The Inner City: Urban Poverty and Economic Development in the Next Century

National Review, Dec 22, 1997 by John J. DiIulio

A DIFFERENT model of what it will take for inner-city blacks to move ahead is contained in a volume edited by Thomas D. Boston and Catherine L. Ross, The Inner City: Urban Poverty and Economic Development in the Next Century. Its more than twenty contributors, including accomplished academics and community activists, each responded to aspects of the seminal May - June 1995 Harvard Business Review article by Harvard business professor Michael Porter, "The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City."

Porter had argued that most anti-poverty programs "have treated the inner city as an island isolated from the surrounding economy and subject to its own unique laws of competition . . . Instead, an economic model must begin with the premise that inner-city businesses should be profitable and positioned to compete on a regional, national, and even international scale." As the editors of The Inner City summarize Porter's argument, among the comparative advantages of inner-city areas are "their strategic location, unmet local demand, capacity to become integrated into regional clusters, and human resources." While most of the contributors disagree with some of Porter's assertions, they take his market-oriented arguments quite seriously.

So do growing numbers of the country's profit-seeking entrepreneurs. The October 1997 issue of American Demographics featured an article entitled "City Lights Beckon to Business." As the article noted, several major retailers are now making moves "into American urban communities -- from downtown locations to inner-city neighborhoods."

AS THE Thernstroms argue, while many blacks perceive whites as either wittingly or innocently unfair, the best scientific evidence suggests that most whites strongly believe in the ideal of racial equality, and that the good will many whites express for blacks is real and runs deep. On this and related points about black - white relations, the Thernstroms are especially fond of the work of Stanford political scientist Paul M. Sniderman.

Sniderman's latest book, with Edward G. Carmines, is Reaching beyond Race, which analyzes new data from detailed public-opinion interviews, including so-called "Excuse Experiments." In these experiments, "a randomly selected set of white interviewees who say they think well of blacks are deliberately given a socially acceptable excuse to make a negative judgment of blacks, precisely in order to see if they take advantage of it." Sniderman and Carmines conclude that whites should be taken at their unprejudiced word: "In analysis after analysis they give the same weight to damaging information applied to blacks as to whites, no more, no less . . . Whites who consistently profess good will toward blacks mean what they say."

I too value Sniderman's research. But I am not at all persuaded that his work is relevant to black perceptions of white unfairness. For one thing, not all whites "consistently profess good will toward blacks." Furthermore, in matters of the heart, head, and other anatomical parts, human beings have been known to consistently profess (and genuinely feel) one thing (love of wife, love of country) but do another (conduct extramarital affairs, dodge the draft).