The Dilemma of the Black Middle Class

The following is an excerpt from The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class are Undermining the American Dream, by Sheryll Cashin, 2004. Reprinted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Book Group.

Black families of a certain means face a dilemma when entering the housing market. They, like all Americans, desire superior environments in which to live, work, play, and raise their children; their dream is the American dream. They want equal access to all of the resources society has to offer, but they are frequently forced to choose between two types of communities. They can live in a black enclave that comes with some costs but provides a spirit-reviving balm against the stress of living as a black person in America. Alternatively, they can join a community that offers a wealth of opportunities and benefits but where they would be vastly outnumbered by whites, a kind of integration they may not want.

Painfully, I have come to the conclusion that external prejudice against black neighborhoods makes it virtually impossible for members of the black middle class to form havens of their own that approximate the economic or opportunity benefits of a white enclave. Black communities, even affluent ones, bear burdens and costs that predominately white ones do not. Most of these costs can be tied either to race-laden decisions on the part of whites and predominately white institutions to avoid black communities or to the propensity (in part fueled by discriminatory attitudes) of black communities to attract low-income people. Waves of black suburbanization have been fueled by the desire to escape the social distress of “the ‘hood,” including its crime and weak schools. But within the space of a decade, most black suburban movers will find that the social distress they sought to escape has migrated to them.

Therefore, integration or living in an integrated community are practically the only routes black people have to escaping concentrated black poverty. Try as they might, members of the black middle class cannot completely escape their lower-income brethren unless they move into predominately white communities. It is a cruel truth. The black middle class carries much of society’s load regarding concentrated black poverty. This group usually provides the buffer from ghettoes for the rest of society. The (racist) rules of the housing market are set against it

In a nutshell, the rules operate as follows: blacks form enclaves by preference and because they are steered to the least controversial areas--those whites deem undesirable--by a discriminatory real estate industry. These enclaves usually lie in the opposite direction from the centers of highest economic growth. In the booming 1990s, Prince George’s County was situated (and still is) directly opposite the “white hot” technical juggernaut of Northern Virginia. In the Atlanta region, blacks suburbanized mostly south- and eastward, while the fastest job growth has been in the suburbs due north, especially near the Perimeter Center. This pattern is repeated virtually everywhere black people are suburbanizing in large numbers. When migrating blacks reach a critical mass, whites flee, and demand in the local housing market falls, causing poorer blacks to move in behind middle-class blacks. Within a period as short as a decade, the black middle class finds itself once again in close proximity to social distress and often moves again, even farther from the centers of economic growth. Meanwhile commercial and retail investors shun these emerging black enclaves since the social distress they attract increases crime, often lowers property values, raises taxes, and reduces school quality as the student population rapidly becomes impoverished.

Black separatism, even of the affluent black kind, then, comes with palpable costs. When a white person chooses to move to a middle-class suburban enclave of “her kind of people,” she makes this choice, perhaps unconsciously, with certain expectations and assumptions that society tends to live up to--assumptions that a black middle-class suburbanite, living in a similar haven of “one’s own,” cannot make, at least not confidently. Among those assumptions:

1. I can escape neighborhoods of poverty, particularly black ones.

2. My children will be able to attend good public schools. They will be prepared, maybe even well prepared, for college.

3. My neighborhood will be free from crime.

4. My property taxes will be manageable, and I will receive better government services at lower cost than I would in the city.

5. I will be able to shop and buy all the things I want and need, at stores located near where I live. I will have a nice range of options for eating out near where I live.

I could extend this list of implicit assumptions about the benefits of suburban life; these are just the main ones. As I show below, these assumptions do not appear to be true for the middle-class and even affluent black people of Prince George’s County. If this county, with its relatively affluent middle-class population base, cannot transcend the racial biases set against it, if it cannot approximate the American suburban dream for its residents, then I do not see how any other black community could.

In clarifying the costs of the separation for middle-class black suburbanites, I do not mean to denigrate majority-black communities. For some residents, the soul-regenerating benefits of a black enclave will be worth the costs. My point is simply that there are pronounced costs associated with this choice and that, unfortunately for African Americans, it appears that the suburban ideal will elude them if they wish to pursue a separatist vision. I make my case below primarily by debunking the common assumptions about suburban middle-class life, showing that they do not hold in Prince George’s County.

