 Welcome to the New America Foundation. We're pleased to have you here with us, those of you in the room, and on our online audience, as well as the C-SPAN audience that's joining us today. I'm Reed Kramer. I direct the asset-building program here at the New America Foundation, and this is a program that focuses on advancing policy ideas to help families move up the economic ladder and out of poverty. So we have a real interest in today's topic. The event is provocatively titled Why Don't American Cities Burn Inequality, Poverty, and Hope for Urban America. And we're going to be featuring Michael Katz, one of the country's leading scholars of the history of the American welfare state. It's his book and his provocative title that we're here to discuss, and we're pleased to have him here with us. For those of you in Twitterland, as I like to say, we'll be using the hashtag UrbanHope. This is a new thing here. Every event we're going to be due, we'll have a Twitter hashtag. So today it's UrbanHope, and we thought that was better than hashtag cities burning, or cities burn, or something like that. Anyway, good comments and questions will be relayed to me during the discussion, but otherwise there's an ongoing conversation that can be had there. And it's really not hyperbole to state that cities do in fact burn. They've done so historically. They've done so in the U.S. across the world. Athens appears to be burning right now. Very dramatic images coming from there. Obviously people are upset with some of the economic policies that are being imposed upon them. Historically, episodes of unrest and mayhem that are distinct from protests have occurred as isolated incidents. They've also sparked chain reactions that spread to other areas. In the U.S., we have a long history, an unfortunate history of actual race riots, as they've been called, where this long legacy of slavery and racial discrimination has continued to unfold. And it's an unfortunate and maybe disturbing part of our history, but it's a defining feature of America, and it's one that shouldn't be forgotten. In Washington, D.C., some of you might know the redevelopment efforts that are going on in different parts of the city. The H Street corridor has a lot of new shops, restaurants, bars that are opening up. Really interesting place. There's a new trolley line that they're building. But this part of the city, in fact, burned in 1968, along with the U Street area after the assassination of Martin Luther King. It took decades for this community to get kind of moving in the right direction. It remained depressed for a long time. So these things do happen. And these events in the 60s certainly also motivated a large-scale policy response, where we saw kind of an expansion of the welfare state. Cities certainly are very complex places, much diversity. They're centers of power, commerce, cultural activity. But they also can be cauldrons that grievances that build up can kind of boil over into things that overcome, let's just say, the rule of law. We can find all the euphemisms for this kind of behavior today, but certainly a phenomenon that is very real. But understanding when we get to that point and what the conditions are is a bit of a mystery. We might expect a recurrence of unrest when we have a severe economic downturn, such as in the Great Recession. We've had rising poverty and unemployment. And yet across the country, violent crime rates are generally down across the board. And even the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations have overwhelmingly been peaceful. In D.C., we see commonly large-scale gatherings of people protesting, celebrating, coming together quite peacefully. The inauguration of President Obama in 2008, one of the largest mass gatherings in the history of the country. I think a million and a half people came out in a very peaceful celebration. But I think it really still remains a challenge to look at places like D.C. and other cities across the country where you have concentrated poverty and social exclusion, entire neighborhoods that are very isolated, and we want to know what to do about it. Local rates of unemployment and crime quite high, but low incomes, low graduation rates. So it remains a real challenge to think about finding ways to address social and economic exclusion where many families are really poorly connected to the broader opportunities. And this is a challenge that we're going to ask Michael Katz to help us think about. He is the Walter Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania in my hometown of Philadelphia. And his new book asks why American cities have remained relatively calm even when we've had historically high levels of inequality and negative economic events. He asked how the forces of lingering social inequality and social and economic exclusion kind of mix and interact with urban policy efforts in recent years and how we might navigate the future of race and class issues in a way that could construct what he calls a hopeful, a politics of hope, modest hope, I think is his phrasing. So we'll hear more from him on that. His new book picks up on some of the themes of his earlier work. As I mentioned, he's really one of the premier scholars of urban history and the welfare state. Ones that were very influential for me were in the shadow of the poor house and the price of citizenship. So anyone that's really looking at the history of welfare politics in America, really, these are must-read books, and this work really picks up on the themes he explains. Explored there. So we have books actually on sale outside here and you can pick them up at your local bookstore and if there's none of those left, certainly your online purveyor of books will have them to check out. After he speaks, I'm very pleased to have Devin Fergus join us who is assistant professor of U.S. history at Hunter College in New York City. He's author of a book called Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965 to 1980. And he's currently finishing a book that I'm very excited about called Land of the Fee, which looks at the rise of consumer finance fees and its role connecting to growing inequality in America today. So I look forward to his comments as well. But first, please help me welcome Professor Katz up to the podium. Thank you. Okay. Well, thank you for that introduction read and thank all of you for coming. It's really a great pleasure to have the chance to be here to talk about my new book. So I'm going to talk for a little while and then I'll look forward to what Devin has to say and to your questions. So why don't American Cities Burn takes its title from a chapter of the book provoked by the 2005 riots in French cities? Why, I asked, had collective violence more or less disappeared from the streets of American cities? Alienation, marginalization, youth unemployment, distrust of the police. These surely were as prevalent in them as in cities in France. In fact, social pathologies believed to have sparked the major civil violence in American cities during the 1960s and 1970s. Poverty, racial segregation, unemployment had, if anything, grown worse. Yet with a couple of exceptions, collective violence had not erupted on city streets. Instead, violence had turned inward. Manifest in drive-by shootings, gangs, and shocking homicide rates among young men. How and why had this happened? Why don't American Cities Burn is, however, about more than