Fortune tellers. They size you up, read your body language, make vague, generalized statements, take your money, then send you on your way. Few of us put much stock in fortune tellers.
America was once graced, however, by a fortune teller of a different sort, a brilliant man and pathbreaking researcher who drew informed insights about our civic health. In 1899, he accurately predicted the emergence of pathologies that afflict quality of life today. He delivered a warning to Whites, imploring them to change “for their own sake.” Other researchers followed, uncovering the roots of pathology in Black America. In the early and mid-twentieth century, they too provided insights with tangible implications for all of us. Years ago, as a nation, we would have done well to listen to what these researchers had to say. But we didn’t. Nevertheless, we’d still do well to have a national conversation regarding what these people were telling us about the times we live in today.
In the past few years, Americans have created YouTube channels that document the difficulty of finding alternatives to suburbia. A separate category of videos produced by Black Americans draws attention to and celebrates ghetto life. Today, you can find “hood” videos for virtually any city in the country. Then there are those videos produced by Americans who have left the United States explaining why they departed and what they’ve learned by way of contrast. Although every individual story is unique, underlying issues trace back to how urban sprawl and the legacy of slavery degrade quality of life. Taken together, these stories raise a fundamental question; As a nation, where did we go wrong, and what we do to improve circumstances for future generations?
It’s a question that a Black sociologist named W.E.B. Dubois definitively answered in his 1899 book titled, A Philadelphia Negro. Its publication served as a stark warning to White America six decades before my birth. It told of what was to come if our racial animus remained unexamined and unchecked. And it has everything to do with why Christine and I raised our children outside the United States.
Dubois was brought to Philadelphia by White elites at the University of Pennsylvania who believed the city was, as he says, “going to the dogs because of the crime and venality of its Negro citizens.” His task was to study Black Philadelphians and determine the source of the problems. He lived in and conducted his research in the city’s Seventh Ward at the same time my mother’s grandparents lived in an adjacent neighborhood called the Devil’s Pocket. At the time, the Seventh Ward was one-third Black, in a city that was 95% white.
Dubois’s research revealed that Black poverty and crime were a symptom rather than a cause. He lived amongst the formerly enslaved and their children and watched in real time as Whites excluded Blacks from mainstream socio-economic life. In 1899, my great-grandfather, John Boland, was a young Philadelphia policeman walking the same city blocks as Dubois.
Dubois thought it all well and good to object to “a race so poor and ignorant and inefficient as the mass of the Negroes,” but if you’re the very group responsible for producing the ignorance in the first place through slavery, and you insist on shutting out Blacks out of mainstream American life, then you’re pushing people into “pauperism and vice,” and need to hold yourself “largely accountable for the deplorable results.”
Dubois saw firsthand that the formerly enslaved and their children were struggling in a nation where white supremacy reigned supreme. He was imploring White Americans to change “primarily for their sakes,” mindful that what was taking place was a “battle for humanity and human culture.” And with these words, Dubois predicted the demise of quality of life in America.
The disdain, prejudice, exclusion, hatred, and violence meted out by Whites did not affect every Black American equally, but Dubois noted that large numbers of those stuck at the bottom were in the process of giving up by 1899.
In the subsequent decades leading up to my birth in 1963, America’s most respected authorities on Black life expanded on Dubois’ work, describing longstanding pathologies in Black life that in our time are routinely and incorrectly blamed on the modern welfare state.
To understand what drove Black men in the South to kill each other in large numbers in the 1930s, read John Dollard’s Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937). To understand why familial ties between Black men and women were strained both before and after our civil war, or to understand why Black men abandoned families in relatively large numbers in the 1930s, read Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States (1939). Read Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy to find concerns spelled out in 1944 regarding how agricultural mechanization would seal the fate of millions of low-skilled Black workers who would inevitably follow other migrants north to increasingly overcrowded cities where dire poverty, economic insecurity, and high levels of crime were the norm.
Studies by John Dollard, Franklin Frazier, and Gunnar Mydrdal (Bibio)
More recently, Pulitzer-Prize finalist Elliot Currie has written a book titled, A Peculiar Indifference: The Neglected Toll of Violence on Black America. It’s through Currie that I learned of the existence of research completed by Dollard, Frazier, and others. Currie does a masterful job of bringing attention to violence within the Black community, putting it into context, and laying out ideas to address the devastating violence he chronicles.
Like Dubois, Dollard, and other researchers, Currie’s work clarifies the challenges of expanding opportunities for middle-class families to live in revitalized, walkable communities. We’re dealing with a continuum that began with people chained to the inner deck of a ship, packed like spoons, with no room for movement. Our problems have tangible origins. Meaningfully expanding opportunities for middle-class families to live in revitalized urban areas, depends in part of broadening conversations about an unresolved racial past shapes the present. It’s not a Black problem. It’s an American problem. As a nation of problem solvers, we can do better.
