I put off reading “Random Family” for a long time, assuming it was overpraised. It is an astonishing piece of work. You just veer between awe at what she did and despair of ever doing anything as good yourself. People rave about Ehrenreich-on-poverty but I’m not wild about her work. And Jane Jacobs, for sure. I found it interesting she moved to my hometown, Toronto, which has been cited as a city that works.

Of the three authors you mention, I’m only familiar on an I’ve-actually-read-it level with Kozol, but I’m a big fan. In fact, I just cited an article he wrote for Harper’s about modern-day school segregation in a post I made last week.

In my perfect world, I would add Jane Jacobs to that list. Even though she’s not writing about race or education specifically, I always find her work provides a great framework for understanding those “systems” you mention — at least in urban environments.

Thanks for the comment, and for adding a few more names to my reading list.

As a guy who can’t pay his bills despite living rent-free in a spare studio cabin owned by his uncle, I’m pretty sure that makes me poor, too. The sun burn I got at the Brickyard 400 NASCAR race confirms that I’m also white. So, as a poor white guy myself, I would certainly never assert that poor equates with black and affluent with white on a one-to-one basis.

What I wrote was that “too often we can simply equate black with poor and affluent with white.” For the sake of argument, this is true, and the facts do my job for me. In 2006, only 8.2% of non-Hispanic whites lived in poverty, according to US Census estimates (see here: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hstpov2.html); meanwhile, a quarter of blacks lived in poverty — that’s three times as many. Even among middle-class blacks, as the Pew study above indicates, a full 2/3 live in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty — a phenomenon which, as shown above, often pulls middle-class blacks right back into poverty. Go back and read the citation. This isn’t the case with most middle-class white families.

That’s not to say there aren’t wealthy black kids or poor white kids. It’s simply to state a fact: that the poverty rate is racially disproportional. I’ll go so far as as to state that perhaps I should have qualified my statement in somewhat looser terms. But that’s as far as I’ll go.

As for a conspiracy to “keep the black man down,” those are your words, not mine. I’m not sure why this is such a difficult concept to grasp for so many people, but I’ll try. Racism used to be institutionalized — enshrined by law, in fact — and it was that way for hundreds of years, from slavery through Jim Crow. That created a situation in which most blacks in America were poor.

You stated that “it’s wealthy and connected vs. poor and addicted. Period.” Fine, lets assume institutional racism is completely dead and there aren’t, say, major differences in how crack (more prevalent among minorities) and powder cocaine (more prevalent among whites) are prosecuted. Let’s assume racial profiling doesn’t exist.

Let’s assume you’re right, because, ok, mostly you are.

It’s the history of institutionalized racism that continues to do most of the discrimination work for us. Whether you’re black or white, if your parents were poor, chances are you’ll wind up poor, too (unless, as shown in the study above, you start off middle-class and end up poor — a mostly black phenomenon). The story of class mobility in America is mostly an illusion, interrupted by the odd exception like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama that proves the rule. So here’s the bottom line: If blacks started off disproportionately poor because of institutionalized racism, they’ll stay disproportionately poor because of the kinds of things you mention: low-quality education, violence, broken homes, and lack of connections and access to quality health care, etc., etc.

Until we see something closer to parity in the poverty rate between whites and minorities, it will still be useful to at least remember these facts and examine things in these terms. The fact is that, comparatively speaking, blacks in America more often face a dearth of opportunity than whites do. It’s just a fact. This disparity, this construct, is not true across the board. But it’s true enough of the time that it’s irresponsible to pretend it no longer exists.

Not surprising when you consider that smaller cities tend to more or less one industry towns.