the question of urban violence? In the largest sense, it is about the collision between urban transformation and rightward-moving social politics. A series of economic, demographic, and spatial changes have transformed American cities, producing an urban form unlike any other in history. At the same time, American politics has been moving right. Federal and state governments have been cutting the safety net, reducing aid to cities, attacking trade unions, allowing the value of the minimum wage to erode, and wherever possible, applying market-based solutions to public business. The coexistence of these trends produces a collision with ordinary people caught in the middle. The evidence is all around us, in rising rates of poverty and homelessness, declining real wages, decayed inner cities, failing public services, home mortgage foreclosures, high unemployment and mass incarceration. The book's prologue looks at the result of this collision on the ground. It tells the story of murder and marginalization in the badlands of Philadelphia, a place where an explosive collision between urban transformation and rightward-moving social politics has trapped residents in a devastated urban landscape with few sources of help. Two men found themselves locked in a mortal struggle over $5, and in the end, one died. I was a juror for the murder trial that resulted. The prologue, The Death of Shorty, which tells the story of the trial and its aftermath for me, provides a concrete, vivid illustration of the book's themes. It shows how complicated and interconnected the issues are, and it reminds readers that the historical and sociological material in the book refers to real people, human beings struggling to survive with some dignity on the mean streets of North Philadelphia and other North American cities. The first side of this story, urban transformation, is the subject of the first substantive chapter which asks what is an American city? It shows how economic, demographic, and spatial changes have resulted in unique urban forms. It uses the idea of a new domestic landscape to illustrate dramatic change in the spatial ecology of suburbs, and it points to the variety of new metaphors deployed with only partial success to capture the new meaning of urban city and suburb. For many years, I have argued that the decades after World War II, that in these decades, economic, demographic, and spatial transformations in the United States resulted in an urban form unlike any other in history. Recently, I realized that in one important way, this formulation of recent urban history misleads. For it reports the outcome of history as singular when it should be plural. That is, form should be forms, an unprecedented configuration of urban places that calls into question the definition of city itself. One configuration is represented by the deindustrialized landscape of destitution that is a short, straight ride up broad street from the newly revitalized center city of Philadelphia. But there are others as well. What forced me to confront the protein quality of today's urbanism and the inadequacy of singular definitions grew out of research and writing a book on the 20th century. One nation divisible, what America was and what it is becoming with Mark Stern, my colleague. Stern and I set out to examine how the 2000 U.S. census reflected social and economic trends in the 20th century. We concluded that America is living through a transformation as profound as the industrial revolution, as the industrial revolution, a transformation that reshapes everything from family to class, from race and gender to cities. Events on the ground, the trends we identified and discussed have undermined the concepts with which we interpret public life, work, city, race, family, nationality. All of them have lost their moorings in the way life is actually lived today. Their conventional meanings lie smashed badly in need of redefinition. The same situation occurred during the transformation from the 19th to the 20th century when an emergent industrial civilization, also based on a global economy, shattered existing ideas producing, among other things, a new form, the industrial city. Early 20th century urban reformers struggling to define and tame industrial cities grappled with the consequences of massive immigration by people with different cultures, the lack of affordable housing, the growth of poverty and homelessness, crises in public health and sanitation, and the impact of growing concentrations of wealth on society and politics. They worried about the role of privatization in municipal services, the heavy hand of state government, the weakness of mayoral executive authority, the corruption of machine politics, the inefficiencies and inequities of courts, and the aggressive and inadequate foundation of city finances based on property taxes. In the late 19th and early 20th century, cities tried to respond to these issues with active governments, what historians have labeled progressivism. Despite the persistence of corruption, widespread poverty and racial discrimination, in these decades, cities increased municipal expenditures, professionalized their administrations, and constructed buildings and infrastructures that supported the most vibrant and successful era in American history. In the late 20th century, by contrast, the response was the withdrawal of active government, evident in reduced federal funds, reliance on market-based solutions to urban problems, and the need to turn to private initiatives like special services districts to carry out public functions such as street cleaning and security. The results are everywhere to be seen in hopelessness on city streets, poverty spreading outward to inner suburbs, uncontrolled sprawl eating up open space, crumbling infrastructure, gross inequity in spending on public education, the future of finance mortgaged to casino gambling, and the incapacity to respond or prevent effectively the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. The widely heralded comeback of American cities is thin and fragile, move away from shiny city centers, and it is not nearly so visible. Look at city budgets, and it does not seem nearly so robust. What is an American city has begun to elicit both a cacophony of definitions and an array of intelligence and promising ideas about how to respond. But these have not coalesced into a new urban progressivism, without the will to forge an effective and coordinated political response. The future of American cities, however defined, is unlikely to be as buoyant as their past. In 2005, the year Barack Obama took his place in the United States Senate, the street mechanic Shorty, born three years after Obama, high on cocaine and alcohol, died from a knife wound on the racially segregated streets of North Philadelphia. Shorty's foreshortened life, a rundown row house on a mean street, frequent encounters with the police, work outside the regular economy, violent death at the hand of another black man, scream the stubborn salience of race in American life. Whose life, Obama's or Shorty's, more accurately represented the trajectory of African American experience in early 21st century America? The question matters, not only because it cuts so close to the heart of 20th century American history, but also because it bears on important public policy choices in the present, chapter two of the book, which addresses the question, suggests