Informing our Analysis of Marginalized Communities

More quotations from "The Warmth of Other Suns" here

In mid-March, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait squared off in a rather public debate that emphasized the importance of informing our contemporary analysis with historical research when such research is available. In the debate, which I think Coates won handily, Chait made an argument that summarizes much of the position that modern liberals take. It goes thus:

"The argument is that structural conditions shape culture, and culture, in turn, can take on a life of its own independent of the forces that created it. It would be bizarre to imagine that centuries of slavery, followed by systematic terrorism, segregation, discrimination, a legacy wealth gap, and so on did not leave a cultural residue that itself became an impediment to success."

Frankly, I'm not going to front like I can outdo Ta-Nehisi's counter to all of Chait's comments. You should absolutely follow this link and just read the entire conversation. Coates delivers a swift kamehameha that is everything our professors in college wished we would have been.

Coates counters Chait's quotation above by citing extensively from Eric Foner's text, Reconstruction, which recounts the experiences of Reconstruction-era progressives who came to the South. In essence, the Northerners who came South, did not find a Black community that was prone to vice and devoid of a sense of filial responsibility. Coates references sections of Foner's text that, in fact, speak to the efforts freed-Blacks put toward maintaining two-parent households and who adopted the children of deceased relatives.

Wilkerson's text puts forth a similar point early in her book, as soon as page 14. She writes:

Over time, the story of the Great Migration has suffered distortions that have miscast an entire population. From the moment the emigrants set foot in the North and West, they were blamed for the troubles of the cities they fled to. They were said to have brought family dysfunction with them, to more likely be out-of-work, unwed parents, and on welfare, than the people already there.
In the past twenty years, however, an altogether different picture has emerged from ongoing research by scholars of the Great Migration. Closer analysis of newly available census records has found that, contrary to conventional thought, black migrants were actually more likely to be married and to raise their children in two-parent households, and less likely to bear children out of wedlock. "Compared with northern-born blacks," writes the sociologist Stewart E. Tolnay, a leading expert on the Migration, "southern migrants had higher rates of participation in the labor force, lower levels of unemployment, higher incomes, lower levels of poverty and welfare dependency." The lives of the people in this this book bear out this more complex understanding of the Great Migration and, based on the new data, represent the more common migrant experience than many previous accounts.

How, then, does this sort of mischaracterization of Black communities affect our discussions on the communities we serve?

How, further, do we get more of the individuals who are involved in education, education reform, and the fates of the most vulnerable, to be better-informed as they analyze the struggles faced by low-income communities of color?