I think Sharkey’s book had multiple important points that I particularly appreciated. I liked how he brought up the argument of the effect of multi-generational poverty. Even though it was something I have thought about before, it was nothing something that I felt was ever truly studied or stated explicitly. His analysis of how children’s life trajectory is affected by this poverty was also very important. I feel that oftentimes when poverty is discussed there is more focus on the present lives of those affected. There is not much talk about the past or the future, but with his multi-generational argument and effect on children’s life trajectory, it pushes us to think more about this.

Something else that I thought was really great about his book was his discussion on how immigration affects Blacks living in poverty. As a child of immigrants, I oftentimes feel like some of these discussions don’t include me but I’m still affected by the ramifications. (Hopefully, that makes sense.) I want to understand how immigration affect Blacks, if it does at all. I think it’s a worthy conversation of having that we don’t talk about that much. Also when thinking about how Sharkey explained the effects of immigration, how does it actually look like? Yes, economically they may be better off, but how is it socially? I know that there is oftentimes friction among immigrants. It’s Caribbean vs. African vs. African American. That’s only accounting for Black immigrants. Once you think about immigrants from other places, particularly Latin America, then the situation gets even stickier. How does this look like in the community? As much as I appreciated Sharkey’s macro-level look at the problem of poverty, I would like a micro-level look at how these communities look with all the various immigrants. Is there tension? Is this tension mainly among the older members or younger ones?

The neighborhood perception example, referring to why people avoid certain neighborhoods, that we discussed in class is very interesting to me. Are people wary of entering certain neighborhoods because they have high concentrations of Black people (or Latinx people) or because they view the neighborhoods are more dangerous or violent independent of race? I think that this is a nuanced question and almost certainly varies from person to person, but my feeling is that race plays the larger role. People will know that a neighborhood is predominately filled with Black people and then from that will assume that this neighborhood is dangerous.

Why is this? I think that it is because Black people are associated with violence and poor living conditions regardless of the actual nature of a neighborhood. I would imagine that the poor perception of these communities creates further disadvantage in these communities because wealthy people with advantage and capital aren’t going invest in Black neighborhoods if they aren’t even willing to visit them. Also, the neighborhood violence and disorder that is prevalent in lower class Black neighborhoods may be a greater product of class than race. Of course, this class situation is perpetuated by race, but I would not be surprised if other poorer communities had the symptoms as poorer Black communities.

I found the effects of generational poverty on development quite compelling in Stuck in Place. One figure we specifically mentioned in the class discussion was: being poor for two or more generations is the equivalent of missing two to four years of school. This was powerful for me because of the way in which is removes individual agency. I know that that was one of the potential criticisms made of the book – being too deterministic and ignoring human agency – but this fact shows how poor community themselves often constrain or erase individual ability. Because children are automatically disadvantaged by their parents’ and grandparents’ economic positions, their own possibilities for upward mobility are limited. This is true even when their families are middle-class when they are born. The effects of past generations, which children cannot control and might not even have any knowledge of, have a measurable impact on these children’s future prosperity.

Also significant is the use of years of schooling as a measure for the amount of disadvantage generation poverty can cause. School is often presented as the great equalizer, where even those who are deprived of economic resources can receive an education, “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” and become more successful than the life they were born into. This theory regarding schooling is already fallacious considering inequalities in the US education system, but Stuck in Place shows another way in which being born into a life of financial struggle can ruin even that one great route to success and mobility.

It is important to consider the role of human agency in this phenomenon: obviously, some who were born into two or more generations of poverty are able to overcome the symbolic loss of years of schooling in order to exceed the economic status of their parents and grandparents. Still, it is saddening to consider the many who fall prey to this system of disadvantage. That an individual’s capability of success can be determined (or, at least, influenced) by the upbringing of family members multiple generations before them presents grim prospects for the future of the poor black community. If the young are so heavily impacted by the older generations’ economic status, it seems there must be many more generations of widespread economic prosperity before upward mobility becomes as easy as it should be.

Our discussion in class made it clear that different realms of American discourse evaluate racial discrimination by remarkably disparate standards. While social theorists such as Reskin point to a complex set of systems responsible for producing and reinforcing discrimination and inequalities, the rule-makers of these systems – and those who must adhere to their rules – apply standards with little or no critical analysis of systemic racism.

