I vividly remember being the driver for a bunch of college kids (I was one of them) and getting lost in East Baltimore briefly and having to get on North Avenue to get my bearings. One of the women I was with told everybody to lock their doors and asked me to not stop at red lights. It was broad daylight and the only people about were Grandpas playing chess with each other.

When I've been with the same people driving through poor white neighborhoods, they just say it's a shithole... they don't demand we drive with our heads down.

You oughta get outa Bal'mer once in a while. I bet there's some water-men who could help you complete your education while you scrape barnacles.

It would make your writings of interest to those of us who have gotten out of our ghettos.

See http://www.irp.wisc.edu/

Ahh, but back in the day (as recently as 10 years ago) black folks NEVER walked through Bridgeport (Chicago Mayor Daley's old neighborhood) after sundown. I have a friend who just moved to Bridgeport (after our parents went to college and grad schools worked their asses off to get their families out of the City and into homes in the leafy North Shore suburbs, we kids move right back into the old neighborhoods) and he says that today, in the beginning of the 21st Century, a black man can walk through Bridgeport at night without fear of gettin' whup'd (local thugs, cops, sometimes both) but a lot of the old people, who have longer memories, still high-tail out at sunset.

I think what is worth noting is that the white ethnic enclaves you mention from Baltimore are explicitly ethnic. It is a place where white people still heavily identify with their ethnicity. This doesn't stop them from being white and getting to be racist. But it does give them some other form of identity beside just white, which, to me, rests on racism. They have a distinct culture, heritage, links to ethnic nations. Where whites in the deep south and even assimilated whites in other parts of the country (including yuppies from the North East) are only white. They only have their racial solidarity to rely on as opposed to ethnicity.

I live in Pittsburgh, where we've got plenty of poor folks—black and white. It's like the Balkans here, with a huge variety of neighborhoods separated by our weird Appalachian geography (it's all hills and hollers and rivers). Only one neighborhood is about equally mixed between poor whites, poor blacks, and poor hipsters. The only people who move much beyond a few blocks are the hipsters. But hey, in these parts, we don't even cross rivers very often and we've got three of them.

One thing I've wondered for a while is whether the dominance of hip hop as the pop music genre of our time is going to change racism in the long run. All the kids listen to it, regardless of color and neighborhood. It's a good argument for the necessity of better hip hop!

In my college days, I lived in primarily Latino East Boston because it was the only place I could afford. Can't say I made any friends there, but I never felt unwelcome, or like I was "invading" anyone's turf. If race were the deciding factor, I probably should have lived in Southie, but I can think of few Boston neighborhoods I'd have been less welcome in.

>>>I think a large part of it has to do with the fact that the writers, the media, the think tanks tend to be in places where they are surrounded by poor people and virtually all of them are black.

You hit the nail on the head there.

The media view their white brethren as folks with issues that can be overcome with self-improvement: drug addiction = disease, education = upward mobility, etc. Poor whites do not exist (esp. not on TV or film!), they are only "working class" and "middle class."

However, the media will always portray blacks as organically and pathologically screwed up - basically inferior. They can't get out of the groove of viewing people who are black as the sole face of poverty.

I went there back in July to go the to Game Stop. I was the only white person I saw that afternoon. The girls working at the Game Stop both came over to me with a curious smile multiple times to ask if I was sure I didn't need any help. Fast forward a couple weeks, and I'm making a trip to the new Target that just opened -- there are white people everywhere

Because that is the right-wing/Republican frame for talking about poverty... it (a) gives poor white folks the "ego boost" of thinking they're not at the bottom of the ladder, and (b) predisposes white folks to think of the poor as the "other" rather than to take their needs and situation seriously.

By only talking about poor people who are black, they (we?) make voters think of help for poor people as "help for black people", which makes it much harder to gain political support for such help.

I'm an overeducated African American female who grew up in the Midwest. I lived in an all Black community but went to different schools that gave me some insight into socio-economic matters. I've always been bothered by the fact that Black people are equated with America's notion of poor people. But I understand that because the media centers are on the eastern seaboard and none of the major cities (except Boston) have large enclaves of poor white people living in the city. t

I also think part of the American image is to project the idea (esp. abroad) that all white Americans are middle to upper middle class and Black people are poor.

I went to junior high school with working and poor white people. I realized early on that we were all getting screwed since we were in a crappy school. My white classmates were already talking about dropping out (in the 8th grade). Black classmates weren't as prone to dropping out but dealt with issues like teenage pregnancies. I was determined to make a better life for myself, so I eventually won a scholarship to a local prep school.

I think the powers-to-be have no interest in acknowledging that
white people in American are poor, homeless, drug addicts, drug dealers, teenage mothers, or deadbeat dads, come from dysfunctional communities or families b/c it hurts the idea of whites as the superior race.

