SUGRUE'S WORK

Sugrue's work

Sugrue's work

Introduction

Perhaps the most fashionable argument for the persistence of urban poverty is the "culture of poverty," a thesis associated with the neoconservatives' emphasis on "values." The breakdown of the family, the concentration of the poor, and the absence of good role models are cited as principal causes of poverty. Looking at many inner-city neighborhoods today, one can find at least superficial evidence to support this contention.

For those people involved in the struggle for social and racial justice, Thomas Sugrue has written a fascinating and very depressing book. Sugrue's work demonstrates the deep seated pervasiveness of racial animosity in this country, and how race discrimination and inequality are intimately linked to the problems confronting urban America. His work also suggests how the power of racism not only exacerbates urban problems, but also functions to thwart possible solutions.

Discussion

According to the author post-war Detroit in many ways exemplified both the possibilities and shortcomings of the golden age of American capitalism. It was a city of homeowners and well-paid industrial workers. Detroit's workers had won the rights of union recognition, collective bargaining, and model benefit packages.

Employed autoworkers and those who depended upon the auto industry were able to take advantage of government loans to buy homes and cars and settle into a life of hard work but decent rewards. Sugrue shows us that below this surface of prosperity and comfort Detroit was a troubled city throughout the post-war period. Detroit's troubles were rooted in two areas, and not having successfully come to grips with either area, as the post-war period matured the problems rooted in these two areas festered and finally exploded upon the metropolitan landscape(Sugrue, 2005).

Until the war, most blacks living in Detroit had been confined to domestic, hotel, restaurant, and maintenance work. Wartime labor shortages resulted in the auto industry opening new jobs to minorities. Yet even amidst the wartime boom, blacks were generally given the dirtiest and most dangerous industrial jobs. After the vast social changes brought about by the war, the industry continued to discriminate. Both management and the unions left hiring largely to the discretion of individual plant managers, and many factories were essentially white bastions. By the late forties and early fifties, blacks were most heavily represented in the least desirable as well as most dangerous jobs and had almost no presence in the skilled trades.

According to Neckerman (2007) one of the central problems, which Detroiters were never able to solve, was the problem of continued racial animosity which expressed itself in discriminatory hiring and in housing segregation(Neckerman, 2007). Hiring discrimination forced African-Americans into not only the hardest, dirtiest, and lowest paid jobs, but also left them most susceptible to lay offs and job insecurity.

The resulting job inequality was not simply the effect of overt racism by employers, but was a consequence of multiple factors such as patterns of hiring from particular neighborhoods or from informal referrals from those already employed, which favored white hirees, fear of the response of other ...