HBO mini-series “Show me a hero” meditates on America’s missing black
men, housing and desegregation
It was only halfway through the 4th
episode that I noticed a striking feature of this new miniseries from The Wire
creator David Simon – although it had lots of black characters, none of them
were men. Time and time again, we were seeing black women holding together
black families in the face of rising odds and an unforgiving economic reality.
This was just one of the inconspicuous elephants filling up the politically
charged narrative of East Yonkers in the late 1980s, when a Federal judge
forced Yonkers to build “public housing” and effectively bus in several hundred
Black & Hispanic people into a predominantly White neighbourhood.
SMAH tries to make sense of it all,
using a tripartite narrative connecting the difficult lives of people in public
housing, the white suburbs they were destined for and the ambitions of
Yonkers’s local politicians. The show is a worthy effort, well executed and
sorely needed in the current socio-economic climate. The story is significantly
dulled by Simon & Zorzi’s unwillingness to ensure that most of their
characters are nuanced and well-realised, while the writers’ own politics clouds
the series’s inherent tensions. However, if you can stand the slow pace, it’s
great to see social issues put on screen in a reasonably honest way.
To most folks, this miniseries
probably appears quite gritty – the show spends some time in the drug-ridden
‘Projects’, there’s the esoteric discussions of the architecture of public
housing, extended scenes of dry political bargaining and, of course, the tragic
ending. You get the idea. But if you’re aware of David Simon & William
Zorzi’s previous work, The Wire, SMAH
is actually a soft-focus version of the subject matter, sort of like a knife
with its edges filed away. This becomes apparent in its visuals as well as the
narrative and characterisation. For a start, the video is shot in clear
high-definition, while The Wire was grainy and looked subdued (one of many
reasons for why Wire bombed when it
came out). Then there’s SMAH’s cloying instrumental music, telling you what to
think, which was missing from Wire. Then there was the almost impenetrable
lingo of The Wire, considered by many
to be the truest depiction of that subculture before or since.
If Wire sounds extremely pared-down and
hyper-authentic, it was. Wire was a
hairshirt production, without no instrumental music and utilising almost
entirely unknown actors, with even some real-life ‘dealers’ (e.g. Felicia
Pearson, aka Snoop). And the subject matter, you ask? It’s hard to say, really
- on the surface it was about drug-dealers and Police in post-9/11 Baltimore.
But it was so much more than that - it was the closest TV had ever gotten to
putting a PhD thesis on screen. It used the cops’n’dealers theme to probe
issues around race, wealth, politics, violence and most importantly, how good
intentions get mangled by complexity and flawed institutions.
For better and worse, SMAH doesn’t pretend
to such ambitions – presumably because Simon & Zorzi actually wanted more
than a few thousand people to watch it. It’s an implicit admission of the fact
that The Wire may have gone too far in its authenticity and no-quarter-given in
terms of plot and dialogue. And yet, on the back of The Wire (and Homicide),
Simon & Zorzi had Hollywood stars like veteran Director Paul Haggis, Catherine
Keener, Alfred Molina, Jim Belushi, Winona Ryder and Oscar Isaac signing up to help
them make their latest political statement. While this clearly serves to make
SMAH look mainstream, it leaves SMAH
in a dead zone of being too dry to be truly mainstream but not gritty enough to
be docu-drama (again, like The Wire).
The evidence for this is in the sub-0.5mn viewing figures received in the US. One
of the few things that SMAH has over The Wire is that it’s not as sprawling and
its plot is tighter and more coherent – it is firmly rooted in housing
desegregation and its politics.
Unlike The Wire though, SMAH is marred by the lack of empathy Simon &
Zorzi show those deemed to be “on the wrong side”, i.e. the residents of East
Yonkers. It never occurs to SMAH that rich (White) people may well have
legitimate reasons to oppose public housing plonked in the middle of a middle
class neighbourhood. Instead, they’re shown as feral, naysaying, pussy-footing,
racist elitists. And not in a nice way, either. Simon & Zorzi stuff their
mouths with insipid, petit politesse dog-whistle phrases like “it’s not about
race” or “they don’t want the same things as us”; even if these phrases were
actually uttered by the residents of East Yonkers, isn’t it the writers’ job to
probe further? Watch the first episode of The
Wire and you’ll see what I mean: Wire
tried very hard to show us the reasons why every character, no matter how good
or bad, did what they did.
