1980-1990: A Deepening Divide
The Labor Divide
West Lexington looking northeast – 310, 308, 304 West Lexington, in the 1980s
Source: The Ghosts of Baltimore
While housing remained structurally aligned against African Americans, unemployment also grew: “The gap in unemployment between African Americans and white increased during the 1970s and 1980s—the same period in which African Americans’ incomes ceased converging with whites” (Bonilla-Silva, 2018, p. 45). For those who were able to find jobs, the gap in wage disparity between white and Black men with similar characteristics (education, training, etc.) was 14 percent in 1980 and had grown to 16 percent in 1985 (p. 45). Further studies have demonstrated that at every educational level whites earn more than Black workers do. Moreover, as Black workers move up the organizational ladder, their pay gap increases when compared to white workers (p. 46).
The Housing Divide
Harlen Park, Baltimore. In the 1990s, of all the Whites who lived in the metro Baltimore area, only 15% lived in Baltimore City.
The 1970s were marked by continued social unrest due to the Vietnam War and to inequities African Americans faced in housing, education, employment, and the judicial system. Lacking the “generational wealth,” asset accumulation related to home ownership made possible by the GI Bill, most African Americans faced an increasing number of obstacles generated and maintained by a white-centered culture (Coates, 2014), or “white racial frame” (Feagin, 2014, p. 63). By the 1980s, failed urban renewal and decades-old public housing set the stage for expanded racist drug laws (“Three Strikes Law”), the crack epidemic, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As a result, by the early 1990s two generations of African American males had been devastated by mass incarceration, HIV/AIDS, or both (Feagin, 2014, p. 160; CDC, 2016).
The social and cultural inequities of the 1980s left African Americans less able to take advantage of America’s economic boom in the mid-1990s and left them even more susceptible to modern-day speculators who flipped dilapidated houses that were bought cheap, fixed cheap, and sold for more than they were worth. Pietila (2010) found that “As a criminal enterprise it [flipping] was…corrosive because quick buck artists gypped buyers but also gave kickbacks to greedy appraisers whose fraudulent paperwork was accepted by corrupt mortgage brokers and sleazy title company officials” (p. 258). Financial damage caused by flipping left African Americans vulnerable to the subprime mortgage scandal perpetrated by Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and other unethical lenders in the early- to mid-2000’s.
The Education Divide
While Brown vs. Board of Education had ostensibly desegregated schools, the segregation existing in residential neighborhoods meant that educational institutions would, on the whole, remain mostly segregated. As reported by Bonilla-Silva (2018), researchers noted “a trend beginning in 1986 toward a resegregation of U.S. schools. As a consequence of resegregation during the decade of the 1990s, U.S. schools were more segregated in the 2000-2001 school year than in 1970” (p. 26).
Baltimore schools, like many schools in segregated cities, lacked what suburban white schools had – money, decent school buildings, equipment (especially up to date technology), textbooks, library books, and resources. Statistically, teachers and administrative staff have been paid less, which combined with the decrepit buildings and lack of political attention to fixing educational inequities, often led to low morale and teacher turn-over. All of these “savage inequalities,” in the words of one educational researcher, have been directly related to lower reading achievements and learning attained by Black students and their limited computer skills (Bonilla-Silva, 2018, p. 26).
The Criminal Justice Divide
Disparity map of Baltimore, 1980-2010.
Source: City Observatory
Until the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, sentence disparity between crack, a concentrated form of cocaine used more by Black urban populations, and powdered cocaine, used more by suburban white populations, was 100:1. That is, defendants convicted of possessing five grams of crack might receive a minimum five-year mandatory sentence while defendants convicted of possessing five hundred grams of powdered cocaine might face the same sentence. Even with the passing of the Fair Sentencing Act, “there is still significant differential punishment for two types of cocaine use” (Feagin, 2014, p. 159). Feagin noted that
There has been only a little change in harsh mandatory sentencing laws in spite of evidence that they are obviously discriminatory…while illegal drug use is roughly as common among white men as among black men, black men are far more likely than white men to be arrested for illegal drug crimes. This is the reason why there are disproportionately large numbers of black men in prisons. (p. 160)
The impact of Nixon’s racist drug war in Baltimore was devastating. In 2010, the editorial board of Baltimore Sun (2012) noted,
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services…found that 9.1 percent of whites and 10.7 percent of blacks had used illegal drugs within the previous month. But even though the differences in drug use between the two groups was statistically small, black Baltimore residents were arrested at more than three and a half times the rate of whites for drug offenses, and the disparities continued through their encounters with the criminal justice system.