Presidential candidate George W. Bush has promised to "rally the armies of compassion" in addreskcsing America's most pressing social problems. Single mothers? Absentee fathers? Drug addicts? Let's just mobilize family, neighborhood and community resources.
Bush's pxolicy assumes that armies of compassionate volunteers will march out of the suburbs to rally around the black urban poor. But Bush's optimism lacks a basis in reality. The fact is, very few inner-city residents experience the benefits of programs run by suburbanites who abandon their cushy pads to live beside "the least among us."
As Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, authors of "American Apartheid," demonstrate, 75% of blacks live in highly segregated neighborhoods. Indeed, the neighborhoods in which poor urban blacks reside are "hyper segregated" places where residential segregation creates nearly total social isolation.
Yes, compassionate white suburbanites volunteer for all sorts of things. But where? Close to home, among their neighbors. Other than on the stage of the Republican National Convention, these people are not very likely to have much contact with those most in need of their labor of compassion.
Marvin Olasky, the oft-described "father" of compassionate conservatism and an influential advisor to the Bush campaign, tells many tales of wealthy people doing extraordinary things. Former professional athletes abandon lives of fame and fortune to minister to lost souls in poor black communities. The CEO of the nation's largest real estate development company leaves his job to develop inner city neighborhoods. The list goes on. Bush envisions that these generous individuals will provide role models that he believes have been absent from poor urban neighborhoods, role models who hold regular jobs, marry and have children (in that order) and maintain life-long commitments to their families.
But Bush and Olasky seem to forget that a fundamental feature of compassion is that it is rooted in empathy. And people are empathetic and compassionate to people who are most like themselves, people from similar neighborhoods, schools and cultures.
