Summary
Today, North Lawndale suffers socioeconomically. Its population has decreased, as have the jobs available—poverty, infant mortality, and homicide rates are all significantly higher than the city-wide and national averages. North Lawndale serves as an extreme example of the trends present in Black Chicago. The differences between Black Chicago and white Chicago are so enormous that Chicago’s impoverished Black neighborhoods are “ecologically distinct” from its white neighborhoods, which have a per capita income almost three times as much as that of Black neighborhoods.
The lives of African Americans have improved in the last fifty years: “whites only” spaces have been eliminated, poverty rates have gone down, as have teen pregnancy rates. But things remain shaky. The income gap between Black and white households has remained the same, and access to affluent neighborhoods has not increased. This is in large part because Black families have significantly less wealth than white families, with the Pew Research Center estimating that white families hold around 20 times the wealth of Black households. This means that most Black households lack a safety net, or a way of dealing with major financial struggles, like a divorce, without massive fallout.
Black people also tend to be restricted in the choice of neighborhood—Black people have to make much more than their white counterparts in order to secure the same quality of neighborhood. One study shows that Black families making $100,000 generally live with white families making $30,000. What this means is that Black Americans generally aren’t able to “work their way out of the ghetto,” i.e. save up to move to better neighborhoods, and even if they do, their children and grandchildren face potentially returning.
Even desegregation progress has had its limits—while segregation has declined, African-Americans remain the most segregated ethnic group in America, and suffer from the concentration of poverty in areas where they themselves are concentrated. The belief present in the African-American community that these conditions are fully a result of cultural pathology, particularly the narrative that the African-American community is “fatherless,” is wrong: these problems cannot be solved simply by making its victims more "respectable" when its victims would be disrespected by this country regardless.
The Contract Buyers League tried to take direct aim at these problems through a lawsuit, grounded in Chicago’s history of segregation that had created a legitimate housing market and a lawless one. In 1976, however, they lost their suit, with the foreman on the jury commenting that he hoped the verdict would “help end ‘the mess Earl Warren made with Brown v. Board of Education and all that nonsense.’”
This kind of attitude seems to still be present today: over the last two decades, the Supreme Court has been steadily rolling back progressive 1960s legislation, and sentiments like this have also been reflected even by liberal members of the government. For example, in 2008, Barack Obama stated that he wouldn’t have wanted his daughters to benefit from affirmative action. This misses, however, the fact that the Obamas have succeeded by being twice as good as their counterparts, and that their situation is not a common one.
Analysis
The problems that North Lawndale faces today can be traced directly to redlining. Not only did redlining bankrupt Black neighborhoods during its implementation, but it also created cities that suffer from deep segregation. Like slavery, redlining's impacts extend far beyond its actual lifespan. Selling on contract caused North Lawndale to transition from the dream of an interracial neighborhood into a neighborhood that faces a myriad of issues, and it's only one of many. The stark differences between sections of a city that aren't even ten miles apart demonstrate how severely racism has made an impact on the literal geography of the United States, and how that geography impacts factors that one might not even think of as geographical, like homicide and infant mortality rates.
With this context, it's not surprising that the improvement seen in African-American communities since the 60s and 70s has been partial and complicated. Coates doesn't deny that there has been a significant improvement, but many of the foundational elements remain the same. Accounting for inflation, the persistence of both wealth and income gaps between white and Black families serves as concrete proof that there is still a race problem in this country. This is something made clear when you study where Black people in America live. The fact that African Americans still struggle to access better neighborhoods and live in neighborhoods with white families that make significantly less than them is an example of the housing market's continuing discrimination against African American households.
Segregation is legally a thing of the past, but the effects of segregation have yet to be undone. People believe that somehow this is a result of African-American behavior, in particular that a lack of fathers is to blame—a narrative that became extremely popular after the publication of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, more famously known as the Moynihan Report, in 1965. The Moynihan Report was a report written by sociologist and presidential advisor Daniel Moynihan that argued that civil rights legislation alone was not enough to fix the racial divide and that family problems in the African-American community had to be dealt with first. Then and now, critics have commented that this is a method of blaming the victim for racism, but the beliefs expressed in that report continue to have a strong grip on the American consciousness.
But the government is not always cooperative, as we see at the end of this section. The Contract Buyers League had their suit rejected, with the jury blatantly expressing segregationist sentiments. The Supreme Court is no longer invested, it seems, in maintaining the progressive work done in the 1960s, and many liberals share this disinterest. But they miss the key point, which is that, despite the success of a few, the majority of African Americans remain deeply limited by the restrictions racist policies set for them decades ago.
