The Dallas Myth: A Review

Dallas was a shock to us when we arrived in 1977 (from Washington, D.C.). We had never been in a city so rigidly segregated. I spent my early years in Denver covering the travails of desegregation in that city. Denver worked through some of these problems decades before Dallas even started to address them. Not that Denver solved them. But at least it did not avert its eyes.

1. The "mythical" corporate or white flight to the suburbs? Nothing mythical about either. They're facts. Check out the stats on the white percentage of students going to DISD. The numbers were in free-fall long before today's DISD financial scandals hit. They started when serious desegregation finally started to be implemented. The result is that Dallas is now successfully re-segregated. Fewer than 10 percent of DISD students are white. That large a population shift didn't happen overnight and didn't happen because of black or hispanic educators buying furniture for themselves with school funds.

2. The nostalgia for the grand old days of Dallas-the-City-That Works is based on sheer inequality. Things got done primarily because large sections of the city had no vote in what was getting done. It's a "nostalgia" for a time when well-connected whites had entitlement and no one else really had much of a say -- and the result was what one might expect from such a set-up: the ghetto-ization of the city's minorities into South and West Dallas and the rewarding of land investors in North Dallas or in downtown projects. In other words, the recent scandals about black city councilmembers that seem to have you so incensed are very small potatoes compared to the large amounts of city money thrown into schemes and redevelopments that, historically, have always managed to profit powerful, (white) private landowners.

3. It's also ironic that the accusation of cowardice directed at the review and Dr. Graff's book -- cowardice in not naming 'guilty politicians' -- is leveled by someone who then refuses to do the same thing, except in courageously describing the guilty parties as minorities. In fact, Dr. Graff does examine relatively recent political events, up through the Trinity River project, for instance -- discussing the role of city/minority leaders like Ron Kirk. But what Dr. Graff's book targets are far larger, older, more broadly based political-economic-social forces than than the recent crimes perpetrated by black city council members. In this light, Dr. Graff does indeed name individual civic leaders' who were responsible for how Dallas became Dallas -- old favorites like R. L. Thornton and G. B. Dealey.

Disappointing that neither the book nor the review mention that, particularly in recent times, local government itself has failed Dallas. It's easy to pick on the mythical corporate or the white flight of and to the suburbs. It's dicier to spotlight elected officials, most of whom are minority. Corruption, scandal, indictment now rule the day. Dallas is a lost city, more now Detroit and/or Baltimore than Charlotte and/or Seattle.

Such unfulfilled promise of a once almost great city.

Interesting in light of Dallas' compulsive forgetfulness that local media have largely overlooked this book. You can't say that they've ignored it completely. There has been a mumbled comment here and there. But in other cities citizens would be locked in debate by now.
I doubt if many Dallas residents even know the book exists, much less what it says about their city.
It might help if the book were better written. But it's an academic work, with all that comes with that mode of writing.