1. I can escape neighborhoods of poverty, particularly black ones.

Much to the chagrin of Prince George’s County leaders, waves of low-income black people have been migrating to the county from the District of Columbia. This kind of poverty influx did not happen in the majority-white suburban counties surrounding the District. Twenty-nine of the thirty-three suburban communities in the D.C. metropolitan area that have been categorized as “at-risk” because of “present and growing social needs” are in Prince George’s County. Prince George’s and the District itself carry a higher poverty burden than their predominately white neighbors. In the 1990s, 15 percent of the metro region’s welfare recipients lived in Prince George’s, while other surrounding suburbs were home to less than 5 percent of this population. Not surprisingly, the whiter and more affluent communities have the least poverty burden. While I am not advocating class exclusion, my point is that, to the extent that escaping poverty and attendant social distress is an aspiration of suburban movers, this aspiration eludes the black middle class.

2. My children will be able to attend good public schools. They will be prepared, maybe even well prepared, for college. 

The Prince George’s County school district consistently ranks 2nd worst in the state of Maryland on test scores after Baltimore, a predominately black and heavily poor city. In the D.C. metropolitan area, the Prince George’s County school system ranked last on the 2002 Washington Post Challenge Index, which measures public high schools’ efforts to challenge its students based upon the percentage of students who take advanced placement and International Baccalaureate courses. Falls Church, an overwhelmingly white, affluent community in Northern Virginia at the opposite pole of the D.C. metropolitan universe, ranked 1st. Of the 155 high schools evaluated for this ranking, the first Prince George’s school to appear on the list was Eleanor Roosevelt, a magnet high school, which ranked 60th. In that year, only 67 percent of the seniors at Roosevelt attended a four-year college, according to the latest reported data. Of the first ten Prince George’s high schools to appear on the Challenge Index ranking, only one other, Central High, had more than half of its seniors go on to a four-year college.

There are at least two factors contributing to the problems with Prince George’s schools. First, the county is hampered by a property tax cap, approved by citizen referendum, that limits school spending--an additional fiscal constraint that other suburban school districts do not have to contend with. When County Executive Wayne Curry vigorously campaigned for the repeal of the tax cap in the fall of 1996, voters rebuffed him. Why, you might ask, would a majority-black county reject a repeal of a tax cap that would benefit majority-black schools? One possible explanation is that the people most likely to go to the polls--whites and affluent blacks--were least likely to have their kids in public school.

Another potential explanation for the difference in school performance between Prince George’s schools and their suburban counterparts is that there is a substantial difference in the numbers of poor children in these schools. School performance is closely tied to the family income of the student population. Indeed, the socioeconomic background of the students attending a school is probably the best predictor of the school’s success. By the late ‘90s, more than half of Prince George’s public school students qualified for free or reduced-price lunches, indicating that many prosperous families in the county no longer sent their kids to the public schools. By comparison, only about ten percent of the students in the Northern Virginia school districts of Falls Church and Loudon County--both on the opposite pole of the metropolitan region--qualified for free or reduced lunch. Still, Prince George’s boasts a number of predominately black, predominately middle-class schools, like Laurel, Surrattsville, Suitland, and Friendly high schools, that are decidedly underachieving: fewer than half of the seniors at these schools went on to attend four-year colleges in recent years. Whether underachievement stems from an influx of poor children, a failure of the black middle class to cultivate a culture of achievement, or some other source, the end result is that many middle-class black parents who have opted to live in a “black sanctuary” are paying a premium for their separatism in the form of private school tuition. Meanwhile, their white counterparts in affluent white suburbs have the option of relying on high-quality, well-funded public schools that typically have few poor children and a host of engaged parents.

3. My neighborhood will be free from crime.

Prince George’s crime rate is higher and its citizens are more imperiled than those of other suburban counties in the region. Even the District saw improvements in crime during the 1990s that Prince George’s did not enjoy, perhaps because the District was exporting poor people to the county. Crime within D.C. dropped significantly in the 1990s, while it rose slightly in Prince George’s. Although the total increase in crime in the county was marginal, the inner-Beltway communities experienced a crime explosion disproportionate to their population growth. Places like Berwyn Heights, a majority-white community of under 3,000 residents, grew by only 8 percent in population but saw crime rise 82 percent between 1990 and 1998. During the same period, the District of Columbia neighborhoods bordering inner-Beltway Prince George’s communities experienced a sharp decrease in both crime and population. In fact, most of the communities with the highest crime rates in the entire D.C. metro region were all located inside the Beltway, in Prince George’s County.

