Black on the Block:
The Politics of Race and Class in the City
By Mary Pattillo
University of Chicago Press, 388 pages, $29
The University of Chicago has spent much of the last century using its surrounding metropolis as a laboratory for the social sciences. Most notably, Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Louis Wirth, along with their colleagues and students, poked, prodded and otherwise examined Chicago, constructing paradigms of urban life and change.
Mary Pattillo’s work is linked to that tradition. Building upon the work of the old Chicago School of sociology, she has emulated her mentor, William Julius Wilson, now at Harvard University, in opening an important, long-neglected subject for re-examination. Where Wilson brought renewed interest to the study of concentrated poverty and public policy, Pattillo, a professor of sociology and African-American studies at Northwestern University, delves into the lives and character of the black middle class. “Black on the Block” follows her earlier, well-received “Black Picket Fences,” an initial exploration of what has remained, for most observers of African-American urban life, terra incognita.
Middle-class blacks have been cursed by stereotypes and the caricature of black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s work, and their plight, particularly in well-studied Chicago, has not evoked overwhelming sympathy. Indeed, the overdrawn image that emerged from Frazier’s “Black Bourgeoisie” (1957) depicted a group obsessed with the trappings of respectability. More, they have been portrayed as aloof, when not hostile, to the presence and protests of poorer blacks. It is a less-than-fair-and-accurate portrayal, and Pattillo has done well to bring this hidden population back into a sharper, more-positive focus.
But her concentration on the divisions within Chicago’s black community and her defense of the middle class, while welcome, still face an uphill climb. Where she argues that the middle class’ first-hand familiarity and engagement with the poor meant they were anything but detached from the latter’s lives, Wilson counters by stressing the impact of middle-class black flight from areas of impacted poverty and the subsequent harm done by the removal of healthy role models. Offering no sign of retreat, Pattillo even more arguably asserts motivation. Well-to-do and needy people of color have a ” ‘linked fate’ ” that has stirred a sense of social responsibility in the former, she says. Rebuking Frazier, she concludes that there is “little empirical evidence” that the economically competent have abandoned the poor. Again, she is largely correct, but she will not convince everyone of the need for a wholesale reassessment.
Pattillo’s thrust is in the right direction, but the evidence remains ambiguous. Her revealing use of interviews, for example, yields disdainful references and harsh judgments regarding the working poor and impoverished on one hand and more-benign evaluations on the other. A number of examples cut both ways, of course, but that is the point. There is not enough here to allow for sweeping conclusions.
The author’s interpretive stance is undermined a bit, moreover, by questionable comparative judgments regarding white ethnic leaders and blacks. The immigrant entrepreneurs, she informs us (without as much as the benefit of a note), were moved primarily by the prospect of “a comfortable livelihood for themselves.” Such individualists did not display, for Pattillo, the same sense of “mission to reestablish a thriving . . . neighborhood” as did the African-Americans. Perhaps reflecting some old judgments of the Chicago School that have not yet been put comfortably to rest, these conclusions are debatable, to say the least. Indeed, a sizable literature exists that emphasizes just the opposite: the historic communalism among the European immigrants as opposed to the more noticeable individualism of black migrants. The important point is not that there is a right position on this question, but that it is not nearly as settled as the author would have us believe.
Finally, the seeming appeal to a primordial racial identification seems a bit out of place in an age that stresses the contingency and social construction of race. And, it may then be asked, how free are the more well-to-do (or anyone else) to choose an identity du jour? Is it any easier for bourgeois African-Americans to stop being bourgeois than black? What makes one identity more “real” than the other? Pattillo is left to qualify and explain away the more unadorned comments of her middle-class interviewees by saying they only “appear” or “seem” to express the same negative attitudes toward poor people of color that have appeared among the well-to-do of other hues.