Wire wasn’t
even an “anti-hero” show like Breaking
Bad – it made no judgements at all. Let us not forget, The Wire was the first TV show to adequately humanise drug dealers and treat them as more than just
the dregs of society. In SMAH, Councillor Spallone is a self-satisfied, self-styled
champion of Yonkers’s middle-classes – played by Alfred Molina in scenery-chewing
form as an odious, venal oaf who ousts Isaac’s character by cynically promising
something impossible. His characterisation as a smirking, hyper-unreasonable, smug
bully with his feet perpetually planted on the Council table is so one-tone and
caricatured that it feels like a different world to the entertainingly complex personalities
of The Wire. Admittedly, The Wire had 60 episodes in which to
probe under the surface, but this doesn’t mean a 6 episode run necessitates the
caricaturisation of key characters - it just doesn’t add up. This is not to say
that SMAH is not a worthy addition to Simon & Zorzi’s taxonomy of urban
America. If it fails, it’s by the Himalayan standards of The Wire & Hill Street
Blues.
Simon & Zorzi could have brought
the story together neatly by focusing on how people on both sides of the
housing debate were primarily motivated by working towards or maintaining a
good environment for family, whether they lived in Yonkers or in the housing
projects. But David Simon is having none of that – his views are firmly baked
into the show’s DNA. The white residents of East Yonkers are shown no sympathy
at all, being shown to be singularly vicious, racist and stupid, while the
people from the Projects are mostly shown as righteous (if not always bright) women
who are just down on their luck [the only exception to this is Billie Rowan’s
mixed race partner, who is just no good at all]. Weirdly from the writers of The Wire, the Black & Hispanic
characters are also quite one-dimensional, dawdling around until about episode
5.
Ultimately though, SMAH does create
an impact - for example, the scene where the Projects’ Housing Association prepares
its tenants to live amongst Yonkers’s White people by patronisingly teaching
them how to tie a rubbish bag. At one point one of the Black tenants asks “will
the White people get lessons in how to act too?” Then there’s the dejected
NAACP official who complains bitterly to Jon Bernthal that the petitions,
political resistance and willingness to go bankrupt is “just for 200 [housing] units…”.
And of course then you’ve got the central character of Nick Wasicscko, who paid
a personal price for the failure of Yonkers to accept desegregation. What could’ve
been a somewhat procedural political drama became something more personal and
curious. Wasicsko was like some of the Black men in the Projects, ‘missing’
from society because he, like them, knew how to do only one thing and when it
was gone, so was he. AM
POSTSCRIPT
Desegregation has seen something of
a rise in visibility due to TV shows like Show Me A Hero and the notable podcast ‘The
Problem We All Live With’ (www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with). The latter was
particularly interesting because it argued that the only thing shown to have
worked in improving failing Black & Hispanic educational achievement was schooling desegregation.
This got me thinking about the recent history of African-American education and
desegregation. Did desegregation really improve Black kids’ schooling? On the
surface it makes perfect sense – schools can’t by themselves correct the
massive social problems prevalent in families from lower socio-economic backgrounds,
so why not move the kids elsewhere and start from scratch? And anyway, isn’t
non-segregation a good thing in itself? Although I don’t doubt this inherent value in desegregation, it feels a lot like simply giving up on Ethnic Minority (EM) neighbourhoods. And in any case, experience seems to have shown that desegregation is often followed by 'White flight', thus leading to resegregation. Instead, wouldn't it be better to focus on making the existing Black-majority schools better? I suppose this brings us back round to the issue of how schools can hope to correct massive socio-economic problems, so it's understandable to hear the cry of desegregation once more. But I'd like to focus on how we got here and whether desegregation really does improve Black educational attainment.
Recent African-American history
The history of the Black peoples in the US has obviously been one of pain, oppression and dignified resistance, and so it was in the 20th century. The triumph of the end of slavery was followed by the pain of the Jim Crow laws, which was itself upended by the civil rights movement of the 1960s. This movement culminated in the more pragmatic freeing of Black society to be itself and compete with other Americans on a more level field, but alas this proved to be ephemeral. In a trend debated even today (see this paper from Feb 2015), the arrival of the crack epidemic destroyed Black families anew, leaving in its wake a multitude of broken Black families and with it the support networks that allow people to fail from time to time.
