The next morning after the Browns first victory of the year (after such a rocky start last Sunday, getting blown out by the Ravens, which of course quickly conjured up memories of all of the past losing seasons), our civic pride bubble had a fist-sized hole punched into it by the news that Cleveland has overtaken Detroit and now had the dishonor of being the poorest city in the nation.
An optimistic way of viewing this kind of bad news is by doing what I used to do years ago on the odd occasion when I found myself dead broke: I’d tell myself, “Hey, there’s no way to go now but up.” Indeed, I was so sure my fortunes would soon turn around, I once took my last dollar and bought a wallet.
But the difference between being poor and being broke is huge — indeed monumental. One is a permanent state of mind and the other is a temporary financial condition. Being poor most often stems from a lack of education, which results in a lack of job skills, which, in turn, prevents one from taking advantage of opportunities to escape poverty. While the other situation — being broke — is the result of financial risk-taking, a condition that can be rectified with sounder money management practices.
The wild card in this poverty equation, the reason Cleveland ranks number one, of course, is race: If persons of color are removed from the financial calculations that make us the nation’s poorest city — in other words, if just the incomes of whites were included in the calculation — Cleveland would probably rise to somewhere near the middle of the pack among cities in terms of wealth. The same thing would hold true for Detroit. Black poverty is an anchor on society in any city.
But how to solve this poverty — the driver of virtually all of our criminogenic pathologies that leads to 10-year-old children being repeatedly gunned down by stray gunfire in black and brown communities around the country — is without a doubt the toughest societal problem to come to grips with and solve — by far. Even in today’s America, where whites of supposedly good conscience are now (again, supposedly) “woke,” it will take decades of progressive leadership from Washington to educate and then lift those stuck on the bottom rung of the economic ladder out of their penurious condition.
The task of improving the lot in life of those on the killing floor, even with a huge Democratic win in November, still will be complicated by the negative feelings harbored by a substantial number of white Americans who simply love to posit: “There’s nothing anyone can do to help THOSE people, they’re simply born that way.” This kind of nonsensical thinking allows bigoted whites to exculpate themselves for their racist behaviors over the last four hundred years, behaviors that by diabolical design had — and has — the sole purpose of keeping minorities financially subjugated.
But know this: It was wrong-headed and racist governmental policies and laws — on both the state and federal levels — that created the conditions of poverty found in our nation’s inner-cities and therefore it is primarily the responsibility of government to solve the problems and fix the conditions that centuries of racist actions have created.
Indeed, when I hear of the disheartening poverty statistics of urban areas and the huge gap in family wealth between blacks and whites in America, it might be that I’m simply applying a mental unguent to the wound it causes, but I often think, “If it wasn’t for some of us blacks (and particularity our ancestors who faced even worse conditions) heroically bootstrapping ourselves out of poverty in spite of the roadblocks of substandard schooling, being the last hired and the first fired, Jim Crow and unfair banking practices which serve to prevent us from starting our own businesses, all of which have been consistently thrown in our path by systemic bigotry and racism, the financial chasm between the races in America would be far, far worse.”
America, also know this: The condition of the bottom one-third of blacks in this country — those stuck in low incomes, low educational attainment levels, low goals and aspirations, and high crime — it’s not of their own doing. There’s nothing wrong with them. Instead, something very wrong was done to them — and we know who, how and why they did it.
It’s past time for the reckoning.
