APB Archives

RACE, COLOR, GHETTOES, AND JUSTICE (Dec 13, 03)

AN ESSAY IN THE NEWSPAPER

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An essay by Tukufu Kanonji appeared in the Wednesday, December 10 edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune. The essay is too long to re-type here, but you can look it up on the U-T website. I wrote the following reply to the newspaper, but I don't think the newspaper will print it.
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Although I didn't mention the San Diego City Council policy about balanced communities in this reply, I did speak about that Council Policy on Monday, December 8 when Redevelopment Assistance Executive Director attended the regular meeting of the Project Area Committee. Council Policy 600-19 was adopted December 26, 1972 and has not been enforced by any City Council, including the current one, since it was adopted - not even once.
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THE REPLY I SENT

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Editor,
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Essayist Tukufu Kalonji's call for equal treatment of all citizens in the criminal punishment system is welcome. It's one of a long but ineffective series of similar calls. Kalonji and others should continue to demand equal justice under law but not be surprised when it doesn't come.
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Kalonji hints that color and race still decide the treatment a citizen gets at the hands of the government, and that's generally correct. Since discrimination by class or wealth is legal, however, wealth and class can be used to justify treatment that, in reality, is race or color based. Wealth and class are convenient foils. Most people of color are relatively poor, most are not among the middle and upper classes, so class and wealth are easy surrogates for color and race. They're used all the time.
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The really disturbing part of using surrogates for race and color appears when one looks at public policy, and an example is instructive. San Diego is engaged in re-writing its Progress Guide and General Plan. To set the tone, the city has adopted a new Plan element, the Strategic Framework Element, which is based around a strategy called The City of Villages. There is even an action plan for the Village strategy.
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The twin pillars on which the new Element and the Village strategy stand are to assimilate population growth without sprawl (Smart Growth) and preserve Single Family neighborhoods. The element says San Diego will accommodate ".. inevitable future growth within existing neighborhoods" (pg 2), and goes on to say, "The City's single-family neighborhoods are unaffected as higher-density redevelopment is directed into five distinct land use districts or village types." (Pg 14) It doesn't take a genius to see that avoiding sprawl AND preserving single-family areas AND taking in more people means that inner-city neighborhoods, now filled with working families of lesser means and mostly of color, will bear nearly all of the burden of the increased population.
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In point of fact, the first version of an implementation map for the Village strategy overwhelmingly allocated the increased housing density to the poor communities South of Montgomery Field, an act that I myself publicly called class conscious, wealth conscious, and race conscious. There was wide agreement even from my friends in the affluent communities, many of whom were appalled at the overt discrimination inherent in the map. After months of pointing out the obvious and after staff dragged its feet through four revisions, the implementation map was not adopted by the City Council. It is, however, being held in reserve by staff in hope of slipping it into a future amendment to the Land Development Code, where it will have the force of law.
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As we build San Diego according to the Strategic Framework Element and its Village strategy, poor people and especially poor people of color will be packed ever more tightly into city-planned ghettoes in order to preserve the relative splendor of the single family neighborhoods. That's unfortunate, and it shouldn't happen. If essayist Kalonji believes we have a problem with race-oriented justice today, just wait until San Diego is thirty years older and has a generation of young men who grew up in neighborhoods built to the wealth, class, and race conscious guidelines of the Strategic Framework Element. Wait until poor people and immigrants and other people of color are stuffed ever more tightly into dense, ill-served, over-policed ghettoes, watching their affluent fellow-citizens luxuriate.
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San Diego doesn't propose any new Green Acres and Mayberry Junctions for poor people. It proposes a different world for them - a very different world; A Brave New World.
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