When you get right down to it, many comparisons of Blacks to Whites are unconsciously (or consciously) asking these questions: Why can’t you be more like White people? Why can’t you get married and act like “normal” middle-class White families (without the leg up that federal policies have given White people over the decades)? Why can’t you achieve academically like White people?
In addition, when White people are assumed to be the norm or standard, everyone else is deemed abnormal. Then, the underlying question driving the research is: Why can’t Blacks be normal?
Mom never once referred to my home or my friends’ homes as broken or as the source of failure. She knew the importance of narrative on the emotional well-being of children and communities. I grew up getting only tidbits about my biological parents’ story from Mom and Mary, and that was deliberate. They carefully curated information about my biological family to protect them and me from incurring any shame from a world that claimed I was a deficit.
I learned about what happened to Floyd and Karen much later in life. Mom would impress upon us that Floyd died in prison while breaking up a fight. (My brothers and I did believe the “dying in jail” part, but her portrayal of him as a Good Samaritan didn’t quite add up.) I mostly didn’t mind the insistence on rendering my biological parents, especially my father, in a good light. I eventually learned that he was very human and had plenty of good in him. As a child, I didn’t fully grasp Mom’s insistence on his goodness. Now that I’m a father myself, I have a deeper appreciation of the stories we tell our children—and why we tell them.
This book picks up where Mom left off.
Mom presented the narrative of Karen and Floyd’s lives so that we wouldn’t be scarred by others’ interpretations of their shortcomings and so we could leverage their strengths. The story we told about ourselves wasn’t one of poverty and a lack of love; we were never made to feel that the way we grew up was abnormal. We had a loving home, a Mom who fought like a lioness to protect her cubs, and a city that, for the most part, shared her values.
Mom and Mary both had to leave 1320 Hill Avenue so they could receive adequate health services in their final years, leaving Hotsy alone in the home. Unable to keep up with the taxes and his own health, Hotsy also left the home, moving to an independent living facility where he resided until his death. Wilkinsburg now owns the home. Its price is nowhere near its true value in relation to the children Mom reared and the parents she undergirded, as well as its market worth—it is devalued.
I have a responsibility to restore my home and community’s value. Know Your Price is not about viewing Black communities through rose-tinted glasses. This book, like Mom, is about seeing—not devaluing—our true potential free from bigoted judges. It’s about understanding root causes. My home, upbringing, community, and culture have significant value even though others devalue them. In addition, my children’s future—and your son’s, and your daughter’s—is linked to our abilities to give value back to Wilkinsburg and other Black-majority cities. Those children could live in a Black-majority city. Approximately 9 million Black people do, roughly 20 percent of the country’s Black population. And many other ethnicities live in these cities, as well.
Know Your Price is not an argument for creating all-Black cities. Wanting one’s culture and background not to be insulted, invalidated, or erased isn’t an argument for segregation. White, Hispanic, and Asian people already live and love in Black-majority places. And we love this multiculturalism (especially when we’re not targeted by 911 calls) because Black folk are inherently diverse, representing different ethnicities, socioeconomic classes, and gender constructions. To disavow the presence of others is to deny parts of ourselves.
If there is a direct message to White people in the book, it’s to relay that helping individuals doesn’t require fixing them. Try fixing policy, instead. Likewise, we can’t wait for White folks to see that Black people aren’t broken. Researchers will write yet another (and another) Moynihan Report, so Know Your Price is also a call to researchers. We need the tools, analytics, and frameworks to properly assess the cities, neighborhoods, and people others devalue.
In addition to calling attention to assets (investment opportunities) in Black-majority cities as well as structural change, I write this book for people who find themselves in the same situation I was in that day in 1986—fighting to belong, to stay in your homes, your communities. It would be foolish to assume that investors will immediately reverse their thinking upon reading my work and start financing Black people, firms, and institutions instead of exploiting devaluation as a path to make profits. Seeing value in inner-city housing stock has helped spur gentrification—just ask the residents of Harlem, Oakland, or Washington, D.C.
Mom moved to Wilkinsburg during the massive intra-city migration in Pittsburgh in the 1960s. I should say that Mom was displaced. In 1961, city officials voted to raze approximately 1,300 structures within the heart of Black Pittsburgh, the section known as the Hill District, to make room for the construction of the Civic Arena sports complex. Over 1,500 families, approximately 8,000 people, were displaced, which spurred a migration to the East End section of town—the Homewood-Brushton neighborhood of Pittsburgh and Wilkinsburg. Mom’s story of how she got to Wilkinsburg is one many Black families in Pittsburgh can tell; Pittsburgher and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson captured one aspect of it in his play Two Trains Running, which offers a framework for a solution to positive change (as well as the title for my book).11
The play, which is set in 1969, the year after the Civil Rights Act was passed and Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, illustrates the economic injustice Black people still face. It presumes that Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), which seized land in the neighborhood of the Hill District throughout the 1960s as part of an urban renewal project, purposely undervalued Black residents’ homes and businesses to purchase the land on the cheap. The protagonist, Memphis, owns a building and restaurant, both of which are slated to be seized by the city through an eminent domain clause in his deed. A Black man, Memphis is certain the city would assess his property differently if he were White. Referring to the eminent domain language in his deed, Memphis says, “They don’t know I got a clause of my own … They can carry me out feet first … but my clause say … they got to meet my price!”
Another character in the play, Hambone, painted a fence for a grocer who promised him a ham upon completion. Hambone painted the fence, but the owner never paid Hambone the ham. “He gonna give me my ham” is a refrain throughout the play. It’s unclear if Hambone suffered from a mental illness before the incident or developed one after, but waiting for the grocer to pay what he promised drove him mad. He died demanding what he was owed.
Memphis, meanwhile, went back and forth with city officials, armed with an accurate valuation of his property and a demand that the city meet his price. The last scene of the play epitomized the kind of result Black business owners, home owners, and all residents can realize if we are collectively as committed as Memphis was in not selling himself short.
“I went down there to the courthouse ready to fight for that twenty-five thousand dollars I want for my property,” Memphis said. “I wasn’t taking no fifteen. I wasn’t taking no twenty. I want twenty-five thousand. They told me, ‘Well, Mr. Lee … we got a clause, and the city is prepared to put into motion’—that’s the part I like, ‘prepared to put into motion’—‘the securing of your property at 1621 Wylie Avenue’—they had the address right and everything—‘for the sum of thirty-five-thousand dollars.’ ” Memphis, elated to receive the compensation he demanded and deserved, starts making plans for a new