Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  Poussaint believes that some young black males are compensating for feelings of inferiority in the larger society. “Sometimes, if you feel impotent in terms of society, you react by stressing your sexual role. That’s why many of them will see getting someone pregnant as proof of manhood, rather than having a child and being a responsible father to that child.”

  Since 1981, unwed motherhood has replaced marital breakup as the leading cause for welfare eligibility (among blacks and whites), but the true cause might be incomprehensible ignorance. In the past few years, I’ve interviewed black women who can’t remember the full names of the fathers of their children and others who can’t spell their kids’ names. Many of these women seem to learn nothing from the experience of the first illegitimate child. They just have more babies. One result, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, is “mothers in their early teens, grandmothers in their late twenties, and great-grandmothers in their early forties.”

  I remember you telling me several times that this was part of the heritage of three centuries of slavery, a theory most frequently offered by black intellectuals and white liberals in response to the 1965 Moynihan Report. In the days before emancipation (say such theorists), black families were purposefully broken apart by the slaveholders, who feared uprisings by men and women who didn’t want their children born into slavery. As a result, there has been a psychological fracture in the black family ever since.

  But this secular belief in predestination — insisting that human beings are prisoners of history and not its makers — has been refuted by the stirring history of black Americans themselves, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr. and many millions in between. To insist that only black Americans are permanent prisoners of the past, unable to shape their own lives, is itself a form of racism.

  Common sense alone tells us that if it had been true, then the trauma would have affected all blacks; obviously it hasn’t. And the post-slavery history of the black family indicates that this particular consequence of “the peculiar institution” was in fact soon left behind. In his brilliant new book, The Truly Disadvantage^ black sociologist William Julius Wilson shows that in 1940, the last year of the Great Depression, only 17.9 percent of black American families were headed by women, and the reason was usually that the husbands were dead. Today, the percentage is 43 and rising, but widowhood is no longer the cause. The men are in the wind. This has had an obvious economic effect; of black families earning $25,000 a year, only 8 percent are headed by women; of those earning $4,000 and less, 80 percent are headed by women. And that raises the essential question in refuting the theory: How could slavery have a greater corrosive effect on the black family today, almost half a century later, than it had in 1940? The question contains its own answer; it couldn’t.

  Alas, we have difficulty even now — in the midst of the catastrophe — discussing such matters. You and I have been asked for a generation to suspend all criticism of the personal behavior of blacks in the Underclass. We would give aid and comfort to racists. Or erode the already uncertain self-image of blacks. To hold blacks responsible for their lives, we have been told (most eloquently by William Ryan), is “blaming the victim.” Before such arguments, liberals fell silent; and the crisis of the Underclass deepened.

  At last, the long silence seems to be coming to an end. Both the NAACP and the Urban League have begun to speak about the need to break the trap of welfare dependency. Last year, Michael Lomax, chairman of Atlanta’s Fulton County Commission, publicly discussed the failure of the black establishment to deal with AIDS among blacks. He saw that failure as part of a larger pattern:

  “It is a matter of coming to terms, at last, with the fact that there are problems within our community that were not imposed upon us by white society. Intravenous drug use, teenage pregnancy, and sexual promiscuity are behaviors that are pathological in our own community, and we must come to grips with that, to take responsibility.”

  That last word is the key. You were responsible for your family, I for mine. But if the typical Underclass family is matriarchal, who is responsible? To blame the system, or Whitey, or history is to embrace a gigantic self-deception.

  Coming out of this drastic deterioration of the Underclass black family are multiple pathologies. You know the most obvious one: the staggering rate of violent crime. Black Americans are murdering, raping, assaulting, and robbing each other at alarming rates. Blacks make up about 13 percent of our country’s population, but 50 percent of all those arrested for murder are black, as are 41 percent of the victims. Black women are three times more likely to be victims of rape than are whites. Yes, too many white cops shoot too many black suspects. Yes, there might be an element of racism involved. But in any given year, white cops don’t kill as many blacks as blacks do on some big-city weekends.

  Again, we must go back to the numbers. According to a Justice Department survey, 46 percent of the nation’s prison population is black; by 1984, the rate of imprisonment for blacks was six times that for whites. National mayhem rates are bad enough; they are even worse in large inner-city ghettos. In Chicago in the 1970s, eight of every ten murderers were black, as were seven of every ten victims; 98 percent of black killings were committed by other blacks. In 1984, 61 percent of those arrested for robbery were black, as were 41 percent of those charged with aggravated assault.

  I remember talking to you one night last year when you were furious with Benjamin Ward, the black police commissioner of New York City. You were angry with Ward because he had described black-on-black crime as “our dirty little secret” to a Columbia University forum sponsored by the New York Association of Black Journalists.

  “We provide the victims and we provide the perpetrators,” Ward said. “We should not be ashamed to say that. We should not try to hide it. We have to speak out about it…. Most of the crime in this city is by young blacks under thirty. I think the young black male has always been perceived in this city by whites, and by blacks as well, as being a more dangerous person than a white. And I believe that just as many black women in this room tend to cross the street when they see some of those kinds of people coming down the street as whites do. And I believe blacks are victims. But we’re generally the victims of some other black committing crimes against us.”