Then came the era of “mass incarceration” of black men and severe curtailment of the economic opportunities of said men (as we also saw in HBO’s Show Me A Hero). Other side effects, such as re-segregation and large numbers of single Black women with no men to date/marry also followed (e.g. the missing 1.5mn Black men). The graph below shows how educational attainment amongst Black people was catching up to White people from the 1960s onwards, but starts to tick upwards from the late 80s, particularly for Black men. This is unfortunately the impact of the crack epidemic.
What puzzled thinkers for a long time, however, was why AVERAGE Black scholastic attainment collapsed, as opposed to simply for users and dealers of crack. As explained in Freakonomics:
The history of the Black peoples in the US has obviously been one of pain, oppression and dignified resistance, and so it was in the 20th century. The triumph of the end of slavery was followed by the pain of the Jim Crow laws, which was itself upended by the civil rights movement of the 1960s. This movement culminated in the more pragmatic freeing of Black society to be itself and compete with other Americans on a more level field, but alas this proved to be ephemeral. In a trend debated even today (see this paper from Feb 2015), the arrival of the crack epidemic destroyed Black families anew, leaving in its wake a multitude of broken Black families and with it the support networks that allow people to fail from time to time.
Then came the era of “mass incarceration” of black men and severe curtailment of the economic opportunities of said men (as we also saw in HBO’s Show Me A Hero). Other side effects, such as re-segregation and large numbers of single Black women with no men to date/marry also followed (e.g. the missing 1.5mn Black men). The graph below shows how educational attainment amongst Black people was catching up to White people from the 1960s onwards, but starts to tick upwards from the late 80s, particularly for Black men. This is unfortunately the impact of the crack epidemic.
What puzzled thinkers for a long time, however, was why AVERAGE Black scholastic attainment collapsed, as opposed to simply for users and dealers of crack. As explained in Freakonomics:
“Crack was so dramatically destructive that if its effect is averaged for
all black Americans, not just crack users and their families, you will see that
the group’s postwar progress was not only stopped cold but was often knocked as
much as ten years backward. Black Americans were hurt more by crack cocaine
than by any other single cause since Jim Crow. And then there was the crime. Within a five-year period, the homicide
rate among young urban blacks quadrupled.
Suddenly it was just as dangerous to live in parts of Chicago or St. Louis or
Los Angeles as it was to live in Bogotá”.
The persistence of this socio-economic phenomenon is why it stays in the news (and indeed why HBO greenlit Show Me A Hero). Whether you live in London, Baltimore or Bombay, the issue of housing continues to be a highly political problem that crystallises many of society’s ills, whether it’s racism, inequality or poor quality of life. This stems partly from its nature: housing is a long-lasting and highly illiquid good; its supply is fixed in the short term and buying/selling it is a generally vexatious endeavour. But for Black Americans, it stems from myriad of historical and social reasons, not least of which are antiquated and racist housing policies, the 1980s crack epidemic, and zero-tolerance Policing. Then there was the breakdown of the American family, which took a particularly vicious form within the Black community, as Dunlap, Golub & Johnson explain:
The persistence of this socio-economic phenomenon is why it stays in the news (and indeed why HBO greenlit Show Me A Hero). Whether you live in London, Baltimore or Bombay, the issue of housing continues to be a highly political problem that crystallises many of society’s ills, whether it’s racism, inequality or poor quality of life. This stems partly from its nature: housing is a long-lasting and highly illiquid good; its supply is fixed in the short term and buying/selling it is a generally vexatious endeavour. But for Black Americans, it stems from myriad of historical and social reasons, not least of which are antiquated and racist housing policies, the 1980s crack epidemic, and zero-tolerance Policing. Then there was the breakdown of the American family, which took a particularly vicious form within the Black community, as Dunlap, Golub & Johnson explain:
“Since 1960…the prevalence of African American children living with their
mother only increased from 20% in
1960 to over 50% in the 1980s and 1990s. The prevalence of white children
in mother-only households also increased…but by 2002 still comprised less than 20%”.
It was in this context that the
crack epidemic hit particularly hard, decimating support structures that were
already weakened. These single-mum families bequeathed to society young black
men who had not had any father figures at all, thus helping perpetuating a
cycle of incarceration of Black men. According to the NYT, the place with the most missing black men as a % of the total is Ferguson, Missouri. Ferguson shows up consistently as the most segregated town in the
entire US, which puts the protests following Michael Brown’s murder into clear
context: this is a town with lots of black men dead or behind bars, and losing
yet another one to something so senseless ignited an almost primordial rage
among its residents. As usual, it’s hard to understand what is a symptom and
what is a cause – are there more single parent families in Black America
because of crime or are African-Americans more criminalised BECAUSE of a higher
incidence of broken families amongst African Americans?