4. My property taxes will be managable, and I will receive better government services at lower cost than I would in the city.

Black communities tend to carry higher social service burdens than predominately white ones because of their tendency to attract lower-income people. Majority-black areas like Prince George’s also tend to be discriminated against in the market for commercial investment and economic growth. As a result, black communities tend to have higher taxes and services that are less responsive to the demands and aspirations of the black elite. Isolation from high-growth economic corridors also means that residents of majority-black communities face longer commutes. The affluent bastions of Prince George’s are outside the beltway to the south and east of the District of Columbia. They could not be farther away from most of the areas of highest economic growth in the metro region: Tyson’s Corner, the I-66 Corridor, and the Dulles and Herndon areas in Northern Virginia, and Bethesda, Maryland, all of which are north and west of the District.

As a result of such trends, residents of black/multiethnic suburbs pay tax rates that are, on average, about 65 percent higher than those of white suburbs, even after differences in affluence are taken into account. And black/multiethnic suburbs spend more on redistributive services than any other type of suburb, independent of levels of wealth. Prince Georgians’ property tax rates ($.962 per $100 of assessed value) are considerably higher than neighboring Montgomery County ($.754 per $100 of value), yet Montgomery County spends more per pupil on public education than does Prince George’s County. Montgomery County, having higher valued--read: whiter--residential properties and a stronger commercial base, can generate more revenues for the services its citizens demand. Overall, black suburbanites tend to reside in suburban communities characterized by lower property wealth, worse public finances, and poorer prospects for economic growth than suburbs with smaller black populations. As a result, blacks living in majority-black towns tend to receive worse government services than blacks who live elsewhere.

5. I will be able to buy all the things I want and need, at stores located nearwhere I live. I will have a nice range of options for eating out near where I live.

Prince George’s County has a higher median income than neighboring Baltimore County, yet that county has a Nordstrom at its Towson Town Center, while Prince George’s has no Nordstrom, Lord & Taylor, or Neiman Marcus, much less a Macy’s. The Bowie Town Center, a 100-store, open-air mall designed to provide a “Main Street” environment, which opened in late 2001 to much celebration, is anchored by middle-market retailers like Hecht’s, Best Buy, and Sears.

If a Prince George’s resident wants to experience fine dining, she also has to drive some distance outside the county to get it. Unlike in Bethesda, Reston, Tysons, or the District, there is no Palm, no Four Seasons, not even a Houston’s in Prince George’s County. The dearth of eateries, especially at the high end, is such that when the Outback Steakhouse announced plans to open two new restaurants in the county and Starbucks announced plans to open a coffee shop, this was cause for celebration. The County’s official website offers a listing of 66 restaurants located in Prince George’s. A similar listing for Fairfax County offers over 340 eateries. In sum, white suburbanites living in havens of their own can take for granted the simple pleasure of eating out with their families at a nice place in the vicinity that offers some atmosphere and quality cuisine. Prince Georgians cannot.

This underinvestment in Prince George’s highlights a central weakness of racially segregated communities: a concentration of racial minorities--particularly of black people--can and often does lead to a decline in access to and influence of dominant institutional actors that shape markets. This is not an apology for racist or ignorant market actors. It is a statement of fact. I have had colleagues in the academic community react angrily or skeptically when I present facts like these. They would like to explain away these unfair tendencies of markets based upon anything other than race. But I am not alone in pointing out these tendencies. Empirical studies show that commercial disinvestment in majority-black communities, even affluent ones, is commonplace.

Prince George’s County is not unique. The five common assumptions about suburban life do not seem to maintain for most other middle-class black communities. Despite their psychic benefits, there are some difficult issues that need to be addressed in order to make majority-black communities eminently viable, issues that we don’t like to discuss openly. When it comes to where we live, integration may have eluded, failed, or simply been unappealing to many black people. But separation doesn’t seem to be working entirely either.