In America, an unresolved, poorly understood racial past reverberates in the present with implications for how and where people live. It is a history that limits options for Americans seeking opportunities to live in places that are the more obvious sources of walkable communities. There are, for example, ninety-three American cities that had a population of 100,000 or more in 1930, before the age of mass suburbia. And today, poverty and dysfunction plague the overwhelming majority of neighborhoods in these cities.
Throughout the ages, people have been delivering a consistent message regarding the importance of making sense of our past to understand the present and shape a better future. Confucius instructed us to “Study the past if you would define the future.” Cicero noted, “To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain always a child.” Mark Twain quipped, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Carl Sagan counseled, “You have to know the past to understand the present.” And Winston Churchill warned us that “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”
In 1969, James Baldwin went further, saying, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” He’s saying in effect that the past is a part of who we are. Almost three decades later, science began proving him right on a molecular level.
In the mid-1990s, epidemiologists and physicians from the CDC and Kaiser-Permanente completed what is perhaps the most important public health study you may have never heard of. It’s called the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, and it established a relationship between childhood adversity and behavioral pathologies and illness as an adult. It turns out that what happens to us early in life matters a great deal. Subsequent studies have revealed that children in poor urban neighborhoods experience a far broader range of traumatic events than children from wealthy suburban neighborhoods.
Advances in imaging technology are enabling researchers to get a better understanding of what happens to the developing brain subjected to chronic trauma or neglect. Problems in the past that were described in behavioral, or emotional terms, result from altered brain structure and function. Ongoing research is focusing on understanding how childhood trauma causes these normally beneficial cells to produce brain abnormalities.[1]
Importantly, this trauma can be passed down from one generation to the next. The mechanism by which this occurs is called epigenetics. Almost every cell in our body contains the same exact copy of our genes. Epigenetics is the process by which these genes are enabled, disabled, or partially enabled to produce one of the roughly 200 different kinds of cells found in our bodies. Nerve cells, red blood cells, and muscle cells all rely on epigenetics to make them what they are.
The sum total of all chemical modifications to our genes is referred to as our epigenome. Although our experiences and environment do not alter the DNA sequence of our genes, they affect our epigenome. Relatively recently, scientists have shown how traumatic experiences can be passed, through the epigenome, from one generation to the next. And they are now working to establish a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms.
Widespread and largely unacknowledged trauma has been a constant for one particular segment of the American population since the beginning. Before our civil war, daily life in the South featured the widespread use of Black women as breeders, whippings, mutilation, and murder as a means of correction, routine splitting of families, the favored practice of rape amongst white slaveholding men, the outlawing of education, and the inability to move freely without identification papers.
After the war, daily life in the South was punctuated by paramilitary campaigns that eliminated nascent civil liberties, widespread lynching in the form of macabre mutilation for the live entertainment of thousands of white spectators, lynching postcards as keepsakes, the criminalization of black life, and the re-enslavement of tens of thousands in brutal, inhumane conditions to serve the needs of business cycles and corporate interests such as U.S. Steel. And we’re just scratching the surface.
This trauma didn’t disappear when the United States government finally decided to prosecute the last vestiges of slavery four days after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Nor did it dissipate with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. As renowned psychologists, economists, and sociologists were repeatedly saying in the years leading up to World War Two, American-made trauma and the history behind it is responsible for deep pathologies in society that shape where we’re willing to live, who we fear, and who we hate.
Much has been written in recent years about the Great Migration, which saw six million Black Americans migrate to cities north and west between 1915 and 1970. Many of these people could move beyond their trauma, thrive, and lead productive lives. Others, however, could not, and in this sense, the Great Migration turned American cities into receptacles of trauma. This is a key dynamic that distinguishes the American city from one found in France, Poland, Australia, or anywhere else in the West.
I’m familiar enough with the pathologies endemic to urban America that, so often, make the goal of expanding opportunities for middle-class families in cities seemingly impossible to achieve. When living in Philadelphia, a man murdered a friend of mine an hour after I said goodnight to her. Months later, I watched the sky fill with black smoke as flames consumed a nearby section of the city afflicted with racial unrest. In Washington, DC, my wife Christine and I lived with our two small boys for over three years in one of the most violent neighborhoods in the city. Tensions with the local drug crew led the DC government to place our house under visible police protection for three days after conducting a weapons and drugs raid in a neighboring house for which some believed me to be partially responsible. In an unrelated incident, I went to the hospital with a bloody leg after pre-teen boys attacked my four-year-old son and me in a decaying high school football stadium. During our last two years in the neighborhood, this same son attended a public charter school, which helped me better understand the possibilities and limitations of lifting people out of poverty through education alone.
The intensity with which I’ve experienced urban life is not necessarily the norm. I mention some of my experiences to clarify that when I talk about the promise of the American city and my hopes for the future, I’m acquainted with the challenges.
It’s not as if functional urban communities don’t exist. America has some of the most compelling, walkable, human-scale neighborhoods in the world, home to residents committed to improving their communities. However, many of these places are unaffordable to the middle class.
Christine and I lived in Boston’s South End when realtors described it as a “transitional neighborhood.”[2] Today, it’s brimming with well-heeled residents and features an unusually large number of beautiful community gardens.
I was born in a hospital not far from Philadelphia’s Queen Village, one of the city’s oldest residential neighborhoods. Years ago, it was in decline and my parents would have never considered living there. Today you can have conversations with middle- and upper-middle-class teens, White and Black, who will tell you they navigate the neighborhood without concern for their safety.
