Tyler Cowen’s exceptional The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream is another must-read for grant writers, like Sam Quinones’s Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. Jake and I like Cowen not only because he’s a terrific writer, but also because he often points out when “conventional wisdom” isn’t supported by data or logic.
While this is not a full book review (see Jake’s review here), I want to focus on one of Cowen’s key findings: America is by some metrics actually more segregated today than it was when I was a budding community organizer and grant writer in 1972. In describing what “segregated” means, Cowen not only cites compelling studies for racial segregation in housing, but also for education, economic, and political metrics. Anyone who lived through the recent election and has seen the startling red/blue county election map should realize that some obvious political divides exist. Still, the increasing racial and educational segregation of America most trouble me.
If I could travel backwards in time to interview my 20-year-old, idealistic self in 1972, I know that my 1972 self would believe two things about America in 2017: we’d be using flying cars powered by dilithium crystals or something exotic, and racial segregation in housing and education would be a distant memory. I was wrong on both counts. While electric cars are slowly gaining ground and articles about the coming autonomous car revolution are rampant, my 21-year-old self would have no trouble either driving or understanding most 2017 cars, which still have gasoline engines (primarily), a steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, and so on.
As Cowen points out, and as we grant writers daily see in Census data, racial segregation is worse today, by some metrics, than it was in 1972, both in terms of housing and education. As Cowen says, “If we look at school systems, racial segregation is also getting worse in some ways.” Despite the perfectly rational explanations Cowen provides, I still find this almost incomprehensible. After five decades of the “War on Poverty,” endless speechifying from politicians, religious leaders, and virtue signalers on the left and right, and the racial divide is not only still here, but seems to be increasing.
Data that supports this doesn’t just come from The Complacent Class. The New York Times just published “Family by Family, How School Segregation Still Happens.” Although Jim Crow laws are long gone, the vast majority of American public school students attend highly segregated schools. For example, 73% of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) students are Latino, even though only 47% of LA residents are Latino (of any race; note this is Census lingo). Only 8.8% of LAUSD students are white, while 49.8% of LA City residents are white. It’s obvious that LA has re-segregated from both residential and school attendance perspectives. The vast majority of white LA residents, regardless of income, have simply abandoned LAUSD (or, depending on one’s point of view, LAUSD has abandoned them). Thus, no matter what ethnicity a LAUSD student is, they likely attend a very segregated school, and, unless they’re Latino, that student is going to be on the extreme narrow end of the segregation stick.
Re-segregation in America presents an interesting problem for grant writers, as we frequently must gently massage the data to fit within the prevailing notions of clients, and grant reviewers. For example, when writing a proposal for Watts or South Central LA, we still present the mythology that this area is largely African American—though it isn’t and hasn’t been for at least two decades. Even the LA Times revealed in 2015 that Watts is over 70% Latino.
We’ve also reached the 25th anniversary of the Civil Disturbances* following the acquittal of the cops involved in the Rodney King beating. I watched a Showtime documentary about this big brother to the 1965 Watts Rebellion, “Burn Motherfucker, Burn”.
In 1992, I was living in the Bay Area, but on April 29th I happened to be in Hollywood visiting a hospitalized relative. We were watching on TV in his room. When the not-guilty decision was announced, the station switched to live feeds of gathering angry crowds at the LAPD’s Parker Center Downtown, which is pretty close to the hospital. I quickly decided to “get out of Dodge” (or Hollywood in this case), as I knew what was going to happen.
I was staying in the San Fernando Valley, which was largely untouched, but as I drove to LAX the next afternoon, I could see the smoke billowing over much of the basin. To quote a prophetic James Baldwin story, it’ll be “The Fire Next Time.”
Around April 29, 1992, I first thought of leaving my public sector career as a Community Development Director to start a consulting business, as I watched LA burn. This idea eventually became Seliger + Associates in 1993. I reasoned correctly that the federal response to the unrest would be massive grant programs aimed at South Central. Since I had worked for the Cities of Lynwood and Inglewood for years, I knew many public agency managers and nonprofit executive directors in LA. Consequently, our first clients were mostly from LA, with many being in South Central. In this way, Seliger + Associates is linked to the Rodney King decision.
While the Showtime documentary is reasonably well made and should be viewed by those too young to remember 1992, I was struck by how the film maker perpetuated the same mythology about South Central and similar areas we still use in proposals to describe target areas. In reality, the disturbances extended way beyond South Central to Hollywood, Mid-Wilshire and Koreatown, none of which were even close to being majority African American. Many of the looters and arsonists were Latino. Even the area around the infamous live TV broadcast beating of the unfortunate Reginald Denny at Normandy and Florence was probably not majority African American in 1992. But this doesn’t fit the narrative of the Civil Disturbance in the documentary, just like Census data doesn’t always fit the narrative of our proposals. As we’ve written about before, grant writers, like documentarians, are at our most basic level story tellers. As Jimmy Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard is told by a newspaper editor at the end of John Ford’s classic western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
* Note that I use “Civil Disturbance” and “Rebellion,” both capitalized, not the more descriptive term, “riots.” Avoid words like “riot” or similarly loaded terms in your grant proposals. Remember who’s going to read the proposal and use language that fits their worldview.