Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen Read Online Free PDF

interpreted it as humiliating to African Americans at a time when they were trying to support black strength and identity. Radical Black Power advocates condemned the report as another racist attempt to discredit black people and blame them for their plight. What right did this white man have even to write such a report about black people?
     
    To exacerbate negative public perceptions, by the end of the decade the War on Poverty had actually succeeded in signing up nine out of ten eligible single mothers for the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program that Roosevelt had initiated thirty years earlier. Instead of small numbers of widows and their children receiving assistance, the welfare rolls were flooded with divorced and never-married mothers. Although it continued to serve more white than black families, during the 1960s the program came to be associated in the media (and therefore in the public mind) with young, black, urban single mothers. The black ghetto had become very visible—and very threatening.
     
    Johnson came to office in the fall of 1963. The first of the Great Society programs moved through Congress and into rapid implementation in 1964. But the ghettos began exploding in 1965, and Vietnam was heavily draining the nation’s financial resources by late 1966. The War on Poverty ground to a halt before it had begun to take off. According to historian Michael Katz, in the end the Office of Economic Opportunity (the hub of the War on Poverty) received less than 10 percent of the most conservative estimate of what it needed to reach its goals, spending about $70 per poor person per year. It never reached the takeoff point normal in most federal programs.
     
    In reality, then, the War on Poverty proved to be only the briefest of skirmishes. The country gave itself no real chance to do anything about poverty. Of course, it wasn’t coincidental that once poverty was defined as an African-American phenomenon, we gave up remarkably quickly.
     
    Worse yet, the perceived failure of the Great Society programs now became associated with a hopelessly flawed “big government” approach to poverty that, in “throwing money” at problems, was believed to worsen them. The shadow of the aborted War on Poverty thus continues to hang over the discussion of poverty and its solutions. It is more than ironic—as well as further evidence of our deep-seated attitudes—that this tiny window of underfunded action that lasted barely a few years has become prima facie evidence of the government’s inability ever to do anything about poverty—as if we had ever tried throwing money at poverty, much less committed ourselves to a program that might stand some chance of working.
     
    Within a few short years we had gone from Harrington’s The Other America , identifying a “culture of poverty” passed down from generation to generation and calling us to action, to the Moynihan Report, identifying a “tangle of pathology,” almost a call to in action. What, after all, can be done about a “pathology”? Within a few short years, before we had really tried anything substantive, ghetto poverty had become, we believed, intractable.
     

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    PILLAGING THE GHETTO: OTHER CAUSES OF POVERTY
     
    The causes of poverty are always multiple, interrelated, and mutually reinforcing. Examining some of the forces that have shaped the black ghetto, we must remember that separate descriptions of individual issues cannot adequately convey their combined impact, for each affects the other, increases the complexity, multiplies the difficulty, pulls the web tighter, adds to the surround of force. It is the complex sum of all these forces that is so discouraging.
     

“I’M NOT PREJUDICED, BUT…”
     
    Discrimination based on skin color is still widespread in the United States. While there has undoubtedly been progress in the last half-century, discrimination against African Americans and other people of color remains a