Review: Benjamin P. Bowser and Chelli Devadutt's Racial Inequality in New York City Since 1965
Reviewed by Kenneth S. Alyass
New York City is a nexus of racial and class inequality. The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent economic fallout has made this all too clear. Nearly one in four New Yorkers of color have lost their job since March. City institutions like the MTA and CUNY, which the majority-minority population of the city rely on in their daily lives, are facing apocalyptic budget cuts. And while the media’s attention is often on the abandonment of corporate offices in downtown Manhattan, thousands of small businesses owned by people of color — the lifeblood of neighborhoods — have shut down, usually for good.[1]
At the same time, millions of essential workers, many of whom are non-white, traverse across the city every day, cleaning buildings, administrating COVID tests, working 14 hour shifts at hospitals, and operating the basic infrastructure needed for the largest city in the United States to continue functioning day after day.[2]
The city cannot exist without the millions of laboring peoples who simultaneously are most impacted by the pandemic and economic turbulations. Yet, little has been done by the cash strapped and gridlocked government at all levels. The American Rescue Plan passed earlier this month will provide vital relief to the city, helping to fill gaps in the budget, prevent MTA closures, and hand out much needed stimulus and unemployment checks. But the damage of the pandemic in combination with the economic crisis means the “recovery” will be uneven. While city life may come roaring back by the summer, many neighborhoods will bare the scars of COVID and its fallout for years to come. And some will certainly become a new frontier for developers to redevelop, usually with little regard to what will happen to the residents unable to keep up with rising rents.
In light of these developments, racial inequality, already up from a decade of recent economic crisis and dislocation, will only get worse. The 2008-2009 global recession spurred austerity and unemployment while forces of gentrification obtained land and buildings at comparatively low prices. Foreclosures, evictions, and luxury developments ensued. For the majority, especially working-class people of color and immigrants, life got harder.
And yet for the immense devastation wrought upon minority and immigrant working-class communities, the literature on racial inequality is disjointed and sporadic, resulting from the lack of coherence around and unified perspectives of methodologies, topics, and policy.
Racial Inequality in New York City Since 1965
Edited by Benjamin P. Bowser and Chelli Devadutt
SUNY Press, 2019
452 pages
As sociologist Benjamin P. Bowser and organizer Chelli Devadutt argue in their edited anthology, Racial Inequality in New York City Since 1965 (2019), “despite the volume and scope” of the literature on racial inequality in New York City since 1965, “it is fragmented and episodic – the product of working from multiple silos.” They argue that the last comprehensive assessment that examined racial inequality in New York City was sociologist Kenneth Clark’s Youth in the Ghetto (1964) and Dark Ghetto (1965). Clark’s work combined insightful academic analysis with pragmatic yet aspiring public policy proposals. Since then, the study of racial inequality in the city has preceded precipitously, but, as they argue in the introduction to the book, there needed to be some way to connect the dots and link them together. They claim that three key interrelated questions have gone unanswered and by answering these questions, their essays in this anthology piece together the varied literatures to address the historical roots of racial inequality and its contemporary manifestations.[3]
What progress, if any, has been made to reduce racial inequality since 1965? What accounts for the city’s current circumstances? What can be done today to reduce racial inequalities in the future? These questions hit on the three main themes of the anthology: structural underpinnings, racism and integration, and practice and policy. They challenge their contributors to think through the history of the last fifty years to contemplate what has changed, persisted, and could be changed going forward while also considering the interdisciplinary nature of research on racial inequality.
The book is divided into three sections with fifteen chapters all together and an introduction and conclusion bookending them.
The first section, “Structural Underpinnings of Racial Inequality,” reviews the operational racial regime and structural foundations of racial inequality the city. It begins with an incisive chapter on the economy by James Parrot that goes through the intersection of race and class to understand wage disparity and job availability. The section then pivots over to two chapters that provide a detailed analysis of housing and education segregation with an addendum that functions as a public policy proposal to reduce educational disparities for Black and Latino young men. Ingrid Ellen, Jessica Yager, and Maxwell Austensen describe the paradox of inclusion and segregation in the city that is often called the nation’s melting pot. Norman Fruchter and Christina Mokhtar then examine the changes in NYC school segregation from 1965 to toady, finding that despite the efforts made, NYC schools are still hyper-segregated. The addendum written by Adriana Villavicencio, Shifra Goldenberg, and Sarah Klevan provide a way to reduce educational disparities. They argue that an improved school culture could advance graduation rates and college enrollment numbers.
