of a particularly heinous crime: In 1984, a forty-eight-year-old African American woman named Catherine Fuller was horrifically raped and murdered by a gang of young men in what might have been a scene from
A Clockwork Orange
. Witnesses must have seen the attack and heard Fuller’s screams, but nobody intervened. The killing was seen as a measure of the depths to which the city had fallen.

Today, Capitol Hill—the name, if not the elevation—extends all the way from the Capitol to the Anacostia River, a polluted, slow-moving estuarine tributary of the Potomac that cuts off nearly a third of the city from the rest. Row houses in the newly added precincts of Capitol Hill have been spruced up with all-stainless kitchens and polished hardwood floors. Decrepit old commercial buildings have been converted into faux-loft
condos; Eastern Market, once an authentic place where locals went to buy everything from collard greens to crab cakes, has been turned into an “authentic” place catering mostly to people who couldn’t tell a ham hock from a hog jowl if their lives depended on it. There are islands of poverty that remain, but they shrink year by year as longtime homeowners and landlords sell to developers with big ideas.

The Abandoned who lived on the flatland that Capitol Hill swallowed—like the Abandoned who lived around U Street, those who lived in the tenements around the industrial zone where developers built the city’s new baseball stadium, those who lived in the suddenly trendy neighborhood north of Massachusetts Avenue (inevitably called NoMa), those who lived in riot-scarred, now-revitalized Columbia Heights, and many others—have largely been pushed across the river. Everyone knows that “the river” in question is not the Potomac but the Anacostia.

Most of the millions of tourists who visit the nation’s capital probably have no idea that this remote part of the city even exists. People often refer to the whole area east of the river as “Anacostia,” but actually it’s a vast sector made up of many distinct neighborhoods—Congress Heights, Barry Farm, Deanwood. The small historic district that is properly called Anacostia is where the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass lived; his hilltop home is now a national historic site. The panorama from Douglass’s front door is one of the best in town, with the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and the rest of the city’s monumental core strewn at your feet; on the Fourth of July, it’s as if the fireworks are for you alone. Such to-die-for views will inevitably attract hordes of gentrifying pioneers to what is an incongruously beautiful ghetto—heavily wooded,
coursed with streams, dotted with parks—but so far the flow is a bare trickle. “East of the river” has always had pockets of Mainstream comfort, and they cling on. But it’s the poorest and blackest part of town. It’s where the Abandoned live.

It wasn’t like that when I was growing up. Dorothy Fordham, a first cousin of my mother’s, lived in a tidy house just off Alabama Avenue. She had a pioneering career as an officer in the army—few black women had ever advanced so far—and her stories of exotic postings and intrigue-filled assignments were fascinating. Aunt Dorothy remained in that little house after she retired, and the neighborhood slowly sank around her. Longtime neighbors died or moved away, to be replaced by newcomers with less regard for niceties such as landscaping and maintenance. They were less neighborly, too: A few years ago, already past eighty, she was attacked and badly bitten by a pit bull whose careless owner lived down the street. Never the type to be pushed around, she held her ground until an incapacitating stroke forced her into an assisted-living facility. Now that she’s gone, what will happen to her immaculate house?

“Law and order” is very much an issue east of the river; people who are poor and black have always suffered disproportionately from violent crime, much of it committed by people who are black and poor. A popular pastime among young men who live in one big housing project is stealing cars—to go joy-riding around the city, to have drag races on a notorious strip of highway in Prince George’s County, or perhaps just as a way to pass the time. Drug dealing is seen as a regular form of commerce in some neighborhoods—not accepted but expected. East of the river is where most of the city’s handgun shootings and murders occur, frequently as a result of longstanding
feuds between “crews”—that’s the word local authorities use to avoid calling them gangs, because acknowledging a gang problem would mean having to do something about it. The crews are based in different neighborhoods, to which they are fiercely loyal. Often the bullets fly during battles over drug turf, but sometimes it’s just because some guys from, say, Barry Farm were seen promenading around Congress Heights in a way that somehow conveyed disrespect. The origins of such territorial disputes are lost in the mists of time, but they are important enough that schoolteachers have to know which kids live where, so they can arrange their classroom seating in a way most likely to minimize conflict.