Review of Race, Neighborhoods and Community Power:
Buffalo Politics,1934-1997, by Neil Kraus
by Aaron Bartley
Race, Neighborhoods and Community Power, a recent study by political scientist Neil Kraus, chronicles fifty years of racist public policy in Buffalo from the New Deal era to the present. In interpreting this regrettable history, Kraus highlights municipal decisions that deepened segregation in public housing and schools as the primary cause of urban poverty. This thesis sets him apart from leading scholars, including William Julius Wilson, who explain persistent postindustrial poverty by highlighting the devastation wrought by corporate abandonment and other structural economic trends.
Outside the academe, debates about whether corporate abandonment played a larger part than racism in impoverishing manufacturing cities, or vice versa, seem somewhat beside the point. Clearly, corporate production decisions and racial hierarchies both had devastating effects on Buffalo; arguments that elevate one factor, such as segregation, over all others teeter on the brink of reductionism.
But the academic discipline of urban politics revolves around esoteric distinctions between seemingly compatible theories. Currently, the battle lines are drawn between scholars who emphasize the detrimental impact of plant closings and those who focus on other agents of change, such as racist public policy. Kraus enters this fray on the side of his thesis advisor Nancy Denton, a professor at SUNY-Albany, who initiated the turn towards deeper consideration of segregation’s long-term effects.
Kraus’ basic argument is solid. The maldistribution of political power in the post-war years of urban renewal—a time when Buffalo built nearly a dozen massive housing projects, several public schools and a destructive inner-city highway system–further isolated an already disempowered African-American community. Through racial segregation of public institutions, especially housing projects, the mostly-white political elite of the post-WW II era imposed discriminatory policies that reinforced existing social divisions. The implementation of racist policies by the political class fomented racial fear and isolation, which in turn precipitated mass suburbanization in the 1950s and 1960s. Kraus connects the renewal-era political exclusion of African-Americans with Buffalo’s contemporary predicament, in which racial fear and discrimination remain central agents of regional decline.
The popular discourse on urban poverty is appallingly deficient in historical understanding and could certainly benefit from Kraus’ careful documentation of state-sponsored racism. His book contributes to an essential literature highlighting the enduring significance of race. This body of work powerfully refutes neo-conservatives like Harvard historian Stephen Thernstrom, who popularizes the preposterous notion that racial oppression is passé and should be omitted from considerations of urban development and empowerment. The daily realities of race-based brutality—including the incarceration boom, the crumbling urban education system and abandoned neighborhoods—as well as the role race plays in heightening structural trends like suburbanization give credence to Kraus’ call for deeper consideration of the American apartheid regime.
While Kraus’ core argument about the salience of race in the urban context is important, the narrow focus of his analysis is limiting. Rather than constructing a holistic model of Buffalo’s power structure—which would include the multiple hierarchies built on race, class and corporate economic control—that have shaped the city in recent decades, Kraus responds to the particular claims of scholars who emphasize the structural economic roots of decline. In distinguishing his work from left-wing structural perspectives and so-called "regime theorists," who focus on the behavior of local elites, Kraus fails to consider how a study of class structure could add depth to his discussion of segregation. Race and class oppression are intertwined throughout Buffalo’s history. At times, Kraus treats them as distinct and intellectually incompatible.
Kraus’ inchoate discussion of Buffalo’s cataclysmic industrial decline—which cost the region nearly 200,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs— ultimately undercuts his sophisticated discussion of segregation. His argument rests on the unwarranted assumption that because Buffalo’s industrial working class was largely white through much of the city’s history, plant closings had a limited effect on the city’s African-American population. For example, Kraus writes, "To maintain that residents of the ghetto are in a difficult, sometimes desperate, economic predicament is not the same as arguing that the economic transformation of the city and the region was the primary cause of that predicament. In sum, since blacks were prevented from enjoying the benefits of western New York’s industrial prosperity, a focus on the economic transformation of Buffalo as the main cause of the geographic concentration of poverty is misplaced."
This passage is problematic for several reasons. While Kraus is right to stress racial discrimination in industrial labor markets, countless social and economic historians have shown that African-Americans, as the least senior class of industrial workers, suffered mightily from the loss of manufacturing jobs. In addition to direct economic effects, plant closings heightened tensions between white and black workers. As opportunity disappeared, reactionary white working-class attitudes combined with public and private racist policies to accelerate white flight to the suburbs. Kraus fails to appreciate how economic change interacted with existing patterns of residential segregation to isolate Buffalo’s black population.
Furthermore, Kraus’ search for the "primary cause" of a phenomenon as complex as the postindustrial ghetto is bound to fail. Urban poverty is an expression of an ongoing social process built on a matrix of power relations, not the result of a distinct and easily identifiable set of "causes." Rather than concentrating on ranking the causes of poverty in order of importance, Kraus would do better to appreciate how segregation interacted dialectically with other forms of racism and industrial decline to intensify the urban crisis.
A more robust historical analysis of Buffalo’s urban crisis would consider how elites in both the public and private sectors exploited racial prejudices to reduce the economic power of all working people in the Buffalo region. Such a study could provide valuable historical insight on how best to reclaim our local economy from absentee corporations, local developers, reactionary race-baiters and political opportunists.