Studying Robert Putnam's _Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis_: Part 3 -- The New(est?) Segregation

Below I offer the third in a series of posts reflecting on my reading of Robert Putnam's 2015 Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. In this and coming posts, I examine Our Kids in digestible chunks, offer critique, and attempt to expound upon connections I see to education and schooling, education reform, and my own experiences.I see this book as central to understanding contemporary exigencies regarding education policy and essential to building and actualizing an egalitarian social justice agenda. 

Part 3; Chapter One: “The American Dream: Myths and Realities” – The New(est?) Segregation

I wonder if America is in segregation denial. So few seem to realize the civil rights battles from the 1950s and 60s did help to desegregate the American South, but many U.S. communities and social institutions across the nation were then and remain now segregated by color or ethnicity. Churches are prime examples. Housing communities too. In the North and elsewhere, communities remain deeply segregated, even more so than in the South, but this fact is one of many regarding sociocultural dividing lines to which Americans seem oblivious or simply don’t want to believe. 

After all, slavery and racism were only constructs of the confederate states, and reconstruction took care of all that, right? Of course not, but when it comes to addressing the realities of seclusion and exclusion, it seems to me Americans either turn the blind eye or don the rose-colored glasses.

Americans need more revealing lenses when it comes
to acknowledging segregation by income. (Not these, though).

In the latter pages of the first chapter in Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,  Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University Robert Putnam reveals more disturbing trends regarding growing opportunity and social mobility gaps. Not only are more affluent families pulling further away from less-fortunate peers in terms of accumulated wealth, but “the ballooning economic gap has been accompanied by growing de facto segregation of Americans along class lines” (37).

Putnam says contemporary exigencies differs from past decades in which social mobility was more equally distributed in that fewer people are exposed to people beyond their own “socioeconomic niche” (37.) Simply put, the well-off are disappearing the rest of us, and it may be that this disappearing continues to happen at whatever other marked class delineations exist. Class segregation is “pervasive,” says Putnam, and housing communities offer evidence to that affect: “More and more families live either in uniformly affluent neighborhoods or in uniformly poor neighborhoods” (38).

Putnam labels this phenomenon “geographic polarization,” though I prefer his other descriptor, “incipient class apartheid” (39).  

Lest one thinks Putnam ignores racial and ethnic segregation while favoring income data, note he offers evidence that “race-based segregation has been slowly declining” while “class-based segregation has been increasing” (38).

What are ramifications of the “incipient class apartheid” linked with my worries about Americans’ foggy vision? If the rich no longer live among the rest of us, and we live only among those in our own income and housing brackets, how do we develop and sustain authentic empathy for those who are less fortunate than ourselves? If the benefits of living with the like-incomed are such that living in a mixed-bracket community actually seem to hurt a well-off family’s networking and ability to sustain their own lifestyle or support their progeny to the best of their ability, why would anyone seek to economically diversify communities?

Similar anxieties permeate Putnam’s thinking too: He worries, for example, that kids from different economic strata are not considered “our kids” anymore, that there is no longer a sense among elders that everyone in a community wants to see all young people, regardless of their economic station, do well and grow their economic progress.

 Stratification seems to perpetuate not even a “You do you; I’ll do me” attitude and necessity, but a “We’ll do us. No one else exists” mentality among the economically empowered which should concern even the most hardcore American capitalist. Not only is “trickle-down” not working; families at the top may be so cut off from realities beyond their own there isn’t even thought given to trickling. Don’t believe me? Try discussing poverty and housing with your peer groups. Note instances of denial and discomfort. Time the conversation to see how long it takes someone to mention that by global standards, Americans in poverty are the envy of the world. For those in poverty, the notion of bootstrapping may seem like a perverse like more than even a fading dream.

Other segregations stem from residential segregation. Putnam examines several:

1.       Schooling segregation: private vs. public
2.       Schooling segregation: public school districts
3.       Schooling segregation: schools within districts
4.       Education segregation: AP enrollment vs. general enrollment
5.       College segregation: Elite vs. less-elite
6.       Marriage endogamy
7.       Social segregation: Friendship networks and other social resource

Affluent kids are more likely to attend good schools and have more choices regarding education; are more likely placed into advanced, college-readying classes; are more likely to attend top-tier universities; are more likely to have two parents who are both well-off; and more likely to benefit from tapping into a vast network of influential and powerful peers and parental peers than are their less-wealthy counterparts.

In both absolute mobility (which Putnam describes as a situation in which "a rising tide lifts all boats")
and relative mobility ("dinghies doing even better than yachts," or the ability of less-privileged folks to surpass the more-privileged and networked) , "American youth now have the worst of both worlds -- low absolute mobility and low relative mobility" (42). Even if a non-affluent somehow gets a dinghy  they may find themselves rowing in a situation like this fellow's.

I worry, since affluent people may see less of those not like themselves regarding these segregations, they may even be less likely to even acknowledge “counterparts” exist.  As a first-generation college student who grew up with family unrest, an economic base teetering at best, and many mitigating stresses when it came to doing well and fully participating in school, I worry especially about the friendship network and social resources gaps between the affluent and the poor. Had it not been for the support mentors and caring individuals outside my own socioeconomic strata, I am sure I would not have survived as well as I did as a conscientious but resource-limited student. I had people – teachers, friends, and parents of friends -- believing in my abilities to overcome. But Putnam suggests that sort of cross-class humanitarianism is at risk. Before delving into chapters on families, parenting, schooling, community, and, finally, suggestions, Putnam sums his book’s findings and concerns:

Ultimately, growing class segregation across neighborhoods, school, marriages (and probably also civic associations, workplaces, and friendship circles) means that rich Americans and poor Americans are living, learning, and raising children in increasingly separate and unequal worlds, removing the stepping-stones to upward mobility – college-going classmates or cousins or middle-class neighbors, who might take a working-class kid from the neighborhood under their wing. Moreover, class segregation means that members of the upper middle class are less likely to have firsthand knowledge of the lives of poor kids and thus are unable even to recognize the growing opportunity gap (41).

When it comes to acknowledging socioeconomic inequality, perhaps rose-colored glasses keep their tint because they disappear all but those in the same economic situation as the wearers. For the affluent, this possibility can screen people from the needs and well-being of the less-fortunate. For the less-fortunate, it reveals the mockery and manipulation of Hope.

Next: A Conceptual Note To Ruin It All?