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From: "Brian R. Corbin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2007 8:04 AM
Subject: Reflections on Poverty in the U.S. Forty Years After the Urban
Riots
FYI...Reflections on Poverty in the U.S. Forty Years After
the Urban Riots
http://tikkun.org/rabbilernerarticles/urbanriots/document_view
Reflections on Poverty in the U.S. Forty Years After
the Urban Riots
By Peter Dreier
This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the "long
hot summer" of 1967, which experienced urban riots in
163 cities, most famously Detroit and Newark. One of
those riots occurred in my hometown, Plainfield, New
Jersey, about which I've written an essay, "Riot and
Reunion," that appears this week in The Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070730/dreier.
What lessons have we learned in the past 40 years?
Historian Michael Katz has a very provocative
article, "Why Aren't US Cities Burning?", in the
current (Summer 2007) issue of Dissent magazine. He
concludes: "The nation's avoidance of civil violence
in its segregated ghettos has one other lesson for
Europeans concerned about urban unrest. It is that in
modern techniques for managing marginalization -- for
keeping the peace in the face of persistent, and
growing, inequality -- the United States is a world
leader." His article will be available next week on
the Dissent website:
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/issue/?issue=65.
Historian Thomas Sugrue's article, "Burn Bebe Burn"
in an earlier issue of Dissent (Winter 2006), also
compares the urban riots in the US and France,
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=150.
Since the 1960s, only two major explosions of urban
rioting-- in Miami and Los Angeles -- have occurred.
But this is hardly the same as "keeping the peace."
What Wilson has called "quiet riots" -- crime,
violence, suicide, drug abuse, etc -- have persisted.
As I wrote in an essay about the 10th anniversary of
the LA unrest
http://www.ncl.org/publications/ncr/92-1/ncr92104.pdf,
riots are expressions of outrage about social
conditions, but they are not truly political
protests. They do not have a clear objective, a
policy agenda, or a target for bringing about change.
At most, riots are a wake-up call—to political and
business leaders in particular, as well as to the
media—that things are seething below the surface.
What brings about positive change—especially for the
poor and working class—is the slow, gradual,
difficult work of union organizing,community
organizing, and participation in electoral politics.
To the extent that Los Angeles is a better city today
than it was ten years ago,it is due to the grassroots
activists—and their allies among
foundations,media,clergy,and public officials—who
have worked in the trenches pushing for change
against difficult obstacles.
The 1960s riots triggered a great deal of national
soul-searching about America's history of violence.
President Johnson created a blue-ribbon task force to
examine the causes of urban unrest and make
recommendations. The Kerner Commission's report,
released in 1968, is still worth reading for its
indictment of racism and its ambitious goals, none of
which were fully implemented by the federal
government, which by then had diverted the nation's
attention and resources to fighting the war in VietNam.
Much has been written about poverty since the 1960's.
But among the most profound statements were those by
Walter Reuther, the president of the United Auto
Workers union, about the limitations of the nation's
"war on poverty" in the 1960s, before the urban riots
occurred. Representing the left wing of the
Democratic Party, Reuther had been making proposals
since World War 2 to renew the New Deal and engage in
national economic planning.He advised Presidents
Kennedy and Johnson to champion a bold federal
program for full employment that would include
government-funded public works and the conversion of
the nation’s defense industry to production for
civilian needs. This, he argued, would dramatically
address the nation’s poverty population, create job
opportunities for the poor and the near-poor
(including blacks living in America's ghettos), and
rebuild the nation’s troubled cities without being as
politically divisive as a federal program identified
primarily as serving poor blacks. Both presidents
rejected Reuther’s advice. Johnson’s announcement of
an ‘‘unconditional war on poverty’’ in his 1964 State
of the Union Address pleased Reuther, but the details
of the plan revealed its limitations. The War on
Poverty was a patchwork of small initiatives that did
not address the nation’s basic inequalities.
Testifying before Congress in April 1964, Reuther
said that ‘‘while [the proposals] are good, [they]
are not adequate, nor will they be successful in
achieving their purposes, except as we begin to look
at the broader problems [of the American economy].’’
He added that ‘‘poverty is a reflection of our
failure to achieve a more rational, more responsible,
more equitable distribution of the abundance that is
within our grasp.’’
Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign was the
last time a major candidate focused on the problem of
poverty. His impromtu remarks about poverty, racism,
and violence in America, triggered by the murder of
Martin Luther King in April 1968, are still very
moving: http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/rfk.htm.
John Edwards' current presidential campaign is the
first since Kennedy's 1968 crusade to seriously focus
on poverty. Many cynical pundits are mocking Edwards'
current 8-state anti-poverty tour as a political non
-starter. A reporter on CNN two days ago claimed that
Edwards' effort to focus national attention on
poverty won't help him get elected President because
poverty was a "sixties" issue, because Americans
don't care about poverty, and because the poor don't
vote. In fact, a quick Google search shows that
Edwards' anti-poverty tour, in both rural and urban
areas, is generating a lot of media attention. It is
no accident that the New York Times magazine recently
devoted an entire issue (June 10) to America's
widening inequality and persistent poverty, including
a powerful article on an SEIU organizing campaign and
a cover story on Edwards' anti-poverty campaign:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/magazine/10edwards-t.html?ex=1184904000&en=c5179a4d94a9dc77&ei=5070
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/magazine/10edwards-t.html?ex=1184904000&en=c5179a4d94a9dc77&ei=5070>
.
Edwards should applauded for showing leadership, for
framing poverty as a "moral" issue, and for linking
the issue of poverty to the widen issues of growing
inequality and economic insecurity among the middle
class. Today, 37 million Americans live below the
official federal poverty line, but there are many
more Americans who can barely make ends meet. For the
first time in more than a generation, poverty is back
on the national ageanda. A new report by the Pew
Research Center shows that public support for rising
the minimum wage, for labor unions, and for federal
government action to address poverty are higher now
than at any time in 20 year:.
http://pewresearch.org/pubs/434/trends-in-political-values-and-core-attitudes-1987-2007
In the past few years, voters in many states have
overwhelmingly supported initiatives to raise their
state's minimum wage. The popularity of Barbara
Ehrenreich’s best-selling book, Nickel and Dimed,
about America’s working poor, and the growing
protests against Wal-Mart’s low pay, indicate that
concerns about inequality and poverty are moving from
the margin to the mainstream of American politics.
The urban riots unleashed a great deal of academic
research about poverty, racism, and violence, much of
it funded by the federal government and major
foundations. Jerome Skolnick's The Politics of
Protest (1969) was an early look at these issues.
Alice O'Connor's book, Poverty Knowledge: Social
Science, Social Policy, and the POor in 20th Century
US History (2001) recounts much of the debate over
the impact of social research on poverty during that
period. Another wave of research on poverty, cities,
and race was triggered by William Julius Wilson's
book, The Truly Disadvantaged (1987). This explosion
of academic research has focused on the concentration
of poverty, the role of racism in exacerbating
poverty, and the influence of "social capital" -
assets and networks -- among the poor. What's
missing is a comparable amount of research about the
rich and the impact of the social networks (including
corporate boards and other elite institutions, and
corporate PACs) among the powerful in exacerbating
inequality and poverty.
Much has changed since the urban unrest of the 1960s,
including the globalization of the economy, the
export of US manufacturing jobs, the influx of new
immigrants, the decline of union membership, the
widening gap between the rich and everyone else, the
deepening fiscal crisis of our cities, the slashing
of federal funding for affordable housing and
rebuilding urban neighborhoods, the accelerating of
suburbanization (initially among the white middle
class), and the growing suburbanization of poverty:
(http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070423/press,
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040920/dreier
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16960673/site/newsweek/;
http://www.brookings.edu/dybdocroot/metro/pubs/20041018_econsegregation.pdf
http://www.brook.edu/metro/pubs/20061205_citysuburban.htm
http://www.secondharvest.org/learn_about_hunger/fact_sheet/hunger_in_the_suburbs.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-10-18-suburbs-poverty_x.htm
Given these trends, we need a new policy agenda to
address the problems of poverty and inequality. The
bold 1968 recommendations of the Kerner Report have
been updated by a recent report by the Center for
American Progress, From Poverty to Prosperity: A
National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2007/04/poverty_report.html.
These recommendations should be the blueprint for the
next war-on-poverty.
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