In
“The Triumphs and Trials of Memphis,” an article featured in the New York Times
during the heightened national publicity on Memphis, Alan Blinder and Jerry
Gray wrote of the struggle now facing the city 50 years after Martin Luther
King Jr.’s assassination. The article quotes Otis L. Sanford, a professor at U
of M and a former editor of the Commercial Appeal as saying, “It’s a malaise
here… There is neither optimism nor strong pessimism, honestly. We’re just sort
of standing still right now” (Blinder & Gray, 2018). In discussing the
history of how a city like Memphis could find itself becoming an impoverished
city which generally lacked optimism the author writes that, “Manufacturing
jobs have faded away, and in 2016 the city’s poverty rate was nearly 27 percent,
with close to half of Memphis’s children living in poverty. The median
household income was nearly $19,000 lower than the nation’s average” (Blinder
& Gray, 2018). In this summary, there is a sense that the author of this
New York Times piece believes that better times in Memphis have been cast away
and that a “worse” city remains.
It is
worth looking at this assessment through a critical lens. By attributing the
poverty to a more recent decline in manufacturing throughout the city, we can
easily ignore the fact that for some Memphians a lack of jobs that can provide
workers with a livable wage is nothing new. For low-income black Memphians this
job-void can be traced back to slavery. Crediting a lack of manufacturing jobs
in Memphis also disregards the overwhelming disparity between the poverty rates
for black and white Memphians. These historic job inequities did by no means
occur accidentally, and can be directly attributed to the enduring plantation
mentality. This mentality has led to the patriarchal lens, with which those who
maintain the positions, which could directly influence institutional racial
inequality, view the world more broadly and Memphis particularly. This should
not be disregarded. The narrative of the history of economic injustice in
Memphis should not be altered or made to appear more convenient.
Blinder, A., & Gray, J. (2018, April 3).
The Triumphs and Trials of Memphis. The
New York Times. Retrieved April 25, 2018,
from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/us/martin-luther-king-memphis.html
I agree - treating Memphis' current "malaise" as a recent development is just an excuse to avoid critically examining the underlying economic realities of the modern American economy. Memphis has problems, but it's just a slightly more extreme example of trends and inequalities that exist nationwide. Memphis is an American microcosm: you can't criticize the city without criticizing the U.S. at large.
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