that the history of black economic inequality and mobility does not support either the optimistic or pessimistic version of African American history, but it does not come down in an illusory middle either. Rather, it recasts the issue by showing that after World War II, the nature of black inequality altered fundamentally. Inequality worked differently at the end of the 20th century than at its start or midpoint. Looking back at the last half century, have the life prospects of African Americans worsened, improved, or remained about the same? Powerful arguments have been advanced in favor of each position. This book contends that this is the wrong question. It asks instead in what ways have African Americans, in what ways have African American social structure changed? The chapter points to two major trends. The first of these is class differentiation. The division of African American social structure through the accumulation of many small and not so small distinctions. The distance between Barack Obama and the men fighting to death in North Philadelphia illustrates the outcome. The other trend is the emergence of a gender gap on most measures of education, income, and occupation. Black women increasingly outpace black men. The new black inequality that emerged in the last decades of the 20th century resulted from powerful technological, demographic, economic, and political forces. It was facilitated by massive social movements and abetted and shaped in every way by the state. And it left African Americans divided among themselves. Large numbers were peculiarly vulnerable to political retrenchment and economic reversal because they were employed in public or publicly funded jobs. A disproportionately high fraction lived in poverty, and many others enjoyed the benefits of upward mobility. While race remained a live force in American life, it worked in some new ways, sifting African Americans through a series of screens, residential, penal, occupational, educational, economic that advantaged some and left others progressively behind. Familiar forms of inequality remained and an alarming gender gap had opened up between black women and black men. Large differences in labor force participation and earnings separated black and white men and a much higher fraction of whites owned property and other assets. Nonetheless, black inequality had been transformed. Earlier, the embodiment of ubiquitous, converging forces of oppression. Late 20th century black inequality was the product of a sequence of differentiating experiences. Barack Obama and Shorty were two of its products. The new inequality was harder to pinpoint or characterize, more diverse, easier for an outsider to miss, but no less real. Now these stories of urban transformation and of the new African American inequality underlie the answer to the question posed by the book's title, Why Don't American Cities Burn? The answer combines three general factors, a new ecology of power, the management of marginalization and the incorporation and control of immigrants. Consider first the new ecology of power. The civil violence of the 1960s erupted when huge numbers of African Americans had moved into American cities and whites had not yet moved out. In the years following this great migration, whites decamped from central cities for suburbs and many cities became majority or near majority minority. By 2000, only 21% of whites remained in central cities. This changed the ecology of power because when they left, whites ceded effective political control of cities to African Americans, retaining only a hold on commerce and gentrified pockets of downtown. Ironically, African Americans inherited city governments at the moment when deindustrialization cuts in federal aid and white flights were decimating tax bases and job opportunities while fueling homelessness, street crime, and poverty. Nonetheless, with many whites gone, neighborhood boundaries became less contentious, eroding one source of civil violence. In the 1980s, massive immigration from Latin America and Asia reignited urban boundary conflicts, particularly in gateway cities where immigrants entered, triggering violence in south-central Los Angeles in 1992, the first major civil violence since the 1960s. But events in Los Angeles did not ignite fuses in other American cities. One reason lies in a set of mechanisms that deflected civil violence by managing marginalization. Five of these mechanisms have proved crucial. I call them selective incorporation, ostensible or mimetic reform, indirect rule, consumption, and repression and surveillance. Together, they initiated a process of de-polititization that undercut the capacity for collective action. In the book, I explain each of these in detail. Here, let me just say something about them briefly. Selective incorporation refers to the gateways to better education, jobs, income, and housing that have opened to a significant fraction of African-Americans and other minorities. The limited mobility that resulted has fractured African-American communities along lines of class and genders, I said women have fared better than men, and eroded the potential for political protest by holding out the promise of economic and occupational achievement as well as a modest prosperity. By mimetic reform, I mean measures that respond to insurgent demands without transferring real power or redistributing significant resources. Such reform cools out insurgencies. It does not resolve the problems that underlie them. White abandonment, selective incorporation, and mimetic reform resulted in indirect rule. Like colonial British imperialists who kept order through the exercise of authority by indigenous leaders, powerful white Americans retained authority over cities through their influence on minorities elected to political office appointed to public and social service bureaucracies and hired in larger numbers by police forces. Despite African-American occupation of public offices, real power lay elsewhere. But indirect rule meant that civil violence or other claims on city government increasingly would be directed toward African-American elected officials, public bureaucrats, and police. African-Americans joined what historian Elizabeth Cohen has termed the consumer's republic. In her words, an economy, culture, and politics built around the promises of mass consumption both in terms of the material life and the more idealistic goals of freedom, democracy, and equality. More African-Americans than ever before were able to purchase the material symbols of the good life. In this way, the consumer's republic undermined black protest by shifting the focus of black demands to public accommodation and market access, thereby linking African-American goals to mainstream American aspirations and subordinating alternatives based on black nationalism or social democratic visions of economic justice. At the same time, public authorities deployed new or heightened techniques of repression and control. New federal grants provided police with money to purchase hardware such as anti-riot tools, helicopters, and vehicles. In the same years, harsh policies of incarceration swept black men off city streets and into prison. America's prison population mushroomed. Its rate of incarceration led the world. In Los Angeles contends Mike Davis, political repression of black power, undermined a promising gang truce, while a decimation of the black panthers