http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/o...rican-american-revolt.html?smid=re-share&_r=0
An insurrection now threatens the future of the Republican Party — an insurrection of white working class voters who have been among the party’s most loyal supporters since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. These men and women felt that they lacked an effective political voice, until they heard the siren call of Donald J. Trump.
Could the Democratic Party face a comparable revolt?
Beginning with the administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson, African-American voters have provided Democrats with their margin of victory in elections at every level across the nation, year after year.
How have African-American voters been faring over all? Badly. The Democratic debt to black voters is immense, and the party has not paid up.
There is no evidence yet of a political rebellion parallel to the one taking place in the Republican Party, despite the fact that poor black Americans are having a much tougher time than the white working class Republicans flocking to Trump.
One key measure of how well a demographic group is doing is the percentage of children living in communities of high concentrated poverty, in so-called toxic social environments.
There is a rapidly growing body of evidence, compiled by economists, sociologists and public policy experts, which demonstrates the depth of thedamage inflicted on children in such toxic neighborhoods.
“Thirty years of research has converged on a clear and compelling fact: It’s not just the family a child is born into that determines her fate, but the neighborhood she grows up in,” Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins, wrote to me.
DeLuca is one of the authors of a forthcoming book, “Coming of Age in the Other America,” along with Susan Clampet-Lundquist and Kathryn Edin. The book provides evidence that African-American children born in Baltimore’s large public housing projects made significant “educational gains relative to their parents” when their families left the projects, using federally issued housing vouchers to move to privately owned properties.
Reed Jordan, of the Urban Institute, describes in detail how detrimental the effects of impoverished neighborhoods like the constant anxiety
resulting from witnessing and experiencing trauma and violence in distressed neighborhoods, negotiating the sacrifices and trade-offs caused by food insecurity, living in unstable housing conditions, struggling to pay bills, and dealing with numerous other worries burn up cognitive capacity.
Elaborating further, Jordan continues:
Persistent stress and exposure to trauma trigger harmful stress hormones that permanently affect children’s brain development and even their genes. The damage to childhood development is so severe that medical professionals now describe the early effects of poverty as a childhood disease.
Another researcher who has mapped the impact of concentrated poverty is Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at N.Y.U. Sharkey emailed his findings to me:
If we want to understand why middle-class black Americans are more likely than whites to experience downward mobility, then we should focus on the neighborhoods where blacks and whites have lived for the past 40 years. Blacks making more than $100,000 per year live in more disadvantaged neighborhoods than whites making less than $30,000 per year.
Sharkey points out that
Black children still live in neighborhoods that offer lower quality schools, more toxic stressors like violent crime, more pollution and environmental hazards than white children from similar families. These differences play a big role in explaining racial gaps in economic mobility over the past two generations.
In a 2009 Pew Charitable Trusts report, “Neighborhoods and the Black-White Mobility Gap,” Sharkey argued that:
Neighborhood poverty alone accounts for a greater portion of the black-white downward mobility gap than the effects of parental education, occupation, labor force participation, and a range of other family characteristics combined.
Elizabeth Kneebone, a Brookings Institution scholar, confirms the brutal impact on poor families of concentrated deprivation. In a 2014 essay, “The Growth and Spread of Concentrated Poverty,” she reported that:
The challenges of poor neighborhoods — including worse health outcomes, higher crime rates, failing schools, and fewer job opportunities — make it that much harder for individuals and families to escape poverty and often perpetuate and entrench poverty across generations.
During the 1990s, there was a substantial decline in the percentage of families of all races and ethnicities, including African Americans, living in neighborhoods of dense poverty.
From 1990 to 2000, the percentage of poor black individuals and families living in neighborhoods where the poverty rate was 40 percent or higher fell from 30 percent to 19 percent.
Since 2000, however, this favorable trend sharply reversed, and the post-2009 economic recovery has not improved matters.
By 2014, according to the most recent data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, 32 percent of black children were living in neighborhoods where the poverty rate is 30 percent or more. A higher percentage of black children live in impoverished neighborhoods than any other demographic group, including American Indians, who lie just below, at 31 percent; Hispanics at 24 percent; Asian-Americans at 8 percent; and non-Hispanic whites at 5 percent.
The negative consequences of living in high poverty neighborhoods are not only imposed on the poorest African-Americans, but also on African-Americans with earnings above the poverty line.
According to data provided by Elizabeth Kneebone, a majority of African-Americans, 52.5 percent, live in communities where the poverty level exceeds 20 percent. Put another way, 44.8 percent of all non-poor African-Americans live in neighborhoods where the poverty rate exceeds 20 percent. In contrast, 8.1 percent of whites live in such neighborhoods.
Despite the flaws of public housing, the lack of federally subsidized housing (and of subsidized housing vouchers) has contributed to an acute housing crisis for the nation’s poor.
Federal housing officials explicitly acknowledge the devastating shortage of housing for the poor. On the Section 8 page of the HUD online website we are informed that the housing voucher program
cannot be relied upon as a definite solution for rental assistance. Finding a Section 8 application online, for example, is very difficult because most housing authorities have to keep their waiting list closed because of overwhelming applications. It is not uncommon for someone to be on a Section 8 waiting list for several years.
In New York City, residents of public housing are 45.8 percent black, and the average household income for residents of public housing is $14,425. The number of families on the waiting list for public housing, 227,000 — constituting half a million people — outstrips by far the total number of units, 178,900.
This pattern is repeated across the country. In Chicago, in 2014, 282,000 individuals and families applied for public housing or housing vouchers during the four-week period in which applications were accepted. Those four weeks last November were the only open application period since 2010.
In August 2010, in East Point, an Atlanta suburb, 60 people were hospitalized after fights broke out among the 30,000 people in line — some of whom had camped out for three days in sweltering heat — to get on a waiting list for 455 housing vouchers.
it still amazes me how much of a corrupt shytbag Johnson was
And it's BECAUSE they have us. ALL of us.