To top it off, state juvenile court data for 2012 shows that African American and Hispanic youths are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated, and civil-rights data from the U.S. Department of Education shows that those youths are disproportionately expelled from or arrested at school.

You would think I was talking about a place like Philadelphia, yes? No, I am not.

OK, I must live in some third-class city in Pennsylvania in bankruptcy? Wrong again.

I’m talking about Montgomery County.

Ferguson, Mo., burst upon the national scene with the shooting death of an African American teen by a white police officer. And in the aftermath, traditional tropes of racial tension in cities, and the binary of big-city blacks and suburban whites has played out in the national consciousness, with calls for firing the police chief and an end to mass incarceration and racial profiling.

The reason the traditional way of viewing these issues is misguided is simply because that view is warped.

The Brookings Institution has already demonstrated that the evolution we see, which in part gave rise to the unfortunate incident in Ferguson, is part of the suburbanization of poverty in this country.

According to Brookings’ view, by 2008 the fastest-growing poor population in America was in the suburbs.

Locally, there are an estimated 53,000 poor children living in wealthy Delaware, Chester, Bucks, and Montgomery Counties. Nearly $145 million would be needed to adequately fund public education in these suburbs, according to Public Citizens for Children and Youth, an advocacy organization in Philadelphia.

And poorly implemented federal fair-housing policy has had the effect of turning parts of suburban communities into housing projects, as housing-choice vouchers do anything but offer those in need a real choice. People are steered by suburban housing authorities to create concentrated poverty in only a handful of towns, or majority-minority neighborhoods, in otherwise very wealthy county jurisdictions.

It is in this context of increased and concentrated poverty, underfunded suburban schools, and lack of scale in the delivery of human services that we find minority and poor youths more likely to be expelled from school and arrested and incarcerated. This makes the school-to-prison pipeline a suburban issue, as well as an urban one.

These are the realities that state and federal politicians, philanthropists, the business sector, and activists continue to ignore and misunderstand.

This is the reality in America that gave rise to Ferguson and the horror of Michael Brown being shot to death by a police officer in a suburb of 21,000 people. Twenty years ago, Ferguson hosted a national conversation on being a model integrated community. Today, people of all backgrounds are ready to flee Ferguson in the wake of a senseless killing that clearly uncovers the inequality that local, county, state, and federal policy helped to create.

For six years, I have been a part of a statewide group – Building One Pennsylvania – that understands these and other important issues are not confined to big cities. It understands that for our region, and our commonwealth, to thrive, an agenda must promote sustainability, mobility, diversity, and opportunity in every zip code, in every borough and township, across the commonwealth.

It is to promote this agenda that we gathered leaders from the four suburban counties – on Oct. 23, at the Second Baptist Church in Media, and on Oct. 30, at Salem Baptist Church in Jenkintown.

We encouraged people to come out and speak up not just for Philadelphia, where issues of poverty and education are often discussed, but also to speak up for all the small communities in our region, the places that are experiencing challenges that are not being adequately addressed by county councils or commissions.

Unless we take a real regional approach to these challenges, unless we understand that inequality anywhere is a threat to equality everywhere, we cannot build a sustainable future where all communities thrive in this commonwealth.

If we don’t recognize that Ferguson and the issues that led to Michael Brown’s death are not limited to certain races and certain places, we cannot achieve the type of visionary public policy needed to make all areas great and sustainable places to work, play, and live.

Philly.com – November 3, 2014 – Read article online