Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities

“What are the benefits to living in a Black-majority city?” and, “Why do so many of us choose to stay in them?”

Adding insult to injury, we’re professionally trained and rewarded to make White people the default referent group that Blacks are measured against. In doing so, we acquire a tendency to center White people in our work.

Regression models are mathematically most stable if the referent group is the largest within the sample you are drawing from. For that reason, in the United States, data sources that make note of racial categories are generally presented sequentially, with “White,” the largest single racial group, listed first.

Moynihan Report,

First popularized in the 1960s by anthropologist Oscar Lewis, culture of poverty theories argued that low-income people share inherent characteristics and values that keep them impoverished.

is good about Black families? Where are the assets of Black communities?

Privileged eyes constantly remove their gaze from root causes of social and economic despair to myopically perceive positive family adaptations as dysfunction or as causing poverty.

Culture of poverty theories manifest themselves in a seemingly constant focus on how Black folk aren’t living up to White norms instead of probing how to dismantle systems that privilege White people at Black people’s expense.

She, like many Black immigrants, feels the collateral damage of negative expectations, stereotypes, and assumptions she didn’t grow up with but now has to live with in her adopted country. The expectations of Blacks in America spill over onto those who haven’t been reared in our context.