WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

Moving Forward
quite by chance to be the first (and only, at least while we were there) white
family placed in a neighborhood that had become “all black,” a condition the
Housing Authority wanted to reverse.
Living in public housing was not as dangerous as many perceived it to
be, then or now. Most other people living there were simply trying to cope
with everyday life just as we were. Drugs and related crime had not become so
destructively prevalent, and crimes were largely restricted to an occasional holdup
of a drugstore or mom-and-pop grocery.
Although my family and I were treated with curiosity and apparent
acceptance by our black neighbors, living there was another lesson in the
prevalence of poverty and class distinctions in America and their meaning for
people at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. Our next-door neighbor was
a young woman with three children under the age of 3. A man I presume was
the father of her children came to the apartment occasionally, and only at night.
The woman said this was because he could not find a job to support them, and
her welfare checks would be stopped if he were caught there. I do not know if
this was true, but I used to watch her struggling to take her three children to the
grocery store or downtown to get her government check. To do so she had to
walk up and down incredibly steep hills, which in winter were covered with snow
and ice, carrying one child with the other two in tow, or spend precious dollars
paying for a “jitney” (an unlicensed cab) because there were no buses or streetcars
in the area. To the average American with a car or babysitter, the difficulty
involved in such a seemingly ordinary event is difficult to grasp; for them, being
out of money usually just means a trip to the nearest ATM.
CLASS DIFFERENTIALS AND GOVERNING AMERICA
Oldfield’s assignment is not simply to recall how my upbringing shaped
my views of class but also to examine how my background influenced what I
believed, researched, taught, and wrote in the past and how these things might
shape my future thinking about such matters. That, after all, is the point of this
autobiographical excursion.
Regrettably, I will acknowledge upfront that my origins did not play as large
a role as they might have had I encountered Kenneth Oldfield and his ideas
sooner. On the other hand, his request that I contribute a personal narrative to
this symposium forced me, for one thing, to consider how I would approach
my responsibilities as a teacher of public administration were I back in the
classroom full-time, perhaps just beginning my career but knowing what I know
now. Specifically, I asked myself how I would encourage students to discover
the extent of socioeconomic inequalities in our American political economy and
how these might affect the theory and practice of public administration in our
unique and widely misunderstood governmental system. Our field sorely lacks
this awareness, which I should not find surprising. After all, I, someone with a
Journal of Public Affairs Education 97