The previous three chapters of the section provide a structural argument about the role of the economy, housing, and education in determining racial inequality, but the last chapter by Jarret Murphy poses the issue of historically contingency. To what extent did mayors of the city succeed or fail in reducing racial inequality and how much weight should we award their tenures versus structural factors? The dynamic between the first few chapters and the last one in this section foreshadows an uneasy balancing act throughout this book between more data oriented, sociological assessments and the narrative driven, qualitative arguments many chapters make.
The second section, “Race Mountains,” examines four major racial groups in New York City: African Americans, Latinos, West Indian immigrants, and Asian Americans. The chapters consider how each group has fared during the tumultuous effects of globalization during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The key to understanding modern American cities during this period, the contributors agree, is the role of the 1965 Immigration Act which scrapped the discriminatory guidelines of the previous four decades. Millions of people from the Global South immigrated to the U.S. en masse as a result. Howard Shih writes the first chapter in the section and the fifth in the book to examine how Asians became the fastest growing racial and ethnic group in the city while noting that the term occludes as much as it attempts to analyze. Seventeen different Asian ethnicities live in the city, including those who identify as Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistani. They are divided as much by ethnicity as by class and geography, yet efforts have been made to organize the groups, such as the Asian American Federation. The sixth chapter looks at the evolving Latinx population in the city by providing a brief history and examining the impact of changing demographics. It ends with a muse on the future of Latinos in NYC, arguing that in order for public policy to respond adequately to the problems in the community, they need to “address the specific needs of these varied populations.” Benjamin Bowser, co-editor of the anthology, stakes out the history of the racialization of African Americans in the city starting in the year 1644 when eleven Blacks and their wives obtained their freedom from the Dutch and established a Black enclave in what would become Greenwich Village. He goes through African American history in the city and concludes by arguing that the social and economic patterns established in its early history, especially with how immigrants from Europe were assimilated in time while people of African ancestry were not, continues to structure racial inequality in NYC in the 21st century. Chapter eight, written by Calvin Holder and Aubrey Bonnett, examines how the 1965 Immigration Act opened the doors for immigrants from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin American to come the United States. In particular, he examines the English-speaking Caribbeans who self-identify as West Indian in the nation more broadly to argue that despite being “mostly hard-working, law-abiding, and productive citizens,” they have been “unable to attain equity with White Americans,” something every minority group in the city has struggled to achieve. And finally, chapter nine, written by Bowers, John Flateau, Hector Cordero-Guzman, Shih, and Holder and Bonnet, examines ethnic conflict in NYC since 1965. They look at the role of racial inequality in sparking ethnic feuds, and in particular they examine numerous specific instances of conflict to locate the potential sources of it. They argue that despite the city’s long history of hostilities between ethnic groups, more violence, such as riots and uprisings, have not occurred for many reasons, such as the repressive New York Police department and the assistance of community-based service organizations in neighborhoods.