  By most accounts, the audience of students hissed Ward’s remarks; black nationalists seemed to dismiss him as “a white man’s nigger.” Or as another Oreo cookie. But he was not hissed a few nights later when he continued the dijscussion at a meeting of two hundred black ministers in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, where the Underclass rules the street.

  “When you go home tonight,” Ward said, “if your place is burglarized, it probably would have been one of your neighbors…. If you stay here late tonight and then go outside, it might be a young black man that will hurt you.” Ward was once the city’s corrections commissioner and said, “It broke my heart [to see so many young blacks in jail]. You go to upstate New York, our state prisons, and that’s what you see — the fruit of our community serving time behind those walls.” Then he added: “I’m sending as many there as I possibly can, seventy thousand perhaps this year for peddling drugs. And I don’t regret it one minute. Because they are committing the genocide against the blacks, they are ripping off the neighborhoods. …”

  In Brooklyn, before a black audience, Ward’s remarks were punctuated by a chorus of “amens.” Certainly the statistics supported his words. New York City is 24 percent black, but in 1986, 52.8 percent of all those arrested were black. Blacks accounted for 55.4 percent of the murder and manslaughter arrests (a total of 644), 65.2 percent of the forcible rape arrests (966), 69.3 percent of the robbery arrests (15,944), and 55.7 percent of the arrests for aggravated assault (13,079). After Ward’s statement was made public, state director Hazel Dukes of the NAACP said: “What he is saying is real and must be addressed. It makes you think.”

  It certainly does. These numbers don’t tell the full story, of course; they are
the statistics of arrests, not convictions. But only a fool would insist that life in big cities is better now than it was thirty years ago. You and I are not old men, but it’s hard to explain to our children that in New York when we were young, it was possible on hot summer evenings to sleep in parks or on rooftops or fire escapes. Exhausted by a hard day’s work, we slept unmolested to the end of subway lines. Like you, I grew up in a poor neighborhood; my front door was never locked, and neither was yours.

  Most city people don’t talk about their apprehension anymore. They have simply altered their behavior. In the big cities, blacks and whites live behind iron barricades: locks, bars, gates. When we walk down a street at night, we follow the pattern described by Ward, peering over our shoulders, always alert to danger; if a group of the black young is seen, we cross the street or reverse direction.

  What all of us have learned is that the fear of the Underclass is about class, not race. This has much precedent in American history; at various times in our big cities, the middle class often felt threatened by the crime and moral disorder of the Irish, Jewish, and Italian poor. But there are three elements of the current catastrophe that were not present among previous generations: drugs, television, and welfare.

  You too have seen the ravages of drugs. Heroin has been with us since the 1950s; in New York alone we have 220,000 heroin addicts — the equivalent of eleven army divisions. We had friends who died of overdoses; together we mourned Charlie Parker and Fats Navarro and Billie Holiday; we saw others virtually decompose before our eyes, their teeth rotting, arms scarred or abscessed by tracks, stealing from their families, hurrying always from one connection to another. Heroin was one of the first plagues we saw together. But other drugs are everywhere now in the ghettos of the Underclass: pot and pills and most of all these days, crack. Every day, thousands of girls turn tricks to get their share of this superpotent, highly addictive, easily smokable form of cocaine; for their supply, teenagers bash old men on the heads. These stupid kids seem to have no grander ambition than to get high. Crack, we are told, gives them illusions of power; heroin smothers their pain. There seems to be no vision that includes working toward power, or confronting personal pain like men and overcoming it. Instead we hear the steady whining complaint about Whitey and the System and the Man.

  “Racial issues get a big reaction in the press,” says black congressman Floyd Flake of Queens, New York, “but it’s drugs that is bringing us down.”

  Every day we see young people from a proud, tough race, nodding out on sidewalks or in public parks, wandering the streets at all hours, frequently homeless, or joined in the numb Fraternity of the Lost, in shooting galleries, abandoned houses, empty lots. We should not be surprised. These are kids who have been shaped in whole or in part by welfare or television. That is to say, to the habit of passivity and dependence, where nothing requires work. To read a book, to absorb it, to agree with it or quarrel with it: this takes work. But according to a 1986 Nielsen Media Research survey, blacks watch TV 39 percent more than all other American households. That means they are consuming a steady diet of slick crap, charged with violence, crawling with cheap emotions. The cumulative message of TV is that solutions should be easy. After all, if the Equalizer can confront a crime, overcome villains, come up with a solution in less than an hour, why should anyone have to master trigonometry?