Why African-Americans often have a precarious place in society
All these factors seem to have left Black America deeply insecure – take for instance the fact that even middle class Black kids are highly likely to end up being poor. If you’re Black and born in the middle class (“middle quintile”), you have a 69% chance of sliding back into a lower socio-economic category, whilst if you’re White, the chance of that happening is only 34%. Now look at this (www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/why-do-black-graduates-make-less-money): from 1992 to 2013, White & Asian University graduates saw their median real net worth rise by about 85%-90%, whilst Black graduates saw theirs FALL by 56%. This comes at the same time as the finding that even White high-school dropouts have more wealth than Black people with degrees. The chart in the latter link is truly astounding – using the ‘median’ chart, we can see that REGARDLESS of education, the average Black person’s wealth doesn’t get close the same level as that of a White high-school drop-out.
All these factors seem to have left Black America deeply insecure – take for instance the fact that even middle class Black kids are highly likely to end up being poor. If you’re Black and born in the middle class (“middle quintile”), you have a 69% chance of sliding back into a lower socio-economic category, whilst if you’re White, the chance of that happening is only 34%. Now look at this (www.psmag.com/politics-and-law/why-do-black-graduates-make-less-money): from 1992 to 2013, White & Asian University graduates saw their median real net worth rise by about 85%-90%, whilst Black graduates saw theirs FALL by 56%. This comes at the same time as the finding that even White high-school dropouts have more wealth than Black people with degrees. The chart in the latter link is truly astounding – using the ‘median’ chart, we can see that REGARDLESS of education, the average Black person’s wealth doesn’t get close the same level as that of a White high-school drop-out.
With all this in mind, all the
recent anger behind shootings of unarmed Black men becomes even more justified –
despite having a Black (mixed-race) President, the economic situation of most
Black people in America has stayed significantly behind White people and indeed even recent arrivals like Indians & Chinese. Here is a
community sandwiched between historically racist policies and weaker
family support structures on one side and zero-tolerance policing on the
other – no wonder we see occasional paroxysms of rage. Unfortunately, the induction of more African-Americans in senior governmental positions (Susan Rice, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, etc.) has not assuaged grievances with policing and government.
Does desegregation improve Black attainment?
And now onto something that piqued
my interest: does desegregation improve Black educational attainment? Well, there’s
some good news and some bad news: the bad news is that although there’s some conflicting
data, the answer seems to be weighed slightly towards “no”. The good news is
that it doesn’t seem to affect White attainment. So atleast there's no harm in desegregation. Have a look at the graphs below
and note what happens in the late 1980s. This is the crack epidemic we talked
about earlier.
As per Evans, Garthwaite &
Moore (2015):
“Black high school completion rates also declined and we estimate that
factors associated with crack markets and contemporaneous increases in
incarceration rates can account for between 37 and 73 percent of the fall in
black male high school completion rates. We argue that the primary mechanism is
reduced educational investments in response to decreased returns to schooling.”
Basically, it just didn’t pay to be
in school when (a) you could make $200+/week slinging drugs and/or (b) you didn’t
have a choice whether to get involved in gang wars and so you had to drop out
anyway. If you couple it with the data in the previous section, it’s obvious
that a lot of these kids made a brutally simple and short term economic
decision. If you’ve seen The Wire season 4, all this should be obvious to you.
What complicates the picture is
that this was also the period when a lot of the kids who went to schools under
Federal desegregation programs in the 1970s onwards were becoming adults or had
just become adults and therefore presented the perfect subjects for research
into this topic. But the advent of the crack epidemic made it hard to sort out
the various effects. So people like Rucker Johnson use econometric analysis to
sniff out one impact from another. In Johnson’s own words (Long run impacts of school desegregation and school quality on adult attainments, NBER Working
Paper 16664):
“…estimates indicate that school desegregation and the accompanied
increases in school quality resulted in significant improvements in adult attainments
for blacks…for blacks, school desegregation significantly increased both
educational and occupational attainments, college quality and adult earnings,
reduced the probability of incarceration, and improved adult health status;
desegregation had no effects on whites across each of these outcomes.”
