"Golden" histories, tarnished cities: Contesting the "problems" of poverty and violence in African American urban communities, Baltimore, MD

Low-income African American urban residents are besieged with the challenges of day-to-day survival in an increasingly politically and economically hostile environment. The discourse on the "underclass" and poverty among urban African Americans is cloaked in a "golden history" that suggests current conditions are an aberration and that in the past poverty was somehow more noble. In this "golden history", a primary thesis is the "breakdown" of the family and the "pathology" of female-headed households. Academicians, the media, and politicians model poverty and "the poor" outside of the context of history and capitalist political-economic forces. I suggest the need to describe African American families and communities in the context of on-going segregation practices, "urban renewal" and the construction of large public housing developments, the exclusion of African Americans from the post-World War II job and housing market, the movement of industries and jobs out the cities, and the conservative political shifts of the past 15 years. I further propose the need for concurrent descriptions and analyses at the community, family, and household level to challenge both the homogeneous representations of low-income African American communities and ill-defined constructs such as "female-headed households." Furthermore, I propose that the issue of violence be addressed at both these macro- and micro-levels, thus expanding the definition of violence to include both structural violence such as racism and physical violence.