On the Other Side of the Gates

During those younger years as the pastor of a poor, black, inner-city parish in Brooklyn, including the years of working with Martin Luther King, Jr., I was an unapologetic romantic about the critical, even redemptive, part that blacks were to play in the unfolding of the American drama. Many of us were. The subsequent years have been hard on Dr. King’s dream. True, most black Americans are better off in most ways of calculating better off. But my version of the dream was attuned to the poor, and especially those concentrated in the hard core of the inner city.

After Hurricane Katrina, there was much chatter about the “rediscovery of the poor.” It was almost all nonsense, and I fiercely wish that were not so. By the 1980s it had become widely recognized that there were the poor, and then there were the poor. The first had low incomes, but they also had jobs at which they worked regularly; they reared their children; the children went to school and learned; and their families were on their way to becoming non-poor. Then there were the poor who were called the underclass, especially the urban underclass. The underclass is not solely black but it is mainly black, and by a very wide margin.

We haven’t heard much talk about the underclass in recent years. That is not because they have gone away. Far from it, although many of them have been put away in prison. The reason we do not hear about the underclass is that they have become forgettable: confined and contained.

We who live on the right side of the tracks, so to speak, have successfully shielded ourselves from them. It is a domestic version of the Cold War’s “containment” policy. Some years ago there was worried discussion about the privileged who live in “gated communities.” Ours is now a gated society. The gates are open to those who play by the rules, but tightly shut against the threatening underclass.

It is almost inconceivable today that we would have the kind of urban riots that were a major feature of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Black radicals threatened to burn down the cities and succeeded in wrecking the neighborhoods where they lived.

White flight accelerated, leaving city centers abandoned and rotting. “Black Power” succeeded to the extent that blacks were left in charge of the ruins. Detroit, while it is the premier example, is far from alone. New York bought off or otherwise co-opted black leaders, who were recruited to keep the underclass in its place. Al Sharpton and a few other court jesters who dance a mean radical shuffle are kept around to remind taxpayers why the pay-offs are a good investment.

The underclass is a minority of a minority. It is defined by a pattern of not playing by the most elementary of the rules. For instance, holding a job, or at least wanting to get a job. For instance, staying in school, at least through eighth grade, or maybe even getting a high school diploma they can read. For another instance, by men not having babies by multiple women whom they decline to support. For a very big for instance, by not engaging in criminal activity.

Social scientist Charles Murray has recently pulled together some of the latest data on the underclass. It makes for grim reading. In the last few years, there has been good news about declining crime rates. One reason is that so much of the underclass is in prison or under correctional supervision. Since Ronald Reagan took office, the number of Americans in various forms of supervision by the criminal justice system has increased by 300 percent. As Murray puts it, “Crime has dropped, but criminality has continued to rise.”

The general sense is that these are better times, at least for those who live in enclaves secured against the underclass. The criminals are left to prey on their hapless neighbors, if they are not locked up. Consider the ratio of prisoners to the number of crimes committed. If the ratio was the same as it was when Ronald Reagan took office, we would today have a prison population of 490,000. In fact, the current prison population is over two million. Imagine what the crime rate would be if tomorrow we released 1.6 million prisoners. That is what is meant by declining crime but increasing criminality.

The underclass is unsocialized. They have dropped out of society and its expectations. Criminal activity is actively anti-social; not working is declining to participate. In 1954, when such figures were first gathered, nine percent of young black men, ages twenty to twenty-four, were not working and not looking for work. In 1999, when businesses were desperately seeking workers for every job level, the figure was 30 percent. And, of course, that does not include all the young men in jail.

Almost everybody who has been paying attention agrees that the big change is in the number of young males who grow up without fathers. This is now an intergenerational phenomenon. It was the harsh reality I witnessed years ago in Brooklyn. Not only boys who did not know what it means to have a father but boys who did not know what it means to be a father. They did not know any men who accepted open-ended responsibility for their children. These boys did not expect to be, and almost nobody expected them to be, fathers to their children.

Today, 35 percent of all children born in America are born to women who are not married. The black illegitimacy rate, as of 2003, is 68 percent. There are large black churches in our cities that have not had a wedding in years. Consider that, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan caused a great ruckus by announcing the breakdown of the black family forty years ago, the black illegitimacy rate was 24 percent. It is not true that illegitimacy has risen precipitously throughout the population. It is heavily concentrated in low-income groups, and especially among blacks. We hear good news about falling teenage births. That is balanced by the fact that blacks have many more abortions. The critical factor with respect to the underclass is the proportion of children born and raised without fathers. “That proportion,” Murray writes, “is the indicator that predicts the size of the underclass in the next generation.”

With the “rediscovery of poverty” after Katrina, all kinds of government programs are being proposed and massively funded. They have all been tried before. They have failed before, in largest part because they are premised upon the assumption that the problem is poverty and not the underclass. As Murray writes, “Poor people who are not part of the underclass seldom need help to get out of poverty . . . . The statistical reality is that people who get into the American job market and stay there seldom remain poor unless they do something self-destructive. And behaving self-destructively is the hallmark of the underclass.”

Some may think Murray’s conclusion is excessively stark, or even cynical. He writes: “Hurricane Katrina temporarily blew away the screens that we have erected to keep the underclass out of sight and out of mind. We are now to be treated to a flurry of government efforts from politicians who are shocked, shocked, by what they saw. What comes next is depressingly predictable. Five years from now, the official evaluation will report that there were no statistically significant differences between the subsequent lives of people who got the government help and the lives of people in a control group. Newspapers will not carry that story, because no one will be interested any longer. No one will be interested because we will have long since replaced the screens, and long since forgotten.”