  Television is also the favored medium of the illiterate. Older generations of poor Americans learned to read in order to entertain themselves; some never got past dime novels, some discovered the glories of the world’s literature and history. The poor no longer must read to be entertained. Television provides entertainment easily and seductively. And while transmitting its grand distractions, the medium inevitably provides models for behavior. In television shows, virtually nobody is ever shown working — except cops. And even in cop shows, the emphasis is on action, not the tedious process of analysis and deduction.

  So I’m no longer surprised when black high school students tell me they have never heard of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, or Ralph Ellison, to mention only a few extraordinary black writers. They don’t know that Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple. They have never heard of Romaire Bearden or Max Roach or Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker. They don’t even know Aesop’s fables or the Old Testament or the tales of the Greek gods. Go to a jazz club and listen to Wynton Marsalis: the audience is white. Young blacks are listening to the puerile doggerel of rap music. I find many white kids equally ignorant these days, but most of them don’t have to fight their way out of the Underclass. Hundreds of thousands of black American kids are growing up in complete ignorance of the basic elements of Western culture and the culture of black America. Increasingly, they are not even acquiring the tools required to cure the ignorance.

  The black high school dropout rate in large cities is approaching 60 percent. Many such kids can’t speak a plain American language, never mind aspire to the eloquent mastery of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. For a while some tried to make this a virtue; they argued that black English was a separate language of enormous strength and value and should even be codified and used in school. Alas, that was just another elaborate rationalization. Obviously, the American language has been enriched by black English and the argot of music and the street. But it will not lead the way to MIT. In a recent article in Harper’s, Julian Bond remembered: “My little girl brought a note home from school that said, ’Juua be late too often.’ What kind of teacher wrote that note? Is he teaching my daughter how to read and write? I’m talking about a public school in Atlanta. …”

  You and I have met such teachers in New York; they exist all over the country now, passing on their own incomplete skills to the young. And the young are leaving. Wilson cites the appalling situation in the Chicago public schools. Of 25,000 black and Hispanic students who enrolled in the ninth grade in 1980, only 9,500 finished four years later; of these, only 2,000 could read at the twelfth-grade level. In the predominantly black and Latino New York public-school system, 39.7 percent of all sixth graders failed to meet the standard in reading, and 43.7 percent failed mathematics. By the time these kids get to eighth grade, the failure rate is 60 percent. One third of the city’s one million students drop out before graduation (the percentage is much higher among blacks and Hispanics). Those who do graduate are often not much better off. They aren’t ready for the real world of the last decade of the twentieth century, and nobody knows this better than the corporations in the city itself.

  The New York Telephone Company reports that only 16 percent of the applicants for entry-level jobs are able to pass simple exams in vocabulary and problem solving. When J.C. Penney and Mobil Oil announced they were moving their corporate offices out of New York, they cited the lack of a quality work force as one of their major reasons. More than half the freshmen entering City University from public schools fail the writing and math courses. Last summer, four New York banks reserved 250 jobs for high school graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds. They were to be given crash courses in job preparation and had to pass some entry-level tests simple enough for a “bright sixth grader.” Only one hundred of these high school graduates could pass the tests, which included such rigorous questions as, “How many quarters are there in seventeen dollars?”

  So in a time when the old barriers to blacks have fallen, when the doors of the establishment have at least partially opened, we are seeing that too many young blacks can’t even walk in the door. There was a time when some of us thought that the education problem could be solved by integration; that is no longer possible in most big-city schools because there simply aren’t enough white students to integrate with. In New York, white public-school enrollment declined more than 45 percent from 1968 to 1980; in Chicago it was 60 percent, in Detroit 75 percent. Much of this exodus was the result of white flight, which superficially resembles racism; alas, it’s more complicated than that.

  Again, the issue is class. White parents pull their kids
from the public schools, placing them in parochial or private schools (or leaving the city for its suburbs) because they want their children to be educated. It’s as simple as that. The black middle class does the same thing for the same reason. They don’t feel they can educate their children in schools that are violent, drug-ridden, seething with anger, or dominated by the anti-intellectual ethos of the Underclass.

  You blame the schools and their administrators. So do I, to some extent. There are too many incompetent teachers, too much flab in the curricula, too slovenly a set of standards for students. But in the end, a school can’t educate a human being; an education is not something “given” to somebody like a suit of clothes. You cannot absorb learning passively, as if it were the check arriving every two weeks in the mailbox. You must work at an education, generally for your entire life; like anything worth having, you must earn it. You must take it. Humble origins are no excuse for surrender. The mother of Camus was illiterate; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  So I’ve come to believe that if there is to be a solution to the self-perpetuating Underclass, it must come from blacks, specifically from the black middle class. Blacks might have no other choice.

  Whites — liberal or otherwise — have not been emotionally committed to the cause of black Americans since the triumph of the civil rights revolution, which culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Around the same time, white liberals were pushed out of the movement by the Black Power crowd; the ignorant lies of black anti-Semitism drove out other whites, depositing some in the chilly precincts of neoconservatism; the preposterous visions of black separatism convinced others that it was time to take a walk. To equate “black pride” with the hatred of whites was reverse racism; it was dumber politics.