Providence, Rhode Island, looks nothing like it did when I first saw the city in the early 1980s. Present-day Federal Hill may be edgier than the cushier Fox Point, but both are attractive, desirable neighborhoods in which you can raise a family. Then there’s Columbus’s German Village, which residents saved from the wrecking ball over fifty years ago. To my way of seeing, it rivals any urban neighborhood I’ve visited in Europe.
These communities, however, exist in a broader context and represent only a small percentage of urban neighborhoods across America. The middle class does not consider the overwhelming majority of these places to be viable options for reasons that include troubled public schools and violence. Per federal government policy established in the 1930s, many of these neighborhoods were designed to fail at a time when most were still White.
By the 1970s, a majority of these neighborhoods were poor, Black, and isolated from White society. Decades later, poor Hispanics began to displace Blacks in many communities, such as my mother’s childhood neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia. My father’s old neighborhood in Toledo is now in transition, with an increasing number of Blacks joining moderate and low-income Whites. In Pilgrim Church, where my extended family went for decades, I can still pick out my cousins in group photos up on the walls. Except for two employees, everyone now affiliated with the church is Black, and most children in their after-school program are poor. Regardless of exceptions around the country, we still live segregated lives.
Health and socio-economic data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Census Bureau reveal that most walkable neighborhoods designed to fail in the 1930s are in crisis today. Thanks to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, we have the research to prove it. Their analysis helps clarify why relatively few middle-class parents today are raising their children in cities.
As a culture, we’ve spent a significant amount of time focused on the dysfunction found in our cities. We’ve spent far less time however, thinking about the history behind this dysfunction, or considering the impact on the human mind. And again, as Churchill and others have said, we can ignore this history, but it shapes the present whether we choose to comprehend it or not. Our unresolved past is not the only dynamic degrading civil society, but it’s the central driver of the fear, violence, and overall dysfunction found in cities that might otherwise be revitalized and improved upon to provide middle-class families with a place to live in which they’re not dependent on the automobile.
This is a history that I have a connection to. I am, for example, named in honor of a family member named Lewis Cass, who was central to expanding slavery in the United States in the 1830s and then again in the 1850s. Many associated with conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Scholars have raised concerns regarding the degree to which we focus on this past. But studying history need not be a zero-sum game in which focusing on the negative must come at the expense of the positive. My experience tells me that widely held discussions on a subject so central to quality of life is a civic project we need not fear. The better I understood Cass’s role in expanding slavery, the better I understood my country and the more deeply American I felt in a positive sense. For me, it’s been a valuable patriotic education. And in no way does it prevent me from acknowledging America’s many remarkable achievements.
We need better discussions if the future is to look different than the past. There are many lenses through which to examine the United States, or any country for that matter. Germany’s Nazi past doesn’t diminish the accomplishments of Beethoven or Goethe. America’s racial past doesn’t diminish the fact that its contradictory values regarding human freedom, combined with its military strength, protected Western Europe from Soviet oppression. If not for the United States, it’s doubtful Europeans would experience the freedoms they do today.
None of this is not mythmaking inspired by blind patriotism. It’s a historical fact as evidenced by policies such as the Truman Doctrine and initiatives such as the Marshal Plan.
To grasp why it’s difficult for Americans to find safe, affordable, walkable urban environments, we need to look through a different lens. In doing this, we can consider an overarching narrative that shapes what’s possible in terms of the quality of life we lead.
The United States operated as a slaveholding republic until the point where Congress ratified the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865. Immediately after, we entered a brief period in which some Americans attempted to pursue racial justice and bring Black Americans into mainstream society. By 1877, dominant elements of that society—white supremacists and those principally concerned with reconciliation between North and South for economic reasons—largely (but not entirely) killing off the notion that all men are created equal. Over the next seventy years, America operated as a full-out white supremacist society that featured a rigid racial caste system. The first significant cracks in this system appeared in 1948. Between 1954 and 1964, America took significant steps to dismantle that system, vestiges of which can still be found today.
None of this is mythmaking designed to breed contempt for American ideals. It’s historical fact, which, when understood and accepted, allows us to better understand what happened to us; not just Black Americans, but all Americans.
No one needs to be told that raising kids to become functional adults is a challenge with significant consequences. We all have family histories that influence how we parent for good or ill. When parenting our three kids, I’d often emphasize the value of aiming to become better versions of ourselves over time. The last thing I want for myself is to become a caricature of my worst qualities the older I get. And over the years, our children saw me both own up to my mistakes and examine my flaws. The path was not always linear, but I seemed to get there in the end. Over time, they saw change, which reinforced trust and opened up lines of communication that might otherwise not have existed. This, in part, shaped who they became as adults. And I sincerely believe that what holds true for the individual and the family holds true for a nation. America can become a better version of itself. The quality of life our children lead depends upon it.
[1] Catale, Clarissa et al. “Microglial Function in the Effects of Early-Life Stress on Brain and Behavioral Development.” Journal of clinical medicine vol. 9,2 468. 8 Feb. 2020, doi:10.3390/jcm9020468
[2] Anthony Lukas’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York: Vintage Books, 1986) describes the experience of three Boston families in the 1970s. One of the families lives in the South End. I cannot recommend this book enough. On the surface, it’s busing (i.e., desegregation), but as someone once told me, that’d be a bit like saying that Moby Dick is a story about a whale.told me, that’d be a bit like saying that Moby Dick is a story about a whale.