Refusing to Give Up

It is not true that no one will be interested. It probably is true that most Americans, including many working-class and middle-class blacks, will not be interested. As long as they don’t pose a threat to the rest of us, the underclass illegitimacy rate could climb to 95 percent and there could be three million or more in prison without prompting any sense of national crisis. The great majority of Americans, I expect, are weary of hearing about the plight of blacks and probably welcome the fact that the largest minority is now Hispanic, which dramatically changes the discussion of “minority rights” and is devoid of lingering feelings of guilt about slavery and all that. Among Hispanics there is not an underclass comparable in scale or intergenerational obstinacy.

Yet there are many who have not given up on the underclass. There are churches and church-related social programs that do the hard, slogging, day-by-day work of helping young people put their lives together and keep them together. There are occasionally black leaders from the religious, entertainment, and sports worlds who risk being called Uncle Toms by trying to persuade young people that it is not cool to cultivate a dress and demeanor that makes you unemployable, to sexually exploit women, or to accuse those who want to learn of “acting white.” And there are mothers beyond numbering who, with no help from a man, strive valiantly to set their children on the way out from the underclass.

Simple Justice

As for public policy, a strong case can be made that the greatest single injustice perpetrated upon the urban poor is the captivity of their children in thoroughly rotten government-run school systems. There are heartening signs that the movement for parental choice in education is picking up steam. We have addressed this question again and again. John Coons’ essay “School Choice as Simple Justice,” in the April 1992 issue of First Things, remains one of the most trenchant briefs for something that can be done and would make a real difference, also for the underclass. Across the country, there are today promising experiments with educational vouchers and charter schools. In many places, experiments have turned into demonstrations of effectiveness, hastening the day when educational freedom will be a reality for all Americans.

Affluent Americans generally choose their schools by choosing where to live. That is not an option for the poor. Obviously, educational choice will not resolve all the problems of the underclass. But it is something that government could do, and that it is reasonable to believe would effect major change over time. It is something that merits the support of people who know that it is not morally tolerable to ignore the millions of fellow-citizens who we so successfully keep on the other side of the gates.

A while back, Bob Herbert of the New York Times surprised his readers with a column devoted to the state of black America. “We can pretend that these terrible things are not happening, but they are. There’s a crisis in the black community, and it won’t do to place all of the blame on society and government.” I say the column was a surprise because over the years Mr. Herbert has, with sometimes tedious repetition, tended to place all, or almost all, the blame on society and government. I don’t know what changed his mind. Perhaps he read the above data pulled together by Charles Murray. In any event, the change is most welcome.

He writes, “The problems facing black people today are comparable in magnitude to those of the Jim Crow era of the twentieth century. There were leaders in those days who were equal to the challenge. I believe that nothing short of a new movement, comparable in scope and dedication to that of the civil rights era, is required to bring about the changes in values and behavior needed to halt the self-destruction that is consuming so many black lives. The crucial question is whether the leadership exists to mount such an effort . . . . Despite the sometimes valiant efforts of individuals and organizations across the country, we are not meeting that obligation now. And that’s because there’s a vacuum where our leadership should be.”

Bob Herbert’s bold indictment and call for leadership took considerable courage. We must hope that he does not retreat under the withering criticism that is sure to come. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Glenn Loury of Boston University was in the forefront of calling for a very different black leadership. In October 1992 he wrote “Two Paths to Black Power” for First Things, recommending the model of W.E.B. DuBois over that of Booker T. Washington:

It is time to recognize that further progress toward the attainment of equality for black Americans, broadly and correctly understood, depends most crucially at this juncture on the acknowledgment and rectification of the dysfunctional behaviors which plague black communities, and which so offend and threaten others. Recognize this, and much else will follow. It is more important to address this matter effectively than it is to agitate for additional rights. Indeed, success in such agitation has become contingent upon effective reform efforts mounted from within the black community . . . .

The key point is that progress such as this must be earned, it cannot be demanded. When the effect of past oppression is to leave a people in a diminished state, the attainment of true equality with the former oppressor cannot depend on his generosity, but must ultimately derive from an elevation of their selves above the state of diminishment. It is of no moment that historic wrongs may have caused current deprivation, for justice is not the issue here. The issues are dignity, respect, and self-respect—all of which are preconditions for true equality between any peoples. The classic interplay between the aggrieved black and the guilty white, in which the former demands and the latter conveys recognition of historic injustice, is not an exchange among equals. Neither, one suspects, is it a stable exchange. Eventually it may shade into something else, something less noble—into patronage, into a situation where the guilty one comes to have contempt for the claimant, and the claimant comes to feel shame, and its natural accompaniment, rage, at his impotence.

Ten years later, Loury published The Anatomy of Racial Inequality in which he seemed to have reverted to blaming society for the plight of blacks in America. In our May 2002 issue he was taken to task by J.L.A. Garcia and John McWhorter for having retreated to the conventional wisdom of the black establishment. Loury responded to the criticism by saying his new book was addressed to a different audience, one that is mainly white. I confess that I, along with Garcia, McWhorter, and others, did not find the explanation entirely convincing.

There are a few black thinkers (Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams come most prominently to mind) who have, year in and year out, insisted that the healing of the black community—and, most particularly, of the black underclass—is primarily the responsibility of blacks. Those who still claim the antiquated title of “civil rights leaders” have excoriated them without mercy. They are “Uncle Toms,” “Oreos,” and, most devastatingly, “conservatives.” From time to time a prominent black such as comedian Bill Cosby will say what Loury once said and Herbert is now saying. But such courageous eruptions of honesty have in the past been episodic, being quickly smothered by the now weary and wearying rhetoric about the evils of our racist society. Perhaps now, at long last, and after the wasting of lives beyond numbering, there will emerge the leadership for which Bob Herbert, along with too few others, is calling.