Page 29 - Impact: Collected Essays on the Threat of Economic Inequality

As a nation, we have achieved notable progress in expanding individual civil rights . However, as the challenges of Newark and other cities demonstrate, these gains have been undermined by the racial and class divides across our metropolitan areas .7 The sad and troubling fact is that our fortunes in life are often geographically determined .8 The quality of our public schools and housing, our access to jobs, our level of income and wealth, and our social networks all depend to a significant (and underappreciated) degree on where we live .9 Thus, our prized individual civil rights have been disabled by the seemingly bottomless inequities of place . The American dream of upward economic mobility through persistence and hard work has been thoroughly sabotaged .10
It is easy to be fatalistic, as the systems that created these racial and economic injustices have been designed to reproduce them .11 For example, our racially segregated and underfunded schools are tied directly to residence laws that require students to attend school in the poor, segregated neighborhoods where they live . Profound wealth gaps among Black, Brown, and White communities discourage racial and class integration, entrenching both the racialized privileges of wealth and the disadvantages of poverty . Persistent isolation compounds the social and economic devastation in neighborhoods that are starkly poor, spawning policies that further degrade local public schools, housing, and the environment . Hostile policing practices fuel a corrosive criminal justice system that destroys community infrastructure . As we have seen recently in cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, and Detroit, the accumulated effects are devastating and span generations, from cradle to grave .
What then can we do? We should begin by conceptualizing a legal and statutory framework designed both to promote place-based opportunity and to disrupt the systems that reproduce racialized, concentrated poverty . Such a project requires confronting head-on certain articles of faith about local control and disabling the systems that allow (mostly White) communities to hoard wealth and opportunity . For example, we have good reason to believe that we will never conquer public school segregation—and its associated social and economic harms—unless we change residence laws that require students to attend school where they live . But this kind of shift would mean that Black and Brown students would be able to attend schools outside their district —which is often a third rail for education policy .
Litigation can be useful for sparking change, though there are limits to its effectiveness . Race- targeted remedies that might be secured through litigation are severely constrained by federal constitutional doctrine .12 Moreover, federal statutes that further racial equity are under sustained attack .13 At the time of this writing, the future of the most powerful tool available under the
7 See generally david D. TrouTT, The price of paradise: The cosTs of inequaliTy and a vision for a more equiTaBle america (2014); paTrick Sharkey, sTuck in place: urBan neighBorhoods and The end of progress Toward racial equaliTy (2013).
8 See generally raJ cheTTy eT al., where is The land of opporTuniTy? The geography of inTergeneraTional moBiliTy in The uniTed sTaTes (2014) (describing the geographic disparities that undermine individual mobility), available at http:// www.equality-of-opportunity.org/images/mobility_geo.pdf.
9 See generally The geography of opporTuniTy: race and housing choice in meTropoliTan america (Xavier de Souza Briggs ed., 2005).
10 See cheTTy eT al., supra note 8.
11 See roiThmayr, supra note 3.
12 See, e.g., Parents Involved in Cmty. Sch. v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1, 551 U.S. 701 (2007) (limiting use of race- specific voluntary student assignment policies in public schools); Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974) (limiting availability of interdistrict school desegregation remedies).
13 See, e.g. Ricci v. Destefano, 557 U.S. 557 (2009) (creating barriers to the implementation of policies designed to avoid disparate impact challenges under Title VII).
Housing and Community
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