resulted in a revival of black gangs, now permeated by a culture of violence and domination. In the 1990s, public authorities again dismissed gang truces and summits as hoaxes. As black men experienced disillusionment, depolititization, and renewed criminal violence, many could not participate in politics and if they wanted to, because they were felons. Except for Maine, all states prohibited felons from voting, and many states continued to disenfranchise them after they left prison. About 13% of African-American men remain effectively disenfranchised, a percentage that could rise to 40% in states that permanently bar ex-offenders from voting. In the 1960s, African-Americans lacked channels through which to make effective claims on the state. Other than through collective action, whether sit-ins or violence, they had few ways to force their grievances onto public attention or to persuade authorities to respond. This changed as the new ecology of power opened up new channels of access. People who once might have led protests now held positions from which they could argue that civil violence was both unproductive and counterproductive. Others remained in America's inner cities, struggling to get by, disenfranchised, wary of the state, disillusioned with politicians, lacking leadership or revision strong enough to mobilize them once again to make claims on the state. The recent history of African-Americans in urban America is only partially helpful in contrasting the American and European experience. For the civil violence that rocked France in 2005 and frightens other Europeans is a product of recent immigration, not of grievances and frustrations of historically marginalized citizens. Both European and American cities have experienced recent massive immigration. Both have had to cope with infusions of low-skilled workers from different cultural traditions. But their parallels cease, as immigrants in cooperation and control take different routes. And these routes have implications in turn for civil violence. In April and May 2005, immigrants across the United States outraged by proposed federal legislation that would turn illegal immigrants into felons and criminalized efforts to assist them to look to the streets in protests that were coordinated, massive and completely peaceful. On May 1st, more than one million marched in protest rallies in cities across the United States. Most of the 400,000 marchers in Los Angeles waved American flags. U.S. immigrants sought redress through government. Their protests assumed that they could realize their goals as Americans' political institutions. They approached government as a potential ally, not an enemy, wanting nothing so much as the rights of American citizens. In Paris, immigrants showed no such faith in the state. In the United States, with policing, with policing decentralized, insurgents tried to enlist the federal government as an agent of reform. In France, conversely, where policing remained highly centralized, antagonism toward the police reinforced distrust of the national government. At the same time, the state pursued a relentless policy of nationalization, rejecting even benign symbols of their culture, such as wearing headscarves in schools, a prohibition unthinkable in the United States. In their rage, frustration, alienation and lack of confidence in or access to official political channels, protesters in France resembled African Americans in the 1960s more than immigrants to the United States in the late 20th century. Naturalization laws reflected and reinforced divergent paths to immigrant incorporation. In France, naturalization rates are much lower. After 15 to 20 years of residence, naturalization rates are 20 percentage points lower in France than in the United States. In the United States, vocal hostility is directed not to all immigrants but to those who are undocumented. For them, the road to economic and civic incorporation is difficult, if not impossible to reach. Public anger at undocumented immigrants, long simmering, has exploded with stunning velocity, demanding still more border militarization and punitive policies toward immigrants themselves or those who employ, house or assist them. The result, of course, undercuts potential immigrant protest. Threats of deportation, which under the Obama Administration have increased to about 400,000 per year and unemployment constitute an effective mechanism of social control that dampens the potential for both civil violence and peaceful political protest. Poverty is the subject of the fourth and final substantive chapter of the book. Have the changes in ideas about poverty and strategies for its alleviation accompanied the transformation of American cities. I found a remarkable shift that I refer to as the transition from underclass to entrepreneur. In the 1980s, underclass was the term applied most often to inner city minority populations, a term which referred more to behavior than economic condition. Underclass provided the latest iteration of the oldest trope about poor people. That is their division into the deserving and undeserving poor. By the first decade of the 21st century, underclass had become yesterday's idea. Instead, from Bangladesh to New York, writers celebrated the entrepreneurial energy of poor people waiting for the spark of opportunity to transform their lives. Poverty entrepreneurs jettisoned the underclass ideas and developed new techniques of poverty work based on market-based principles. The foremost prominent were rebuilding markets in inner cities, the poor as consumers, micro-finance, the poor as entrepreneurs, asset-building, the poor as savers, and conditional cash transfers, the poor as rational actors. How effective were these new technologies? The jury remains out on each of them. Whether singly or together, they can seriously dent poverty remains uncertain. But they do represent a break, a break with past ideas about poverty. The displacement of pathological stereotypes of the poor with images of competent entrepreneurs accumulating assets marks a new stage in poverty discourse and policy. In the epilogue, I raise questions which grows out of the earlier chapters and out of my work as a teacher of urban studies. Both the political right and left tell a similar disheartening story about the history of American cities since World War II. The facts are largely accurate and beyond dispute, and many of them are in this book. But are they the whole story? As it stands, the narrative of urban history is depressing, and it leaves students unsatisfied. Is it possible they wonder to make a difference? This question leads me to believe we need a new urban narrative, one still true to the facts, but wider in its frame and more inclusive. I see bits and pieces that can be used to build it, but constructing the frame remains an unfinished task. It is, I suggest, the underlying task of progressive politics as well as of urban history. The book ends with a quotation related to this dilemma from the brilliant urbanist Ananya Roy. She's where she writes, in teaching my course Global Poverty at Berkeley, I am struck by a contrast. On the one hand, I have students who are brimming with enthusiasm to do good. They want to save the world. They believe they can. On the other hand, I have students who are cynical, those who are able to level sharp critiques of structures of injustice, but not believe that change is possible. I