Economists primarily conceive of “statistical discrimination”: they claim that employers use race as a proxy for likely schooling and other predictors of productivity. They rarely present concerns about combating disparities such as the achievement gap, and they offer little criticism of the resulting “statistical discrimination” except to say that it is unlikely to last. The textbook I have been assigned for my introductory economics course, for instance, notes that discrimination will probably not persist in the labor market. It suggests that undervaluing workers of color will lead competitors to hire these workers more cheaply, ultimately pushing up demand for workers of color until they are hired as readily and paid as well as white workers.

Similarly, as Avni mentions in her post, the Supreme Court demands that claims of discrimination be bolstered by proof of intent. This standard disregards the extreme difficulty of proving intent. It also fails to acknowledge that intent is not necessarily important to prove, given that disparities themselves are evidence of discriminatory systems.

These limited understandings of discrimination dominate the economy and the courts –sites where many people of color confront and combat racism. A push for racial equality, economically and legally, therefore requires a transformation in how discrimination is interpreted in these domains. Perspectives like the one Reskin offers in her race discrimination system could prove crucial to this effort, but we must first render these views accessible. In short, we must demand a nuanced, systemic understanding of racism and discrimination from other academic fields, and also from popular discourse.

Patrick Sharkey’s Stuck in Place is a bold project. In it, Sharkey attempts to explain why neighborhood context disadvantages African Americans across generations. His lens is incredibly broad—he attempts to examine the state of the black community across the United States, without focusing specifically on any one neighborhood. Because of this, he uses general statistical analysis to make his claims, rather than interviews with people in the neighborhoods he talks about. While this is good in that it is generalizable to the entire country, Stuck in Place doesn’t seem to add much to the conversation, because it is so focused on generalizable statistics.

Sharkey’s essential claim—that “disinvestment from black neighborhoods, persistent segregation, declining economic opportunities, and a growing link between African American communities and the criminal justice system” have hurt the black community—perhaps doesn’t strike me as novel because I’m approaching it from a sociological perspective. As was mentioned in class, it could be valuable in pushing back against the popular idea among economists of targeting policies at an individual while ignoring the individual’s context. But I think it is still problematic to leave out the voices of the communities to which you are prescribing policies. These are the people who will be affected by the policies Sharkey discusses, and it seems odd that Sharkey wouldn’t make an effort to incorporate their voices. While his analysis may be objective and generalizable, statistics don’t tell the whole story, and I think it is important to talk to the people who are actually experiencing the problems Sharkey discusses.

One part of Stuck In Place that I found particularly interesting was the story of Detroit in Chapter 3. In this short section, Sharkey presents the case of the decline of Detroit and the questions it raises. In this explanation of the abandonment of the city along with the growing prosperity of its suburbs, the author presents the concept on white flight. Here, we are able to see the stark difference between the residential mobility of the black and white members of this city. As racial tension grew in the city during the 1960s, only whites had the capacity to leave the city. The resulting decline in tax dollars and investment, coupled along with economic downturn and housing market trouble created a situation of deep-seated economic and infrastructural problems for the city – only seeing a short respite in the 1990s. I found this intriguing because even the diagrams in this sections show how clearly segregated the racial makeup of the city was. The concentration of blacks in the inner city while whites were more spread out around the outskirts of the city showed the apparent separation of the communities. A situation was created which allowed whites to more easily leave the city when faced with social or economic issues due to their greater access to federal mortgages and other institutional policies. This particular case and the stories of other cities throughout this chapter were helpful in better framing the discussion of the issues of inequality and segregation discussed in the book.

The graphic of the “Discrimination System” displayed in class mentions the labor market, income, the criminal justice system, the healthcare system, credit markets, the housing mortgage markets, residential and social segregation, and educational access as factors that contribute to the widespread, interdependent network of race-linked disparities. Professor Bobo mentioned also the implications of the complexity of the system: that the system is resistant to change, that feedback effects often counteract the effects of exogenous pressures on the system, and that mechanisms within the system are often redundant. Thus, points of intervention in the system must simultaneously act on subsystems or try to remove institutions from the network itself.

