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The tale of the other America

With its spectacular high-rise buildings, magnificent museums and art galleries, Philadelphia represents the finest face of the United States. Another America is hidden less than an hour’s walk away. Polished glass and steel give way to run-down homes, and the silence on the streets is punctuated, every so often, by the wail of police sirens.

Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have hit the streets these past weeks, preparing for today’s pivotal Pennsylvania primary, which will determine who the Democratic nominee for President will be. In the process, the other America has begun to emerge from the margins.

In March, Mr. Obama delivered what some have hailed as the most important speech on race made by a politician since the civil rights movement. Delivered at Philadelphia’s Constitution Centre, across the road from the hall where the U.S. foundational document was written, the speech pointed to “a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.”

Mr. Obama noted that racial discrimination continued to haunt the U.S. “A lack of economic opportunity among black men,” he said, “and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family contributed to the erosion of black families — a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighbourhoods — parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pickup, building code enforcement — all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect.”

He couldn’t have picked up a better place to make his point. With almost 20 per cent of its 1.5 million residents living below the official poverty line, Philadelphia illustrates Mr. Obama’s case as nothing else could do. Half of all poor families are made up of single mothers with children under five; well over half are black.

According to the United States Bureau of Census data for 2005, 45.9 per cent of black males aged between 16 and 64 were jobless or otherwise outside of the workforce. By contrast, only a third of white men in the same age group were jobless. A recent study by Max Pfeffer determined opportunities for Philadelphia ghetto residents to work in the New Jersey countryside as day-haul workers have shrunk, in part because of competition from migrants.

Industrial decline has led to further shrinking of opportunities. Across the banks of Philadelphia’s two rivers, the shells of what were once factories and warehouses are still visible — some in the process of being demolished to give way to modern office buildings and apartments.

Discrimination remains deeply entrenched in the city, despite the end of its legal infrastructure. Much of its physical space is segregated. While the white working class occupies the south, the northeast and the areas along the rivers on the western and eastern edges of the city — once its industrial heartland — black Americans are centred in West and North Philadelphia. Latinos inhabit a kind of buffer zone between the two.

Low-grade racial skirmishes are a fact of life. During 1989, the anthropologist Jo Anne Schneider has recorded, there were 40 incidents in the neighbourhood of Port Richmond, in the main set off by a group of white teenagers who hurled both racial abuse and bottles at Puerto Ricans to prevent them from using the local playground. Schneider noted that racism was mitigated by social networks that cut across race lines — but he also recorded alarming levels of hostility.

Philadelphia’s failure to build an inclusive, egalitarian society has bred a culture of violence. As many as 392 people were murdered in 2007 — 10 of them in a single weekend in April last year that saw bullets flying across the city, including in its normally peaceful centre.

Just how astounding these figures are becomes evident when one considers that last year Jammu and Kashmir, described as “the most dangerous place on earth” by the former President, Bill Clinton, saw 764 combat-related fatalities, of which only 170 involved civilians. Given that Jammu and Kashmir has an estimated population of 7.7 million, five times that of Philadelphia city, the statistics are startling.

Part of the problem is easy availability of illegal guns — a problem, in turn, linked to street crime and narcotics. An overwhelming majority of homicide victims last year, 331, were killed with firearms. Last year, Philadelphia saw 648 shootings, higher than the number of jihadist acts of violence in Jammu and Kashmir. A 2005 state Commission to Address Gun Violence recommended a welter of tough policing measures but the statistics suggest that these have had only limited success.

Race colours violent crime as it does almost everything else in Philadelphia. Of the 392 homicide victims last year, 310 were black — as were an overwhelming majority of the alleged perpetrators. According to the Commission, both “offenders and victims tend to be predominately male, minority and between the ages of 20-24.” “Demographically”, it noted, “the most significant increase in firearms violations for youth has occurred for 16 and 17 year-olds.”

Although it advertises itself as the “city of brotherly love,” Philadelphia has a long history of racial conflict — one that residents of India’s communally-volatile cities would instantly comprehend.

Racial tensions escalated in the city through the summer of 1964, fuelled by clashes between the police and black residents — tensions that were heightened by violence in Rochester and New York, the first of a long series of riots that rocked major cities. On August 28 that year, a black woman Odessa Bradford refused orders from two policemen — one black and the other white — that she remove her stalled car from the busy intersection of Columbia and the 23rd Street. Bradford fought when the officers attempted to physically remove her. A crowd gathered to witness the argument; scuffles broke out. Later that day, the clash transformed into a rumour that a pregnant black woman had been beaten to death by white police officers. Mobs looted and burned down white-owned businesses in north Philadelphia. Over 300 people were injured in the violence. Although the 1964 riots were unprecedented in their scale — and accelerated the city’s long economic decline since many of the destroyed businesses never reopened — violence had long been part of the race relations in Philadelphia.

In the summer of 1918, residents of Elsworth Street attempted to stop black probation officer Elsa Bond from occupying a home she had purchased in the all-white neighbourhood. After she was installed, a white mob attacked her home. Bond responded, firing two shots in self-defence. Sixty people were injured in the fighting that followed and two, both police officers, were killed. Rioters, The New York Times of June 19, 1918 reported, “turned into an armed camp the zone bounded by Twenty-fifth and Thirtieth street and Washington Avenue and Dickinson Street.”

Even small incidents often sparked violence. In 1904, for example, white and black children living in a working class neighbourhood had a fight. Their parents got involved, triggering large-scale violence. “The mob grew larger,” recorded The New York Times on May 31, 1904, “and finally clubs and pistols were brought into play.” Five persons were seriously hurt; “a score or more roughly handled.”

In the decades since, the race riots have ceased to be a medium through which black rage is articulated — but the rage hasn’t gone away. “Race,” wrote scholars R. Robert Huckfeldt and C.W. Kohfeld in their book Race and the Decline of Class in America, “continues to be the most important line of conflict in American electoral politics.” “In the 1984 presidential election,” they pointed out, “nine out of ten black voters supported the Democratic candidate, while only one out of three white voters cast a Democratic vote. Levels of racial polarisation were even higher in the south: only one out of four southern white voters supported the Democratic candidate and only one out of six white Mississippi voters voted Democratic. These figures indicate a level of polarisation between racial groups unequalled by any other racial boundaries.”

Despite the facts, the faultline has been little discussed. In a June 2007 article, commentator A. Bruce Crawley lashed out at the long-standing political silence on race. “Issues,” he wrote, “such as the fact that almost 50 per cent of Philadelphia’s black males are unemployed; that African-Americans are segregated into the lowest-performing public schools; that illegal drugs and guns are disproportionately channelled into our city’s black communities; that the excessive, disproportionate poverty rate in black Philadelphia contributes to our city being the most poverty-stricken large city in the country; that black businesses participate in less than one per cent of [the] city contract revenues; that the city’s skilled trade unions have systematically excluded blacks from full, card-carrying membership for nearly 125 years, were all classified as inappropriate for polite discussion.”

Mr. Obama’s speech broke the silence. Whether it will also result in an agenda for change, though, remains to be seen.

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