teach in the impossible space between the hubris of benevolence and the paralysis of cynicism. Finding this impossible space is what the book calls the existential dilemma of urban studies. So finally, briefly, I would like readers to take away at least four things from this book. First, an understanding of urban transformation and its consequences. To comprehend the world in which we live, we need to toss out older ideas of city, suburb, and urban. The exercise is not just intellectual. It's necessary if we are to develop policies which respond to the situation as it is, not as it was so very long ago. Second, second is an ability to criticize statements that attribute poverty to the failings of individuals. By this point in history, it should be clear that the Charles Murray knotwithstanding, that the attribution of poverty to personal defect, along with the hoary idea of the undeserving poor, is intellectually bankrupt and incapable of pointing the way to effective strategies for substantially reducing the unacceptable extent of poverty in America. Third is an appreciation of the role of government and a healthy skepticism about the ability of privatization and policies based on market... policies based on market models to solve major problems. The denigration of government is one of the most corrosive public trends in recent American history. Its ugly consequences are all around us. Without strong effective government, a vibrant, successful democracy is impossible. Fourth, and finally, a willingness to reject the idea that there is no alternative. Tina, as the late Daniel Singer called the idea, is a powerful ideological control mechanism for disabling protest and creative thinking about possibilities for change and alternative policies. Alternatives have always existed as they do today. The question is whether we have the imagination and will to make them happen. This, I suggest, is the important and encouraging message of Occupy Wall Street. Had the Occupy Movement happened a little earlier, or had I written the book a little later, it would have made the perfect ending. Thank you. Thank you again, Professor Katz, for that wonderful sort of summary of your texts. As a historian as well, I cannot help, but start with a story. Specifically, I'd like to begin with the story of a little-known graduate student named Paul Wellstone. Then, finishing his PhD in political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the late 1960s at the height of the urban revolt and social revolution. An urban revolt and social revolution was the focus and the heart of his dissertation project. Wellstone's dissertation was subtitled quote, Why Black Militants Believe in Violence. Wellstone spent nearly a year doing field research in Durham, North Carolina, conducting and collecting over 100 interviews. What shook him to his core was that even in this tiny southern tobacco city, revolution seemed inevitable. Even the southern black women he interviewed, the plurality of them, said that they supported political violence if it could mean an end to inequality. Wellstone, like so many across the sort of ideological spectrum, staked his academic career on the certainty that the nation's cities would be engulfed by political violence in just a few years, but there was no fire the next time. It is an adulterly written book and perceptive study. Professor Katz, 40 years, 40 years later, tells us how America escapes its riots and everybellions that gripped Wellstone and the nation in the 1960s and France and now Greece more recently. My comments would be very brief, but I would just like to say that Professor Katz has extremely valuable takeaways and for various publics effectively concerned about these issues. The policy community, which is always in search of the proper public-private balance, Professor Katz provides an excellent synthesis of the most ineffective limitations of market-led solutions to poverty that seek to wish away structural inequalities through the cult of the individual. His work offers a primer about the value of history as a guide to public policy and I hope he can sort of explicate or expand on the role that history is in these sorts of issues and discussions. For the general public, Professor Katz's book conjures up the best works of history like those of C. Van Woodward's strange career of Jim Crow. As Katz challenges the general reader's imagination by reminding us of the forgotten alternatives to upward mobility. For Professor Katz, forgotten alternatives range from mass-organized protests to possible forms of political violence to even a reinvigorated activism of the broker's state. And that is a state less interested in the management of marginalization than using the tools at its disposal, tools like fiscal policy to address issues of inequality. This is where I really envy you. Professor Katz really knows how to engage in the washes of his credits the first year under graduate, the college freshman. The book's gripping opening pages mirrors some of the more sort of some of the opening scenes of law and order with this murder and trial and intrigue rather than sort of the dry academic treatise about social historical causes for urban poverty. For graduate students, Professor Katz offers future directions of research and for scholars as well, such as myself. So finally, for historians and urban scholars, Professor Katz's work, Why Don't American Cities Burn may actually provide the best intervention that I've come across thus far by a scholar, not named Devin Fergus about the so-called declension narrative in urban history and in recent U.S. history captured in books with telling titles like The Unraveling of America, America Coming Apart, The Uncivil Wars. As Professor Katz aptly sums, this is the pressing story about urban America since World War II and progressive politics since the 1960s. This narrative of failure, as Professor Katz labels it, has stressed government's complicity in the failed public housing, urban ghettos, public education, and countless other instances of publicly sanctioned racial discrimination. To quote Professor Katz, this view has sort of naturalized the public failure as a master narrative of urban history. And while the facts of these previous stories are largely accurate, Professor Katz asks, usefully, is it the entire story? Is the story much larger and much broader? In this book, he goes in search of a new urban narrative. And in this section, I think he really explicated it quite well. Why don't American cities burn is also among the best citizens I've read thus far by historian on the mechanisms that contribute to economic inequality within black America in the post-war World War II period. I found the book profoundly engaging and extremely helpful. Not only my own research on issues of economic inequality and the overlooked mechanisms that contribute to the rise of the wealth gap, but also for the classes I teach and the conversations that many of us have with policymakers. I hope it will become an essential reading for anyone who works with underserved communities. And I would put it at the top of my reading list. I have a series of questions for Professor Katz and I would sort of like to engage him, hopefully, now. Okay. We'll start with that with one of your questions. And I'll add one of my own and then we can open it up for discussion with the audience. Are the mics on? Can you hear them from the... No, hit your mic here. John will magically make it appear in the other room. Okay, thanks. 