The second half of the book has Pattillo concentrating on the transition of North Kenwood-Oakland, just north of the University of Chicago. It was there that, in the best tradition of participant-observer sociology, she bought a home at 4432 S. Berkeley Ave. in 1998 and partook in the life of the community. Her detailed and nicely paced account of its postwar trials brings a story with which we are increasingly familiar down to the present day.
It is a story, in part, of racial succession (from white to black beginning in the 1940s), but it is much more. As described here, the process breaks free of the constraints imposed by the Chicago School, which could not capture it in its entirety. As classically described by sociologists Otis and Beverly Duncan, that process included what was then considered an irreversible change in racial composition undertaken in the context of physical decline. History ended, it seemed, with the emergence of a black “slum.”
A second transition, however, lifted North Kenwood-Oakland from among the poorest of the poor communities in the 1980s to a place where black middle-class status, if not wealth, enjoyed considerable display. It is in recounting that complex story of intrablack diversity, conflict and cooperation that the nature of these intraracial relationships is brought to life, often with irony and insight. It is by far the most rewarding portion of the book.
It is also here that Pattillo is quick to point out the beneficial results of black-led gentrification. The newcomers’ capital, credit ratings and entrepreneurial drive have broken through restrictive practices to spur investment and growth. The value of the middle class to those of lesser means — and in this Pattillo is also correct — is apparent in their ability to open doors and serve as buffers between white and black institutions and individuals. But this crucial role of middle men and women who broker white and black interests leaves them open to criticism.
Those with the skills, resources, time and desire to participate in civic affairs and political processes have, naturally enough, agendas that serve their own purposes. Differences in interest and influence can, subsequently, produce outcomes that are skewed and tailored to their needs.
Throughout the book it is easy to detect, therefore, a yawning gap between the stated good intentions of the middle class and dubious results (for the poor) of their intervention. Such conditions have produced a litany of excuses. If the middle class alone (or primarily) benefits from the opening of an exclusive, new school, they are merely serving as models deserving of emulation. If public-housing residents are forced out of their apartments after receiving assurances to the contrary, that was simply the cost of a necessary compromise, the give-and-take of politics. If the legal framework for development permitted, at best, incremental change, it was because they were forced to use the “master’s tools,” which is to say, instruments that are by their nature less than revolutionary.
In the end, the outcomes seem painfully familiar to those of the previous generation with one important exception. The purpose here is not to lay blame, but to point out an impossible situation. The middle class has a hard enough struggle handling its own problems; it is hard to see it taking on much more with a serious hope of success. It can certainly help but is probably not the ultimate answer.
Finally, if the answer lay in expanding the middle class while shrinking the numbers in poverty to insignificance, we must come to grips with the utility society has found in the latter’s existence. In the 1940s the poor occupied inner-city land deemed ripe and essential for redevelopment. Many were subsequently relocated, with public housing playing a key role. Given, in effect, temporary custody of considerable stretches of another burned-out urban landscape, they placed these lands in reserve for the next half-century, permitting them to lie fallow and regain value as the city changed around them.
The ghetto, in effect, became a land bank in which some of the property used only for minority housing (the North Side, West Side and the riots of the 1960s are not treated here) regained value just as once-rich farmland soaked up nutrients when left unused. Guarded by the presence of massive projects and thousands of minority poor, these large, well-situated sites beckoned once again. By the 1990s this second occupation had run its course, and the poor were called upon to move again. The old Chicago School cut into this process in midstream and saw only the first half. The end remains in doubt.
Those remaining skeptics and critics, in short, can still find much common sense in director Mike Nichols’ assessment of the first round of urban renewal in Hyde Park. It was, he said, simply a matter of, “White and black, standing shoulder to shoulder against the poor.”
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Arnold Hirsch is the Ethel and Herman L. Midlo professor for New Orleans studies and university research professor at the University of New Orleans. His most recent works include “Less Than Plessy: The Inner City, Suburbs, and State-Sanctioned Residential Segregation in the Age of Brown” in the book “The New Suburban History,” edited by Kevin Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue.
