I admit that a 3 day weekend is a windfall, for whatever reason it comes. It makes my weekend actually relaxing instead of just the days I work really hard at home and church instead of at work. And I don't have to worry about what to do with my children and can just hang out with them, guilt-free.
That being said, I have been thinking about Dr. King's contributions to the world this weekend. Every day now, I find myself working against the segregation that still exists in society. My boss is holding a sort of mini-summit tomorrow about getting serious about eradicating poverty in Syracuse, and we are supposed to come to the table ready to discuss 4 questions
1. Why do we have people in poverty?
2. How do we eliminate poverty in our county?
3. What will it take to get people out of poverty?
4. What do we (our organizations represented at the table) need to do in 2012?
In preparation for that conversation, I found an article I remember Jeff telling me about. (Actually, Jeff had shared with me a conversation with the author after attending her talk, and I had to go find the article it was based on). It is entitled "Living in Each Other's Pockets: The Navigation of Social Distances by the Middle Class Families in Los Angeles" by Alesia Montgomery in 2006 in City and Community. The article reports that when parents (in this article, African American parents on the outer edge of the middle class) are trying to "do better" for their children, they spend a lot of time and money shuttling their children to safer parks and recreational areas and schools with higher test scores. A major difference between families in the "lower class" and the families in the "middle class" is that the activities of children in the middle class are highly orchestrated by their parents, with a lot of the legwork being done by mothers (can I get an Amen, somebody?!)
What ends up happening are 2 significant things. One is that the neighborhood being "left" declines even further. The second, and the one that I think is a sucker punch in the stomach to people in my line of work, is that when those families started attending the whiter, more resourced, higher test score schools,
the families at those schools starting moving further out or sending their kids to even nicer private schools.
The circle of advantage moves further and further out, leaving an even bigger donut hole in the middle.
At my agency, we run a workshop called "Bridges Out of Poverty." It is all about building a way for middle class people and those in poverty to have real conversations and relationships in order to change things for the most disadvantaged families. But, I have said this to my boss before: Does the middle class actually want to build bridges, or do they like protecting the gulf?
So I can cite many theories as to why there are people in poverty in our county. I can propose solutions like employment and real banks and grocery stores in depressed neighborhoods. I can even talk about making communities more viable and getting the middle class interested in the plight of the poor. But how do we actually do that? I know how we can plan to do that, but in the end, we work against what seems to be a universal human tendency to distance ourselves from those less advantaged from us. I say universal because this is as old as serfdom or older. It's as globally present as a caste system in India, severe social class separation in Brazil, and urban sprawl in the United States.
Dr. King's dream is realized in that there are not signs hanging on establishments saying, "For Whites Only" anymore, but I strongly feel that still for some, in Dr. King's words, "basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one."
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