MyBlack^® Wealth

Neighborhoods of color show marks of recession

Source: Kansas City Star

LOUISVILLE, Ky. | Loni White, a longtime friend and colleague, met me at the Kentucky Derby Museum after a panel discussion for The Trotter Group of black columnists. She was excited about showing me Churchill Downs and other hometown hot spots. But I declined each offer. Instead I asked her to take me to neighborhoods where people of color live. I’ve made a habit of doing that nationwide. How a community treats people who’ve historically been oppressed shows the quality of the city more than tourist sites. We drove through a Hispanic neighborhood near Churchill Downs. It was a community of many needs. Then we went through black areas. Some were solidly middle class. Others looked like blocks around Prospect and Troost avenues in Kansas City, where buildings were boarded up, vacant lots were plentiful and adults on the street appeared aimlessly unemployed. The recession has sunk these already sickly communities into a deeper grave, and the people who call these areas home are down there, too. “What’s going on with the economy here is what’s going on everywhere,” White said. Seeing these communities is a better indicator of how progressive and open-minded a town is and whether equality, opportunities and true justice are shared by all. Louisville, like Kansas City and other urban areas, fails this test. It’s why President Barack Obama’s deaf ear to black people’s unique concerns is disturbing. We learned at a Trotter community forum that the Obama White House hasn’t tried to satisfy African Americans. What’s worse: Black people were so excited in 2008 about the prospect of a black man winning the presidency that they never made concrete demands of Obama, fearing that backlash from white America might keep him from winning. And even when black leaders have met with Obama, it was as if they were conductors on a 21st century underground railroad and afterward couldn’t say what the chief executive told them.

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