Roger Lane, William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours: The Past and Future of the Black City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
In a sense Orientalism
was a library or archive of information commonly and, in some of its aspects,
unanimously held. What bound the archive
together was a family of ideas and a unifying set of values
proven in various ways to be effective.
These ideas explained the behavior of Orientals; they supplied Orientals
with a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere; most important, they allowed
Europeans to deal with and even to see Orientals as a phenomenon possessing
regular characteristics.
– Edward Said, Orientalism[1]
Ghettoization might be considered a relative of Orientalism – second cousin, twice removed, once
gentrified. As such, the spatial and physical separation of people is not all
that is important; the way these real and imaginary separations are interpreted
must be given close attention. Real
divisions are often less significant than imaginary ones; or, seen correctly,
real divisions are in fact imaginary ones.
If we stick too closely to divisions accepted as fundamental within
American society – if we accept transhistorical or
foundational categories of any kind – then we are likely to reify and make
static transitory and sometimes potentially transformative
processes. An example of the dangers of such reification is to be found in
This mammoth study has many things to commend it, providing an
extraordinary wealth of material and insights regarding the issues of race and
community in the lives of
William Dorsey’s Philadelphia is a gold mine of information for historians
because of the wealth of previously unused material available to the author.
But, of relevance to our concern to understand theories of ghettoization
and race, these strengths actually contribute to the book’s two shortcomings:
Lane’s reluctance to interrogate William Dorsey, and, closely related, his
desire to generalize from “Dorsey”s
In fact, though, the scrapbooks make clear that race is a social
construction which actually emerged in new forms during this period. This is
discernable from the discrepancy that exists between, on the one hand, the
obviously multifaceted and dynamic character of the black community revealed in
the documents, and, on the other, the uniformity and sameness of the comments
about that community by both white and black commentators. Given the picture of
stratification within the black community, generalizations about “the race”
ought to have been almost impossible to make. And yet, just as Dorsey would
have done, Lane falls into the trap of describing what some African Americans
did and then uses these actions to paint his picture of black people generally.
For example, Lane follows the common judgment of the time that black
business failures were in part explained by a lack of entrepreneurial
experience.[3] Indeed, the harshest critics of African
Americans’ failures in this regard were members of the black elite, who
believed that this lack of entrepreneurial spirit was only matched by the lack
of racial pride among members of the community who did not become customers of
the fledgling businesses. A less race-based analysis would recognize the fact
that all small businesses during this
period were exceedingly short-lived. Ironically, the influence of members of
the black elite, limited though it was, contributed to the notion that black
culture was at the root of the problem.
Lane’s use of the racial category leaves its mark on his interpretation
of violence in the black community also. Reciting figures from his earlier
work, The Roots of Black Violence,
Lane informs the reader that the black murder rate in the city in the 1890s was
11.4 per 100,000 (66 murders altogether), while for the white population
altogether it was only 2.1. Left as they are, these numbers seem to confirm an
African American proclivity toward violence. Using class analysis to
disaggregate both the black and white figures, however, can produce a very
different impression of why violence occurred: upwardly-mobile people are
generally not in social environments where most violence takes place, fewer
blacks are upwardly mobile, therefore, as a group,
they will engage in more acts of violence than whites. Moreover, homicide
figures are notoriously suspect. An African American
male stabbed or shot by a member of his own community in a bar brawl was far
more likely to die, because of the limited availability of hospital services
for him, than an Irishman wounded by a fellow Irishman in a similar incident.
The latter, saved by the increasing number of Catholic hospitals in the city
and the medical advances occurring in them at this time, would not end up as a
homicide statistic. Such interpretations are related to racial discrimination
since blacks faced economic and social discrimination, but they undermine the
belief shared even by members of the black community at the time that years of
racial inequality had left their mark on black urban culture creating a violent
subculture that “the race” needed to overcome. Lane’s
understanding of race and his empirical method lead him from an
exposition of the views of a particular segment of the black community during
Dorsey’s day, to an endorsement of that world view. In short, Lane and Dorsey become one and the same person.
