Abstract
In the course of the United States’ long history of struggles for and against racial equality was the Civil Rights Act of 1875, a federal law passed by Congress and signed by President Grant. The law guaranteed that everyone, regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, was entitled to the same treatment in “public accommodations” (i.e., inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement). Many resisted the law by refusing to follow it. By 1883 the Supreme Court acquiesced to racist sentiments by overturning the 1875 law, thus reverting to the legal segregation of public accommodations. Further strengthening boundaries between blacks and whites, in 1896 the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson (163 U.S., 537, 551) that “separate but equal facilities” were constitutional. Such legally sanctioned segregation, or Jim Crow law, meant that black Americans could be barred from “whites only” water fountains, rest rooms, lunchrooms, hospitals, stores and restaurants, schools and colleges, workplaces, social clubs, bars, and neighborhoods. The negative social and psychological impacts of denying racial equality combined with the glaring racial divide in the unequal distribution of economic resources assured that separate could never be equal. It would not be until 1954, with Brown v. Board of Education (347 U.S., 483), that separate would be ruled “inherently unequal.”
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Notes
Howard Zinn (2005), A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics), 450.
The term underclass was first used by European economist Gunnar Myrdal to acknowledge a subset of the urban poor population that is chronically unemployed and whose way of life is at odds with “mainstream” values of work and personal responsibility. The term underclass has raised a great deal of controversy, largely because it was used in ways to blame and stigmatized victims and also because it failed to adequately explain underclass in nuanced contexts. Douglas Massey’s work, “American Apartheid,” has contributed greatly to a necessarily complex understanding of the “underclass.” In his work he illustrates his argument with a simulated experiment. The argument is that “racial segregation shapes, and to a large extent determines, the socioeconomic environment experienced by poor minority families. Racial segregation concentrates deprivation in black neighborhoods by restricting the poverty created by economic downturns to a small number of minority neighborhoods. To the extent that cities are also segregated by class, increases in poverty are confined largely to poor minority neighborhoods. Simulations demonstrate that under conditions of high class and racial segregation, poor black neighborhoods rapidly move to high concentrations of poverty following an overall rise in black poverty rates … [P]overty rates comparable with those observed during the 1970s have the power to transform the socioeconomic character of poor black neighborhoods very rapidly and dramatically, changing a low-income black community from a place where welfare-dependent, female-headed families are a minority to one where they are the norm, producing high rates of crime, property abandonment, mortality, and educational failure. All of these deleterious conditions occur through the joint effect of rising poverty and high levels of racial segregation” (351). Douglas S. Massey (1990), “American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass,” The American Journal of Sociology 96 (2): 351.
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© 2013 Karen Bettez Halnon
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Halnon, K.B. (2013). Black Ghetto Cool. In: The Consumption of Inequality. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137352491_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137352491_5
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