Page 28 - Impact: Collected Essays on the Threat of Economic Inequality

Shoe Stories:
Civil Rights and the Inequality of Place
26
Elise C. Boddie1
A friend who is an educator told me recently of two young children who were fighting during school . The fight started after one child poked fun of the other’s shoes, which were so torn that his feet were slipping through the cracks . As the fight was breaking up, the child explained through tears that he did not want to give up the shoes . His father had bought them for Christmas . And though it was just February and the shoes were no match for the winter cold, his father’s gift was for him a source of family pride .
The school I refer to is located in Newark, New Jersey . Like many post-industrial cities, Newark is predominantly Black and Brown and has a high population of low-income people .2 Though we might use the term “poor” to describe them, it would be a mistake of course to assume that folks lack for either pride or resiliency, as the “shoe story” indicates . Yet in listening to it, I could not help but focus on how deeply poverty intertwines with place . A kid in the suburbs might find himself in the same predicament, but in that particular Newark school of approximately 700 kids, there are hundreds of shoe stories . The scale of inequality is different in both kind and degree .
Newark is a complex city and, like most places, it cannot be reduced to a single narrative . But it is beset by problems of concentrated poverty that would trap even the most talented and determined among us . We commonly refer to the problems of race and class as if they are distinct, but in the United States they tend to be inextricable .3 Of course, this is no accident . Rather, their tangled relationship is the tragic result of decades of federal, state, and local policies—replicated and reinforced by private actors over time—that intentionally segregated and isolated Blacks in particular, as well as other “undesirable” groups, from Whites .4 Years later, the effects of these government policies persist, stubbornly entrenched throughout our cities and neighborhoods .
Most of us have no idea how implicated all levels of government are in our racialized landscapes .5 Instead, we presume that these distressed places are the cumulative result of individual choices and, therefore, that affected communities should bear the consequences alone .6 Worse, because our communities are so rigidly separate, the human toll is almost entirely invisible to the wealthier and better-resourced people on the other side of the jurisdictional walls we have created . Our equilibrium is inequality . As the shoe story subtly reveals, the impact is both pernicious and intergenerational, generating trauma and pain on matters both large and small .
1 Associate Professor of Law, Rutgers University-Newark; former director of litigation, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
2 See RoBerT curvin, inside newark: decline, reBellion, and The search for TransformaTion 9 (2014) (noting that “over half of the [Newark] population is black,” with a Latino population of 33.8 percent, and that 28 percent of the city’s population “lives below the poverty line”).
3 daria roiThmayr, reproducing racism: how everyday choices lock in whiTe advanTage 11 (2014).
4 See Curvin, supra note 2, at 16-21; Thomas Sugrue, The origins of The urBan crisis (1996) (“Urban inequality is the result of the mapping of understanding of racial differences onto the geography of a city—and the power of racial difference to create racial hierarchies that shaped housing patterns, workplace practices, private investment, and the public policies that reinforced them.”); see also generally kenneTh T. Jackson, craBgrass fronTier: The suBurBanizaTion of The uniTed sTaTes (1987).
5 curvin, supra note 2, at 19.
6 Id.
Impact: Collected Essays on the Threat of Economic Inequality