The last section, “Practice and Policy,” combines analyses with public policy. The first chapter in the section and the tenth in the book is an examination of Stop and Frisk, the painfully racist police practice of detaining “suspicious” Black and Brown men and searching them whether they committed a crime or not. The policy, Natalie Byfield keenly argues, is guided by the implicit belief that “Black and Latino youth are dangerous, unpredictable, violent, and incapable of self-control.” Since 1999, she claims, the policy of stop and frisk has led to the death of seventy-six men and women in the city. She then examines the long history of racist policing in the city to conclude that “Stop and Frisk is a modern expression of a historic bias against African Americans,” and she questions whether it will be replaced with more oppressive systems, reduced in scope, or finally disbanded. The next chapter pivots to a discussion of public policy and HIV/AIDS in the queer community of the city. Robert E. Fillilove examines how ten percent of people in the United States who are living with the disease are living in NYC. This is not because of the city’s size, rather, he argues, it is “the result of three disastrous public policy decisions made over time by New York City’s government,” which he then spends the rest of the chapter examining. As a result, communities beyond the queer community were destroyed, and to rebuild will take public policies that can “strengthen racially diverse neighborhoods” on many fronts. Chapter twelve by Kristen Lewis and Sarah Burd-Sharps utilizes the American Human Development Index (HDI) as a framework to argue for new way to understand and consider the effects of racial inequality. Devised in the 1970s and 1980s by the late economist, Mahbub ul Haq, the HDI opposes the traditional Gross Domestic Product (GDP) index typically used by policymakers. HDI provides a more holistic approach to understanding “all aspects of life that contribute to an individual’s well-being. By utilizing a human development approach, the writers argue that to achieve equal freedom, “New York City needs to invest in its residents… and dismantle barriers that cut communities of color off from life’s rewarding pathways.” One of these pathways, housing, is the center of the next chapter. Chapter thirteen by Victor Bach examines the state of public housing in the city. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) manages 178,000 apartments and is the city’s largest landlord, housing a half-million residents. Bach goes through the history of the massive housing program since 1965 and provides a profile of current residents. He ends his chapter by claiming without changes in government priorities, the prospects for public housing are dismal. A range of public housing properties are in bad shape and housing needs in the city have only skyrocketed as gentrification sweeps up millions of previously affordable units of housing. Political power, it appears, is the way forward to provide more public investment in the city’s housing stock. Chapter fourteen by John Falteau examines political inequality, and in particular, fifty years of Black political power inequality in the city. While the city has experienced a rise of Black political office holders, for the most part, the progress has been threatened by institutional racism that still exists. Chapter fifteen examines what can be considered one of the key factors defining racial inequality in NYC today: gentrification. James Rodriguez, Robert Hawkins, and Andrew Wilikes examine how gentrification produces social capital for whites while generating racial inequality for Blacks. They provide numerous potential solutions to ameliorate some of the worst effects of gentrification in the city, yet they argue that without major solutions on the part of wealthy whites and the city government, structural racism will continue to be a barrier for Blacks seeking social capital.
The anthology ends with chapter sixteen, a concluding section written by the book’s editors. They think through the preceding fifteen chapters and their policy proposals. Their claim is that the “only way Black, Latino, Asian, and West Indian New Yorkers can achieve racial and social equality is to work through government” and form coalitions to achieve political power and community cohesion. To do this, they suggest a series of recommendations based off the research presented in the anthology. This last chapter is a profound testimony to practical focused research of the preceding essays. It is not enough just to research. One must figure out ways to turn that research into something that will affect the daily lives of the subjects you examine. This is perhaps the best takeaway from this anthology. Research is crucial for understand racial inequality, and when parred together with policy and community organizing, it can be the thing that tilts the scale forward.
One will find numerous places in each essay to criticize. Not so much because the writers are wrong in their conclusions or lack evidence, but because they hone in on particular methodologies and frames of understanding that those in their fields may disagree with. In this way, it a great book to generate further conversations.
The collection is full of numbers, sometimes at the risk of losing valuable qualitative analyses and narratives of history that breathe life into the countless actors who endured racism and inequality on a daily basis. As a historian, I want to complicate to what extent quantitative analyses bring us to a fuller understanding of racial inequality in the city. Some chapters read as too technical for a non-expert to understand while others deftly narrate histories that reveal class and racial fault lines through the perspectives of urban stakeholders. All in all, however, the anthology aims to be an interdisciplinary resource that tackles numerous aspects of racial inequality in New York City. It succeeds in its mission and that despite the harrowing statistics and stories told, the book’s last chapter with its dozens of pragmatic recommendations forces readers, most of whom are likely researchers and activists themselves, to confront what scholarship can do, here and now, to reduce racial inequality.
Kenneth S. Alyass is a Ph.D. student in history at Harvard University. He studies race, class, and crime in the late 20th century United States.
[1] “Race and the Economic Fallout from COVID-19 in New York City,” Irene Lew, Community Service Society, July 30, 2020. https://www.cssny.org/news/entry/race-and-the-economic-fallout-from-covid-19-in-new-york-city; “The Catastrophe in New York City Jails,” Sarah Leonard, Dissent Magazine Online, April 24, 2020. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/politics-as-usual-as-coronavirus-floods-new-york-city-jails.
[2] “These Images Show the Workers Who Were Always “Essential,” Vox, May 7, 2020. https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/5/7/21235115/essential-workers-new-york-city-coronavirus.
[3] Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (Wesleyan: Wesleyan University Press, 1989).