Moreover, rampant street crime and violence attends this economy, becoming ever more prevalent and at times purely random.
The result of all this is that a great many inner-city black Philadelphia neighborhoods are experiencing a lost sense of security. As neighborhood resources decline, as residents become ever poorer, the social breakdown spreads. Among the most desperate people, competition for available resources increases, and the drug culture becomes more pervasive. In these circumstances, the police, when summoned, may not respond, and they often tolerate obvious drug dealing and disrespect for the law, thus encouraging cynicism by many black residents toward both the police and the criminal justice system. Such feelings are consistent with the general belief that the police are indifferent toward crime in the black community, for black residents “know” that such blatant violations of the law would not be tolerated for a minute in the white neighborhoods of the city.
Given their heightened concerns with crime and public danger and their lack of faith in the police, many residents take personal responsibility for their safety, at times arming themselves. This reality has given rise to a “code of the streets,” observed by numerous inner-city black people, “street-oriented” or “decent.”35 As indicated above, living in such circumstances brings one in contact with potential danger on a daily basis, and living by the “code” is a cultural adaptation to this reality. As poverty becomes ever more widespread in the inner city, the social ills of drug trafficking, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancy, and violence all become more acute.
Although DuBois identified many similar social ills, he associated them mainly with “the submerged tenth” and the “working poor.”36 Today these problems are much more deeply entrenched in the inner-city black community because of the way major economic changes are affecting that community, but also because of the social impact of a legacy of racial discrimination—identified by DuBois so long ago. As these problems worsen, black and white middle-class people flee to the suburbs. There we witness the emergence of “satellite cities,” with their vast industrial parks, that compete effectively with Philadelphia, drawing residents and more jobs, undermining the city's tax base, and creating a “spatial mismatch” between available jobs and black workers, who remain concentrated in the inner city37 The situation has contributed to a decline in city services that directly affects the quality of life in inner-city neighborhoods, thus increasing the undesirability of the city.
Much of what has happened to the Philadelphia Negro is largely a result of the interaction of racism and market forces. It might be said that the youthful DuBois's greatest failing in The Philadelphia Negro was in not having appreciated how wedded the capitalist enterprise was and is to exploiting market forces to their fullest without regard for human casualties. Although DuBois approaches this conclusion as he proceeds with the study, he does not fully pursue it. DuBois seems imbued with the idea of benevolent authority and convinced that the capitalists wanted to do right by their workers while at the same time, of course, exploiting their labor; he felt that was the only rational course of action, and he was certain the capitalist was rational.38 Before doing the study, his only explanation of the capitalists’ behavior—their failure to use black labor—was that they were ignorant. They needed a new way to think about race, and his purpose was to enlighten them and thus provide increased economic opportunities for the black population of Philadelphia. Over time, however, DuBois came to realize that the capitalists’ problem was not so much ignorance, but rather unbridled self-interest within the context of white supremacy. The capitalists were in fact benefiting from the competition between immigrants and blacks; the resulting tensions kept the workers divided and their wages down. Eventually he concluded that the “better class” of whites had no real interest in improving the lives of blacks when doing so might impose a hardship on themselves.
Strikingly, these themes are still applicable to the task of understanding the plight of the Philadelphia Negro of today. Presently, the business and industrial elite appear even less directly involved with the local community, and in fact might often be fairly described as itinerant. Increasingly, they possess a national, even a global, orientation, moving from city to city, from country to country. The benevolence of the individual, personally known capitalist was always held suspect, but this proposition is even more questionable today, in the era of impersonal, global capitalism, than it was in DuBois's time.
Nearly a hundred years have passed since W.E.B. DuBois wrote The Philadelphia Negro. Have his insights contributed to the amelioration of the conditions he studied? Is the African-American of today, in Philadelphia or anywhere in the United States, free of the forces DuBois chronicled? Despite undeniable progress, the answer must be no. By considering the status of blacks then and now, the entrenched nature of the forces of both white racism and black victimization can be seen in even sharper relief than was visible to DuBois.39 DuBois's keen observations should make it clear to all that much additional effort will be needed before our society approaches real equality of opportunity or the rational benevolence envisioned by this eloquent, humane, and seminal thinker.
Acknowledgments
The inspiration for this essay grew from the experience of “team teaching” a survey course on the work of W.E.B. DuBois with Arnold Feldman and James Pitts when I was a graduate student at Northwestern University. I would like to acknowledge as well the helpful comments of James Kurth, Antonio McDaniel, Michael Katz, Thomas Sugrue, Nancy Anderson, and Victor Lidz, and the able research assistance of Christine Szczepanowski.
SEVENTH WARD
[Taken Jrom publications of the American Academy, No. 150, July 2, 1895. The large figures refer to voting precincts.]
1. See DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Schocken, 1968; originally published 1940); and David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993).
2. Ibid.
3. See Dusk of Dawn, pp. 30-32; and The Souls of Black Folk, reprinted in W.E.B. DuBois: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986), Chapter 4, pp. 405-10.
4. See Dusk of Dawn, pp. 35-45.
5. Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois, pp. 188-89.
6. Dusk of Dawn, pp. 58-59.
7. See Robert E. L. Faris, Chicago Sociology: 1920-1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); James F. Short, ed., The Social Fabric of the Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).
8. Booth, Life and Labor of the People of London, 9 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1882-97).
9. Addams, Hull House Maps and Papers, by Residents of Hull House, a Social Settlement. A presentation of Nationalities and wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of Social Conditions (Boston: Crow-ell, 1895); Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1910).
10. The Philadelphia Negro, 1996 edition, pp. 119–21. All page references below are to this current edition.
11. See Roger Lane, William Dorsey's Philadelphia and Ours: On the Past of the Black City in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 231-52.
12. The Philadelphia Negro, pp. 136-46.