2007, then Senator Barack Obama addressed an annual minister's conference. We spoke with the quiet riots simmering in inner cities throughout the nation by quiet riots the senator meant the growing frustration and sense of social alienation by many blacks living in the nation's most depressed communities. Of course scholars contend that these quiet riots manifest themselves anthropolitically. That is to hit and ax of resistance. So my question apart to Professor Katz is how would you respond to possible critics who might contend that your work neglects or misses these so-called hit and ax of resistance? Well, that's a... Is this mic on? Yep. Okay, great. That's a great question which I obviously did not take up in this book. The search in a sense for hit and ax of resistance for agency on the part of subaltern people has been something of a minor industry among historians. And I'm kind of resistant to it because it tends to lead to a bit of romanticism. A kind of a stress on often individual more minor achievements rather than to the neglect of the larger social structural political questions. So I mean there always are certainly people who are doing heroic things and I would not want to denigrate those or lessen their achievements. But you have to ask in the long run what have they accomplished? Let me see a show of hands for questions. We're going to move the mic around and that's good. Let me also, before we do that, ask about this new narrative that's emerged that really is taking us away from the underclass framework that was so dominant in the 80s and early 90s and one that's focusing more on the entrepreneurial capacity of this community. And I just want a little bit more explanation of what you think the implications of that are and how it might interact with situations when possibly the mobility that is kind of promised through that approach doesn't materialize in any real way. I mean we had an event last week we were looking at some of the mobility data and we still have, we do much worse than other countries when people are starting out at the very bottom and their ability to kind of move up the ladder and I think that there's especially a gender component to that story as well. So what are the implications for this transition to the new narrative and what happens when the country, the prosperity isn't delivered? Yeah, that's also a great question. It sort of clued me into that something was really happening in the way people were thinking and talking about poverty was looking in the window of the University of Pennsylvania bookstore, Wharton, the business school at Penn has its own press and I guess it was a couple of years ago I was looking in the window at the Wharton books that were displayed and this whole raft of books on poverty and I thought what is Wharton doing producing books on poverty? It's about time. Yeah, it's about time. So it really led me into, to begin to see that there is this new market-based entrepreneurial approach to poverty that's quite different than any other that I know of on a large scale in the past. So what is it going to add up to? How is it going to interact with mobility? I mean the new mobility studies are really high-opening and really deeply distressing. We certainly cannot in this country boast that we have one of the high rates of mobility in the world anymore and what are the implications of that? I mean clearly, I mean when people's aspirations and expectations are not met there's always some kind of problem either it focuses outward and some kind of protest or either turns inward into some kind of self-blame and quiescence and I just don't know how it's going to play out in the future. Okay, Hannah, let's see. There's a question up front here and then we'll move to the back. You can wait for the mic and state your name and ask your question directly. I'm Fritz Mollhauser. I'm a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union here in D.C. As a civil rights attorney with dozens of cases on police issues, I'd focus you on a puzzle for me. How do you put together two conflicting notions? On one hand the impressive rise in urban government positions and authority of African American leaders. Many cities now of course have minority mayors and city councils and the like. At the same time, a force of police, courts, prosecutors and the like, presumably who should be responsive to the concerns of poor communities who are the targets and sufferers under strong regimes of prosecution, adjudication, incarceration and fundamental policing which are greatly to their disadvantage. How do you put those two together? Great question. Great question. It's a tough question. I can only think about, I can't give you a really comprehensive answer as I would like to be able to, but it does seem to me to be an instance in a way that social structure and group mobility works which is to say that individuals or groups which are upwardly mobile seem to be absorbed into the existing kind of structures of power, authority so that in fact a kind of the sort of social, economic, political arrangements are not threatened, are not threatened by the entrance of new people, of new groups. There's a kind of a maintenance of those, of the kind of basic structures of inequality even though the people are absorbed and some people are absorbed into some of them. And I suspect that is kind of what's happening here. Why that happens and one can see it early, much earlier in American history with other kinds of groups, with other kinds of situations that I looked at quantitatively over time. I can't say, but it is a huge puzzle. I actually think it touches on an issue that I'm very concerned about, this toxic brew between mass incarceration that we've had within the political defranchisement where people kind of coming back, mentioned the felons that are not being able to kind of participate and vote with some of these gender inequities that are playing on. I think it's very dispiriting and I'm not sure who's going to offer voice to that kind of population if it's not going to be some of their elected officials at the local level and certainly I haven't noticed it to date. Any comments on this issue? Okay, Sean, let's go in the back and then come to the middle here. Hi, Sean Fremstead with the Center for Economic and Policy Research here in D.C. I'm looking forward to reading the book. I just wanted to, this is maybe a comment, but maybe you have something to say about it. It's interesting that this, you know, we have the idea of the underclass on one hand and then the idea of sort of the poor as the entrepreneurial class on the other hand, both seeming like kind of, you know, conservative or Reagan-esque almost ideas, you know, the Stryvers, the Algeresque Stryvers versus the, you know, kind of the, you know, all the deviancy and kind of stuff that's associated with the underclass. What seems to be missing is an idea of the poor as the working class, you know, kind of this old idea, you know, think about it in kind of people like Jane Addams and a whole century and that almost seems to have disappeared, you know, in discourse today we have the poor, the rich and the middle class and the working class is just kind of the old guys who were white and worked in factories but when you think about African-American communities, Hispanic communities, they really