Lack of opportunity is no accident

Cycle of poverty in cities dates back generations

The Katherine Brennan/Clarence Rogers and Worthington Hooker Schools are two K-8 institutions in New Haven. According to SchoolDigger, a website that uses test scores, crime statistics, enrollment data and real estate information, in 2018, the Brennan/Rogers School ranked 503 out of 532 schools in the state of Connecticut for test performance. That same year, the Worthington Hooker school ranked 93.

On the surface, this just seems like a sad and simple case of disparity between two schools. However, these numbers become much more sinister when you discover that almost 75 percent of the students at the Brennan/Rogers School are black while half of the students at the Worthington Hooker School are white. Furthermore, the Brennan/Rogers school sits north of Springside Farm near Hamden Plains, surrounded by lower-income communities. The Worthington Hooker School, only block from Hubbard Park, sits adjacent to some communities of the highest caliber in the city.

If history has anything to teach us, it’s that nothing happens by accident. We built these schools and we dictated the opportunity — or lack thereof — for their students. There is a history of policies that have lead to the disenfranchisement of millions of people of color in the United States, and hundreds of thousands here in Connecticut. This disenfranchisement has helped create the low-income neighborhoods like the ones that surround Katherine Brennan/Clarence Rogers.

According to author Richard Rothstein, author of “The Color of Law,” the Fair Housing Administration began redlining neighborhoods in order to maintain “social harmony or balance in the whole community.” Redlining is the practice of denying home loans to certain people depending on where they live. The term refers to the red line that was drawn around particular areas of a map to show where financial institutions such as banks should not invest their money. These areas were redlined based on the “widespread assumptions about the profitability of racial segregation and the residential incompatibility of certain racial and ethnic groups,” according to Mapping Inequality, an interactive study on redlining throughout the country created by the University of Richmond.

The racial makeup of neighborhoods worked on a scale. Neighborhoods marked green were judged the best (and often, the whitest) communities. Red was the worst — and generally, the more diverse. Between the two colors were blue, where banks could be reasonably assured — in the eyes of the government — of seeing a return on their investments, and yellow, which meant that the odds of lending opportunities would be slimmer.

Over time, the process of governmentbacked redlining allowed segregation to persist long after the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. As people of color were rejected from mortgage bankers, some became trapped in urban areas, which were seeing opportunities dry up as factories and other manufacturing concerns moved away or to more suburban areas. With this came fewer opportunities to earn income that would support access to quality education and basics such as health care.

Rothstein says that “racial segregation will persist until more African Americans improve their educations and then are able to earn enough to move out of high-poverty areas.” Access to education is the main reason for the majority of Americans to obtain a livable income. Economist Mikael Lindahl say that “much micro-econometric evidence suggests that education is an important causal determinant of income for individuals within countries.” And so begins the cycle of poverty that can go on for generations.

In order to stop the cycle of poverty created by redlining, we can create government subsidies in order to create better affordable housing. We could reallocate funds from our defense budget and put that money into creating better public schools. We can start funding the Green New Deal that would create jobs and sustainable initiatives that would help the United States economically as well as provide a future for our children and our planet. We can finally hold the rich accountable for the destruction of the middle class through shady corporate tax cuts and lobbying. All we need to do is work together, educate ourselves and hold the real criminals accountable: the U.S. government. It’s possible.