I wish more people would pay attention to Henry Grabar’s post at Slate than probably will. It has quite a few important revelations. For example:
The collapse of manufacturing in the Mahoning Valley may have provoked a white identity crisis that the national media can’t get enough of, but the upheaval was more severe for black Americans. As Sherry Linkon and John Russo, onetime co-directors of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, wrote in Steeltown U.S.A., their portrait of Youngstown after the fall: With less money saved, smaller pensions, and less valuable homes, black families, “suffered disproportionately when the mills closed.â€
And they keep losing ground. In 1980, according to data provided by Jacob Whiton at the Brookings Institution, the median black family in the Youngstown area made 18 percent less than the median black family nationally; today that family underearns by 35 percent. In 2017, the median black household in the city of Youngstown, where most of the region’s black population lives, makes $20,646—little more than half the income of the median black family nationally.
Youngstown’s blacks aren’t Republicans and the Democrats aren’t interested in them:
The bad news is that no one had voted in the city’s recent primaries for local elected office. Turnout was about 10 percent. Helen Youngblood, a longtime leader of the AFSCME local, remembered talking to a friend about this: “When I ask, ‘Why can’t we get these people out to vote?,’ the person says to me, ‘Helen, when you get up in the morning and you don’t know if your baby is going to have milk, then your priority of the day isn’t getting out to vote.’ †Poverty, she reasoned, was crushing people’s will to participate in the political process.
But several people I spoke to said there is also reason to blame Democrats, or as Sybil West called them when I paid a visit to her east side home on a recent afternoon, “the wimpocrats.†The party has been as absent here as Donald Trump is present, West told me, and the state’s GOP-led gerrymandering and poverty have further sapped people’s enthusiasm. “Most people are feeling apathetical,†she surmised, “because they’re saying, ‘It’s not going to do any good.’ â€
One of the effects of the collapse in manufacturing jobs in the United States is that it has concentrated black people in the cities. Black people moved from the South to Northern cities for jobs. Now that the jobs have vanished they’re more hesitant to move than their white counterparts.