identify as working class but you don't hear about it much in at least our discourse, I guess. Thanks for that question and thanks for your organization which does such great work. Yeah, well, you know, there is a real reluctance to use the language of class in this country it's, you know, you use it in your accused of class warfare but it does seem to me that there has been, you know, a lot of concern for what people have called the working poor and that they are a group which has been a very sympathetic group and the group which has benefited from public policy, you know, starting in the Clinton administration particularly if you think of the earned income tax in the earned income tax credit so I think there is an awareness of that I think there is an awareness of that group although it's not talked about in those terms I mean to talk about it in those terms as the problems of the American working class I think would lead one straight to the question of trade unions you know, and their decimation and the decline in union density and so on which is such a huge, huge problem and a lot of people I think don't want to go there. Devon? Yeah, I mean you raised an excellent point I mean in the invisibility of the working class particularly the black working class is a problem that vexes even scholars I think like Bill Wilson when Julius Wilson's book on the truly disadvantaged and the classif as a race he makes the argument that I mean what explains the rise of the presence of a black underclass and the dysfunctionality of it is the outmigration of a black middle class but there's a stable black working class which remains in the city of America and the way you find it is by following the private market following the predatory lender both HUD and the Federal Reserve illustrates and demonstrates and do reports that says that the primary targets of these predatory lenders are individuals who've been living in inner city ghettos and own their own homes why because they have all this equity in their house and this is what home equity lenders want people with equity in their homes and so they remain stable elements in inner city America these working class black working class which remains in inner city America that even leading sociologists like Bill Wilson and others have sort of missed and we need to re-insert them back into the narrative I think that's a really, really important point I live in West Philadelphia about a mile, mile and a quarter from the Penn campus and most students think that it's some kind of a wild west nobody should go there they're always amazed when they come out to our house it's better today than it has been in the past it was always great I've lived there over 30 years and I've always liked it but what's interesting about it is I just remember getting in trouble for going down there with my mother but you walk a little bit west of our block and there are the modest houses very stable, very well kept almost entirely of African Americans who are in this stable working class position working really hard to make a living and there are people I worry a group that I worry about so much because I have not been able to do a kind of systematic analysis but I suspect that many of them are maintaining that kind of modest stability through working in the healthcare system through working in city government through state government these public and publicly funded jobs and every time those get cut these are the people who are just getting decimated I don't think there's nearly enough discussion of that You want to go right here in front of your hand and then we'll go here Hello, Daniel Esser from American University it struck me in your talk that there seems to be almost an equation of burning cities and minorities and specifically African Americans I think African Americans are not the only ones who have matches what struck me as a foreigner in this country is the tolerance of massive inequality when you compare that to the European situation so I'm wondering what other triggers of burning cities do you see that may not necessarily be directly linked to the disenfranchisement of minorities which I don't debate is a huge issue in this country and remains a huge issue but I think if we look at London if we look at Greece now these situations have very little to do with race in London of course there's a bit of a racial undercurrent but you basically I think it drives us back to the previous question about class and underclass and social exclusion that actually transcends race and that in a sense speaks to your notion of transformation So is there a spark in America that's not racial in origin? I'm really interested in the UK riots and in that question of what touched them off and what's different in Britain than in this country most of the discussion that I've read has not been very satisfying I've had a very good student sort of collecting information on that and I'm hoping to be able to spend the spring semester 2013 actually in London trying to look at teaching and trying to look at that question you know in some detail so that I'll be able to answer it My guess is that I will find the answer somewhere in what I call these techniques for managing marginalization and that there will be a difference and that also somehow in the social ecology of cities as for the US I actually do not think that we are going to have despite inequality, despite the poverty I do not think we are going to have large scale civil violence maybe in a particular place but not the kind of thing we had in the 60s and 70s I think that the configuration of forces that are right against it are just too powerful I mean their structural forces their ideological forces their political and I just I would just be very, very surprised to see it happen And I think it does connect with your concept of the consumers republic that you talked about and I actually want to connect this to Devin's work that where he's looking at you know the rise of these consumer you know, fee practices when we've moved people to a system where they are encouraged to work and they get extra resources maybe through the tax refund and the earned income tax credit and then we kind of let them fend for themselves in the marketplace and they saw a lot of predatory behavior where resources were stripped away and so yeah, I wanted to see can you elaborate on those dynamics and the impact? Again, it's linked to financial deregulation in many ways and some of the great shift in wealth and risk from institutions to individuals which is sort of and the triggering mechanism that is financial deregulation Gramleach-Blally for instance and we see it in things like the payday lending so payday lending it gets proliferated in part because of financial deregulation and then we had it targeting basically the working class and so financial deregulation plays again a major role in this and the economic inequality and the problems that consumers have and that's in part there's one of the things I would have sort of like to see sort of a bit more explored in your text you do a fantastic job explicating the asset side of the ledger but the ways in which equity gets stripped out of America Philadelphia is a great example the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 when it gets passed there's a series of presidential commissions across the country and one of the places they stop is actually in Philadelphia and they