Over the years, I have met people — at least a dozen — who have tried to argue that Whitewater is economically troubled because it has a cultural, ethnic minority that somehow — no one ever has a clear explanation — inhibits community prosperity. Almost to a person, these few have also warned that Delavan is a dangerous example for Whitewater. They say it as though we should rue the prospect of what supposedly befell Delavan.
Then or now, comparisons between Whitewater or Delavan point (1) to the ways that Delavan has had success, not failure, and (2) show without any doubt that ancestry has not played a discernible role in the economic fortunes of that town, or ours.
In my earlier posts on poverty, I have stuck to what’s most likely to be telling and meaningful: a community’s overall poverty rate, the rate of poverty among families, and trends of those two rates.
FREE WHITEWATER is a blog of brief commentary, not lengthy policy analysis. I have not set out to blog about anything more than general commentary on Whitewater, Wisconsin. There are blogs that do handle discussion of poverty-related policy well. (A blogger like Mickey Kaus, in and apart from his kausfiles posts at Slate.com, has offered some solid analysis of welfare reform, and made a name for himself that way, for example.)
Nonetheless, if anyone wanted to venture an opinion about poverty is this town of fourteen thousand, a look at economic performance and the ancestry & ethnicity of our fellow residents would be the worst place to start. An enumeration of the different ethnic groups within Whitewater gives no insight into causes or effects. If I learn that there are a number of Norwegians in Whitewater, it’s of no help in determining economic performance in town.
Delavan is the refutation to those who think that ancestry makes a difference. We’re a community with, by the figures of the U.S. Census bureau to which the City of Whitewater links on its website, 10.6 of our residents in poverty. Yet, only about 7-8 percent of our number are ethnic minorities by the contemporary understanding of the term. Most especially, the idea that we’ve so many poor because we have an appreciable minority community in Whitewater is false, and false in a way that’s a hopeless red herring. In Delavan, using the same data that our city uses, 23 percent of people were ethnic minorities in 1999, yet Delavan had a poverty rate for families of only 5.7 percent. That’s right – a far larger minority community than ours, but far lower poverty. (Looking at it differently, one might as easily make the mistake of thinking that Delavan’s doing better because it has a larger ethnic minority community, or fewer residents of European ancestry.)
Delavan’s situation is obviously different — and better — in ways that have nothing to do with ancestry. If we’re looking for demographics that help inform an understanding of Whitewater’s economic condition, we would probably look anywhere except ancestry. (Delavan’s economic situation, by the way, is likely better since these figures, considering the overall growth that she has experienced. Yet, even years ago, when some mistakenly held Delavan out as a bad example, she had fewer impoverished residents than we did.)
Perhaps that’s why few cities list economic statistics and ancestry on their webpages. The former webpages of the CDA and the City of Whitewater didn’t do the subject justice, either. Crude statistics about ancestry (and especially about income and ancestry, as the CDA formerly posted), are nearly useless. You’ll always have a few people who will seize the ancestry figures to argue that some small groups are responsible for the town’s overall difficulties. An overall poverty rate will tell you something about how a community is faring, but trying to determine causes of poverty in a small town through a list of income by ethnic groups is just speculation. A city should not be accountable for the distorted use of its statistics; a city should be accountable for recognizing that the demographics it displays have limited or no policy value (and undermine efforts to look beyond ethnicity).
We can restore our community to broad-based prosperity by rejecting the hidebound, narrow views that hold sway among some of us. When we abandon the failed notion that we can restrict, regulate, code-enforce, and spend our way out of Whitewater’s predicament we will be able to improve our condition, and that of all our fellow residents.
Next in the series: Poverty in Whitewater, Part 4: If we keep building new shopping centers, why does Whitewater’s poverty rate not decrease?