Given that this is a recent study,
it should carry some weight. However it’s interesting to note that the author
stresses non-academic results as well, such as reduced probability of
incarceration. Looking at page 49 of his paper, this reduction in probability
of being incarcerated is 4%, which would be impressive if it wasn’t for the
fact that Black men have, on average, a 1 in 3 chance (i.e. 33%) of going to jail
at some point in their life. Nonetheless, progress is progress. Now look at the
other side of the debate, which is summarised by Armor and Rossell (2008):
“…in spite of the existence of comprehensive and well-funded
desegregation plans in many school districts throughout the nation, there is
not a single example in the published literature of a comprehensive racial
balance plan that has improved black achievement or that has reduced the
black-white achievement gap significantly.”
They show the graph below - what
this shows is that the gap between Blacks and Whites narrows only in the “Whitest”
schools, i.e. highly segregated schools (this time with a White majority). One
way to interpret this is that these schools are simply “rich kids’ schools”,
and in those schools, everybody does well. Note the source for this – it’s the National
Assessment of Educational Progress, the most comprehensive dataset of
educational attainment in the US. But then again, it’s somewhat dated and only tests
the effects of desegregation in the 1970s-1980s (that was the heyday though). A similar graph for mathematics unfortunately shows Black attainment never closing the gap on White
attainment, regardless of the concentration of White children.
But can we find a nice, clean
example that doesn’t need all this statistical wizardry? Step forward Wilmington-New
Castle County in Delaware. Now this is a subject with lots of beautiful writing
behind it and if you’re still reading this article, you should seek it out:
The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School
Desegregation [read it here].
Delaware was a former slave state, with customs that could be identified as 'Northern' and 'Southern'. This led to strange overlapping rights and denials of rights: Blacks could vote freely and libraries and trains were not segregated, but schools and restaurants were. What makes New Castle County special is that it remained racially balanced for quite a while, thus
allowing studies to be carried out on the impact of desegregation. What ‘contaminates’
a lot of studies is that there is ‘White flight’ once desegregation starts,
thus leading to re-segregation, just in new areas. In New Castle County, the
schools remained about 65% White, attributed to the Whites being much poorer
than elsewhere and therefore less able to simply relocate to the suburbs in
order to “escape” desegregation. As per 'Bill Frank', one of the state's most famous newspapermen:
"Where desegregation in Delaware has been given a fair chance, it has been successful in that it has not developed into any difficulty nor has it gone beyond any limit set by educators".
Unfortunately, going back to Armor & Rossell (2008), test scores did not show improvement:
"Where desegregation in Delaware has been given a fair chance, it has been successful in that it has not developed into any difficulty nor has it gone beyond any limit set by educators".
Unfortunately, going back to Armor & Rossell (2008), test scores did not show improvement:
Unfortunately there’s a lot of data
like this implying little or no improvement in Black attainment, although the
sample size of 4 years is quite small. It's worth thinking about WHY desegregation should improve test scores. According to Armor & Rossell (2008), racial isolation is inherently harmful because it "deprives minority students of contact with more middle-class, usual higher-achieving students", who "set the pace of study". So we're back to the fundamental question of class - how can going to a new school wipe away issues at home? Again, won't the socio-economic problems of some communities overwhelm the new school as well? Another reason given is the concentration of good teachers in safer, richer schools, which is also obvious. A major determinant is simply funding, and it is considered that White-majority schools have more funding and that's why desegregation may have a beneficial impact. However, this clearly uncouples the argument from desegregation per se and makes it about funding.
Clearly, higher funding is something that works, but you probably didn't need to see any research papers to learn that. What all this does say, unfortunately, is that anything other than funding has only superficial affects and there's no real substitute for good school funding, strong families with good role models and safety nets in the form of wealth rather than just income.
Finally, one of the things I was struck by in the book Burden of Brown is the little personal vignettes which show how New Castle County dealt its problems:
Clearly, higher funding is something that works, but you probably didn't need to see any research papers to learn that. What all this does say, unfortunately, is that anything other than funding has only superficial affects and there's no real substitute for good school funding, strong families with good role models and safety nets in the form of wealth rather than just income.
Finally, one of the things I was struck by in the book Burden of Brown is the little personal vignettes which show how New Castle County dealt its problems:
“Thomas Mulrooney, the Director of
child guidance, reported that a growing number of students came to school “unfed
and clothed in rags”…”
In this day and age, this may be interpreted as an arrogant, sneering statement. Fortunately, however, humanity served to show
its better side, as the school decided to remedy this by innovating and being one of the first schools in the West by providing breakfasts,
clothing, psychiatrists and other attempts at improving the lives of these
children. If only we could see more of the same today. AM
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