During the early 1970s, my family and I lived in the Kansas City, Kan., area during a time when a lot of racial tensions were present. To help deal with these tensions, our suburban church became friends with an inner city African-American church, and we exchanged services and met together for fellowship several times a year.
It was a great experience for both churches. Later, when they integrated the buses hauling school children and trouble erupted, the African-American pastor and I worked together to help alleviate the potential violence caused by integration on the buses and in the schools. He solved the bus problem and I confronted the superintendent of schools, and together we saw a peaceful resolution to the racial problems in our city.
Later, it was my privilege to minister to a white family living in an all white community at the time a black family moved in beside them. They panicked, sure that their property values would plummet and that crime would increase around them. As it turned out, the black family was more professional than they were and in a much higher income bracket. They actually increased the value of the property they owned and proved to be good neighbors. Nevertheless, I was unable to help the white family see that all was not lost, and the family sold its home and quickly moved.
During this time, I interviewed several real estate agents and discovered that "red lining" actually was being practiced in our area despite being against the law. Red lining occurs whenever a real estate company deliberately sells a home in a white community to a black family and then notifies all of the people in the neighborhood that their properties are going to drop dramatically and that they should sell cheaply and get out while they can. This was what happened in the area mentioned above.
Recently, my wife and I were discussing the emergence of "black power" and the cry that "black lives matter" as we were alone in our car going somewhere. We immediately agreed that "all lives matter," but it was how to solve the problems associated with people of color being subjected to extremely difficult circumstances that occupied most of our time. Are the problems really racial? And is just beefing up the law enforcement community the best solution? I believe in personal safety and the Second Amendment, but I was not convinced that the problems facing our country are primarily racial. I know the law enforcement community and understand that it is impossible for any agency to be strong enough to prevent all crime. It takes everyone working together to make life worth living.
On the other hand, The New York Times (Sunday, Aug. 21, 2016) had an article by John Eligon and Robert Gebeloff that startled me. Red lining does not appear to be going on today, but there are other forces that are just as deadly. Consider that in many of America's largest metropolitan areas -- e.g. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee -- black families making $100,000 or more are far more likely to live in poorer neighborhoods than even white households making less than $25,000. This is even truer when a neighborhood has a long history of residential segregation.
In these areas in the United States where black and white families earning $100,000 or more a year live, 37 percent of the black families live in a poor area while only 9 percent of white families live there. Only 22 percent of black families live in an affluent area, while 47 percent of the white families live there. In places like Milwaukee, the statistics are even worse. As many as 59 percent of high-income black families live in poor areas, while only 6 percent of the white families live there. Only 17 percent of black families with high incomes live in affluent areas, while 57 percent of the white families live there. This means that a different kind of segregation is taking place in our large cities, and that there are too many places where injustice breeds violence. It may be racial because of the people who live there, but it has much more to do with human dignity and equality.
With the above statistics, it is no wonder that there are areas in our large cities where trouble is ripe to emerge. Both white and black families (although mostly black families) are being dealt an injustice that actually promotes violence. And, if this is true with white and black families, one can only imagine what it must be like when other groups like Hispanics are included. Too many areas are like bombs ready to explode, and there is no good way for our law enforcement to adequately deal with the situation.
We desperately need to address these trouble areas by working together to make sure equality, ethical decisions and justice prevail. And we must never allow these things to happen here in Northwest Arkansas.
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Robert Box is the former chaplain for the Bella Vista Police Department and is currently the Fire Department chaplain. The opinions expressed are those of the author.
Editorial on 10/19/2016