Lane employs race in a transhistorical
fashion, particularly in his discussion of white unionists’ discrimination
against African Americans. As Lane is aware, unions discriminated against all
“scab” labor, by which they meant immigrants or any other potential cheap labor
force. While the racial hatred of skilled workers should never be
underestimated, nor should their hatred of the immigrants, who in many
instances would have been seen as, if not black, then certainly not yet
“white.” By suggesting that a hierarchy exists in terms of racial hatred,
whereby anti-black hatred is always recognized as more powerful than other
forms of ethnic prejudice, the changing nature of racial discrimination in the
city and an understanding of the possibility of alternatives is missed. Immigrant workers used the racial division as
a way of “whitening” themselves and gaining acceptance in the trade unions.
Lane, then, correctly recognizes that it was not the legacy of slavery’s brutalization, which determined blacks’ position in
Given the primacy of his transhistorical
category of race, it is not altogether surprising that Lane’s analysis of the
present urban predicament is so bleak.
The “past of the race” becomes something that can be used to judge the
prognosis for African Americans in today’s cities. Further, historians who reify race tend to
make assumptions about the “underclass” that can only be considered “blaming
the victim,” the idea that, as one such historian has written in celebration of
Lane’s work, the black underclass poses “problems...to itself, the black
middle-class, and society in general.” Members of the underclass, according to
this view, suffer from a “growing historical cultural handicap,” one that such
historians closely associate with the prevalence of single-headed families. Lane writes, for example, “The female-headed
family may be a realistic way of adapting to or coping with the harsh world of
the ghetto, [but] it offers no help with the very different problem of escaping
from it. There is no longer any doubt
that children raised by single mothers are not only far more likely
statistically to be poor than those with two parents but are further
handicapped emotionally and psychologically in dealing with the wider
world.”(pp. 382-83) What is primarily an
economic problem becomes, for Lane, a cultural and racial one.
The work’s limitations are apparent within the subtitle of the book:
“On the Past and Future of the
During Dorsey’s period, the black community was heavily dependent upon
the white elite for income and patronage.
Later, as residential segregation increased and African Americans found
such patronage cut off, they became an economically insecure and divided
minority. As such, even when they have
elected black mayors, they were not able to redirect urban policy towards the
regeneration of poor neighborhoods, away from the standard corporate policies
of other cities. At best, the notion of a “black city” becomes a romantic
appellation attributing too much agency to African Americans in determining the
character of their neighborhoods. At
worst, the notion reinforces negative stereotypes that suggest that such cities
are “lost” to members of the black “underclass”, who, because they have shaped
them after their own dysfunctional and poverty-stricken culture, have made the
inner-cities unreachable for mainstream America.
In fact, however, such a city has never existed except in the
projections of those who wished like Dorsey to create one by bringing “the
race” together into a unified force, or of those who live outside black
neighborhoods. The power of projection
of people from without, however, has first of all established that black
communities were the locus of corruption and crime, and then, with “white
flight” (amounting to a stampede) to the suburbs and deindustrialization
after the Second World War enlarged this notion of the black ghetto to
represent the concept of the city itself.
All this, of course, might be put down to racism, but doing so leaves a
single prognosis for the future of urban lower classes; an unchanging racism,
an unalterable (unless changed from within) black underclass.
Clearly race is not so all pervasive or ineluctable. Black suburban dwellers, while facing
discrimination of their own, will project onto black ghetto dwellers the same
pathologies and ascribe to cities the same “blackness” that white suburban
dwellers see. That ghettoization
is more about projection than reality suggests that underlying problems of
structural inequality, the social distance between the urban poor and the suburban
rich, have to be dealt with instead of altering the cultural make-up of those
who suffer as a consequence of this inequality.