FYI- I love your site.

kb- Given the present state of hip-hop, I think that its popularity among white youth is nothing to celebrate. The obsession in mainstream hip-hop with "reality" makes all these dumb white kids who don't know any better think that Young Jeezy and the ilk are telling the whole story about the 'hood. And using the "what about..." argument (...Nas? ...Outkast? ...Roots?) doesn't change anything, because the conscious stuff doesn't get anywhere the cumulative presence of the mainstream.

I think that, often, white people are unique in their ability to ignore their own class of poor, socially dysfunctional folks. They'll breezily talk about the problems of the ghetto or the hood while totally overlooking the danger of the mobile home park.

Often, I find myself very unnerved about assignments that take me deep into enclaves of poor white people. Just in the past two weeks, I've had a guy refer to black as "jigs" and also found myself in the midst of at least a half-dozen people with Confederate flag T-shirts. I'm not quite sure if they mean me harm but the threat is always there, you know? I'd feel much more at home in the urban streets than the mobile home park.

So you're right TNC, because most MSM types work in large urban centers, they have no idea about this class of poor white folks. But the poor black folks are right around the corner and right on their block. Thus, it's easier for them to get much headlines and such.

Similar income levels, similar education levels, similar teen pregnancy rates, similar drug use rates (meth there, heroin here.) And when I probably consider it further, similar gun ownership rates too.

You could put a bunch of people from those two groups in the same room - and with all they have in common - they'd stand on opposite sides and view the "others" with suspicion, and blame the "others" for the problems of the world.

kb- Given the present state of hip-hop, I think that its popularity among white youth is nothing to celebrate. The obsession in mainstream hip-hop with "reality" makes all these dumb white kids who don't know any better think that Young Jeezy and the ilk are telling the whole story about the 'hood. And using the "what about..." argument (...Nas? ...Outkast? ...Roots?) doesn't change anything, because the conscious stuff doesn't get anywhere the cumulative presence of the mainstream.

And equally worthwhile of a discussion is the likeness of poverty-shaped behaviors across racial lines. In this, I wish John Edwards had been able to keep it zipped - he was a powerful voice on the subject of poverty - and he didn't race bait with the subject.

QT

I grew up in Baltimore--I think I'm a couple years older than you (graduated from high school in 1988). But I'm white, and I grew up in the whitest of white neighborhoods, Roland Park. Hampden's nearby, in fact my parents purchased and renovated a rowhouse there (rented mostly to grad students of my father, a JHU prof). Obvious class distinction, readily apparent as soon as you crossed 40th Street on Roland Avenue. I got jacked for my bike by a bunch of thugs from Hampden, in broad daylight on Roland Avenue on a weekend afternoon. Same gang of thugs beat the hell out of my best friend when he was walking home from school, and I'm pretty sure they were responsible for a string of property crimes in the neighborhood at the time.

Also around that time a black family tried to move into Hampden and got the horrible welcome you'd, sadly, expect.

What's interesting is that when I describe my childhood and how crime was much more commonplace in Balto than St. Paul, MN (where I've lived for the last 20 years) people assume that the criminals are black, because of stuff like The Wire and Homicide. I have to explain that there were poor white 'hoods in Baltimore that were probably just as bad as, say, Murphy Homes, and if you were black you definitely did not want to be seen there.

(Not to mention the barely-veiled racism in Roland Park a lot of the time; when we moved away, our neighbor, an old-time resident, asked that we make sure we sold the house to a white Christian.)

The separation, fear, and threat (or acts) of violence across groups keep the city down. If Baltimore is ever going to become a great city, it needs to confront this segregation and discrimination straight on.

Growing up in Boston, which is only 6% black, our biggest pool of thugs was obviously white, although as the poster mentions above, there was an incredibly deeply imprinted identification with the immigrant ethnic experience, eg people saw themselves as Italian or Irish.

The tough Irish poor in the 1980s in particular exhibited many of the characteristics attributed to "dysfunctional" black culture, including suicidal levels of alcoholism and drugs (mostly heroin), tons of kids, being on welfare, dropping out of school.

There were even entire housing projects (like the once notorious Old Colony) that were entirely white poor.

And we produced our very own hierarchy of organized crime (the Bulger mess) who sadly enough, got away with it for years by informing on the Italian mafia to the FBI and telling folks in South Boston and Charlestown they were helping protect them from . . .tha n*gg*hs.

BTW, townies looked down on "rednecks" who they knew primarily from television and counted all poor whites from Worcester down to Florida.

How all this escaped the theorists as Harvard is a good question :-)

I think the cultural image of "trailer-park people" is often to usually about poor white people. I think there's also been a good deal of study of poor white Appalachian poverty. I'm not sure if this is the same as what you're talking about though.

Going by those the image of "poor white people" or "poor white thugs" might be excessively rural. That seems possible.

I'm just saying...