have this North Philadelphia minister who sits down and says basically there's a bank which operates in a North Philadelphia community of Kinsey I believe and he says that this bank operates here and it takes all these deposits from these local poor people but they've not made a single mortgage loan and so this process of equity stripping removing wealth from one space and transferring it to another again is a major structural problem that the official regulation has sort of exacerbated also if we see debt drying up and getting harder to access people will have a harder time almost accessing the goods of the prosperous society there's a lot of I think uncertainty of how those dynamics will unfold let's go here and then in the front excuse me I have a cold I'm pretty clear my name is Myron Dow I live here in DC and I wanted to fill up on the last comment and you had you talked about the dynamics that are in play that would minimize any kind of burning of the cities in this country I would like you to speak to kind of the dynamics of the black political class and how it's managing marginalization as well as the white political class and how it manages marginalization I guess my thing is I don't think that there's enough discussion around white poverty in this country yes it's invisible it's going back to Harrington's book The Other America I mean it's a large kind of non you don't see this white poverty in this country and it far outpopulates black poverty in this country and the numbers that just came out I think a couple weeks ago where 47% of the population is either at the poverty line or just above it there's a lot more people in that number so the distinction between some of the white marginalization and black marginalization yes and how the political classes are managing that marginalization differently and to give you a quick example and I want to take up too much time this whole discussion that Colonel West has taken up about him and Tavis Smiley and their kind of discussion on this poverty tour it's interesting what's playing out in the African-American community you have these powerful radio stations that are Tom Joyner and the other gentleman the former comedian who now has his own station as well here they are criticizing Colonel West for challenging the president on poverty and they willed an enormous amount of power and no one has called them out for it as a matter of fact Steve Harvey called Colonel West and Uncle Tom because he challenged the president on not addressing poverty in the African-American community that's absurd and no one's taking these guys to task and they have built enormous power a power base within the African-American community and they carry a large voice and there's undercurrents and chatter in the African-American community about Colonel West being crazy I mean you can't make this stuff up it's really fascinating the dynamics and these are this is coming from that black political class I received some of the emails and I have to push back and this is absurd thank you I'll stop here that's fascinating I mean you know I don't you know I'm not really in touch with with what you're talking about and I'd like to know a whole lot more I'd like to know a whole lot more about it it's obviously very very important but clearly you know there's a lot going on there's a lot going on here you know and I guess understandable reluctance on the part of African-Americans to make Obama look bad in any way you know you can understand that even when it's not helpful you know and people who you know who are comfortable in positions that they have and have their own power bases and want to maintain them this has always been a very you know black urban politics has always been a very very complicated story you know with local alderman kind of negotiating between constituencies and yet having to try to hold their place and position within larger white political structures you know the white poverty is really really interesting and really important I think what would be and you know what you know a really fine fine piece of research would be to look at this spatially to look at you know where you know the kind of concentrations of white poverty and black poverty I think you'd probably find very different patterns you'd find some concentrations of white poverty remaining in central cities but you find a lot in rural areas you'd find it growing particularly in suburbs where we know that poverty rates have really have really gone up so I think it would be my guess is that it is a much less concentrated phenomenon I'll speak anecdotally for as a white person I'm also working as a I'm also working on a documentary film and land of the feasts same title and we've had the most difficult time trying to find interviews with white men because it's about debt particularly about student loan debt and payday lending debt issues of debt because I think there's a badge of shame which goes along with a cultural shame which goes on with issues of debt that might operate in a function particularly with white men in ways entirely different than psychologically but then with women or with people of color, African-Americans in particular and so as we try to do these interviews we've had the most difficult time again nailing down white men to interview about the ways in which because of student loan debt they can't pay their mortgage or can't pay their bills that's just speaking anecdotally one of these sentences pardon we I mean honestly go there Des Moines, Iowa is not a suburb, it's a city Minneapolis is a city, St. Paul is a city I mean seriously I did my Ph.D. work at the University of Minnesota and it was eye-opening for me in the front row here this gentleman and I think this will be our final question so thank you for joining us my name is Lincoln Day I'm a retired demographer I haven't heard anything said so far about the possible significance of the changes in the geographic structure of American cities in my lifetime I've watched how the interstate highway system has ripped the guts out of almost all of the major cities in the United States in many of the small towns has destroyed farm lands farm areas, recreational areas near cities and at the same time put people into a position where they tend to go to work in far larger numbers far larger proportions than ever before in their own cars just taking account I suggest you do this just count the number of cars that have more than one person in them during peak hours and my experience is that virtually never is it more than one out of five and in most cases probably not more than one out of ten and what this is doing seems to me among other things is destroying opportunities, local opportunities for people to get to know one another in the same boat to understand people who are going to a different kind of church or different kind of school different jobs living different places there's a separation but it's a separation that's not into small groups really but it's separation into individuals who aren't in anything else Professor Katz has thought about some of these issues so that's a great point you're absolutely right and I deal with it more in the book than I had time to do in this presentation but you're 100% right great I want to thank you both for joining us today if you have additional questions maybe you can come up and flag them afterwards but thank you for joining us and have a nice day thank you