Sharkey proposes another view of how to address this discrimination system by suggesting that efforts often overlook the ideas of contextual mobility and cross-generational trends. This focus on time appears also in his recommendations for a durable urban policy, one that defies the diminishing effects of time. Although the discrimination system and Sharkey’s analysis in Stuck in Place provide useful, new frameworks for how to look at this difficult situation, I find their recommendations ultimately unsatisfying. Sharkey’s idea for a durable urban policy is commendable, but only in the general sense that he proposes. What would a durable urban policy really look like? In the article that Khytie linked, he mentions that urban policy has thus far been unsuccessful because public attention drifts away easily, but contends that he doesn’t have any ideas for how to engage public interest for longer.

I would thus be really curious to know more about the research done on proposing effective policy measures that implement the ideas put forth by Sharkey and through the Discrimination System.

In an interview with CityLab Sharkey discusses “The Persistent Geography of  Disadvantage” further and underscores the issues surrounding durable urban policy and urban politics.

Read the full article here: http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/07/persistent-geography-disadvantage/6231/

A useful feature he points us to is the The Justice Mapping Center’s website which uses GIS technology to communicate and evaluate criminal justice and other social reform policies. Check it out!

“Durable urban policy has three basic requirements. We have plenty of examples of policies that meet the first two—disrupting multigenerational patterns of neighborhood inequality and generating real and transformative changes in the places that people live. But we have few examples of policies that have been sustained when the public’s attention shifts away from issues of urban poverty or when the political winds shift away from the challenges of cities. A quick review of urban policy over the past four decades reveals a cycle in which urban issues receive a great deal of attention and exciting new initiatives are announced, only to be diluted or abandoned and forgotten before the programs have any chance to be effective.

I am not a political scientist and I don’t study social movements, so I have no expertise in how to generate a coalition of support behind durable urban investments. But there does seem to be growing recognition throughout the policy world that the key to sustainable prosperity lies in our cities and the urban areas that surround them. A related insight, and one that rarely makes its way into discussions of metropolitan policy, is that the fortunes of entire urban areas are compromised when cities contain sections featuring areas of severe concentrated disadvantage, low-quality schools, and high levels of crime and violence.

One final point on urban politics is that a durable urban policy does not necessarily require a massive influx of new funds into poor, nonwhite communities. Instead, what is required is a shift of priorities in the way that funds are spent in such communities. If you want to see some stunning visual representations of how much our nation already spends in low-income communities, check out The Justice Mapping Center’s maps of block-by-block expenditures, in New York City and elsewhere, used to lock up residents in prisons and jails. The point of these maps is that we are spending an enormous amount of resources in disadvantaged communities, but the resources are not being used to make investments in the families, core institutions, and organizations that are essential to creating enriching, safe, and prosperous community environments.”

Reflecting on this week’s discussion, I was particularly interested in Professor Bobo’s points about the benefits and drawbacks of different techniques for measuring discrimination. Specifically, he noted that a key issue with quantitative disparity analysis is the need to somehow prove discriminatory intent. Initially, as a black man, it is unthinkable how anyone could question how many black-white inequalities may not at least partially stem from unfair or prejudicial treatment. However, using the black-white mortality disparity from coronary heart disease, I realized that the difficulty of proving discrimination does not imply a racist disregard for other systemic inequities. Discrimination does indeed play a role in this unequal outcome, as Schulman et al. 1999 found that physicians were less likely to recommend blacks for cardiac catheterization compared to whites. However, this disparity also stems from blacks having less medicare-supplemental insurance, as highlighted in Chen et al 2001.

Nonetheless, I fear that this quantitative approach could give latitude to skeptics who may try to explain away or minimize discrimination’s role in race-based inequalities. This problem drew my mind to a saying outside the movie theatre on Church Street in Harvard Square which reads, “Indication of harm not proof of harm is our call to action.” If quantitative approaches lead scholars to demand proof of discrimination, my concern is that broader anti-discrimination efforts by government, NGOs, and other entities will be undermined, as their backers may also require more explicit evidence before offering their intellectual or monetary support. Such reluctance could thus undermine prompt responses to these issues.