Death of a Nation

by Dinesh D'Souza

  Nor is Coates impressed by attempted solutions. In another, more recent book, he lashes out at neighborhood gentrification, which refers to the project to transform poverty-stricken, crime-ridden neighborhoods by attracting new businesses, coffee shops and a young, upwardly mobile residential population. “Gentrification is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy,” Coates writes. He views it as “the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime.”4

  A much more comprehensive account of the urban plantation comes from the work of urban anthropologist Elijah Anderson, whose research focuses on the largely black neighborhoods of Philadelphia. While Anderson is a Philadelphia native, he approaches his topic in the manner of an anthropologist visiting a distant land, in other words, with clinical detachment. This makes his observations especially illuminating.

  Anderson begins by describing how these same urban communities were once governed by an “old head,” typically a “man of stable means who believed in hard work, family life and the church.” His acknowledged role “was to teach, support, encourage and in effect socialize young men to meet their responsibilities.” Young people “had confidence in the old head’s ability to impart useful wisdom and practical advice.” Even for those who didn’t have dads to look after them, “the old head acted as surrogate father.”

  But today, Anderson writes, “the old head is losing his prestige and authority,” displaced by drug-dealing gangs who have convinced “street smart young boys . . . that the old head’s lessons about life and the work ethic are no longer relevant.” Anderson’s point here is the urban plantation isn’t simply a continuation of earlier black communities that formed under sharecropping and segregation; rather, it is a new creation of the past few decades, with a new culture and new role models.

  The gangs have created a new “code of the street,” which is the title of one of Anderson’s books. “At the heart of the code,” Anderson writes, “is the issue of respect.” Yet this respect is obtained by “taking the possessions of others.” Anderson explains: “Possessing the trophy can symbolize the ability to violate somebody—to ‘get in his face,’ to dis him—and thus to enhance one’s own worth by stealing someone else’s.” Even trivial conflicts, such as a dispute over a pair of sneakers or a perceived insult to one’s manhood or one’s girlfriend, can result in modern-day duels that leave people gravely injured or killed.

  Even holdups at gunpoint, Anderson points out, are power transactions involving respect. “The holdup man wants first to relieve the victim of his property. The victim does not want to give it up. Yet the streetwise victim fully cooperates and may even help the perpetrator rob him. He says, ‘All right. There it is. Please don’t hurt me.’ In saying this, he is effectively submitting to the power of the holdup man. Such deferential behavior is itself often a large part of what the stickup man wants. He wants the person ‘with something’ to recognize him, to acknowledge his power and what he can do to the victim.”

  Anderson contends that “central to the issue of manhood is the widespread belief that one of the most effective ways of gaining respect is to manifest nerve. True nerve expresses a lack of fear of death . . . Conveying the attitude of being able to take somebody else’s life if the situation demands it gives one a real sense of power on the streets.” The code of the street can turn an otherwise polite and deferential person into a potential murderer.

  When a street kid is murdered, Anderson says, it is customary for friends and relatives to “vent anger at the newspaper for not running a long enough story” or to “vent at the police, calling them incompetent, racist or worse.” At the funeral, “they speak of the deceased . . . They wonder aloud why this happened, but in fact they know why. They know the boy was a drug dealer. They know he violated in some way the code of the street.” Yet among all the testimonials about the boy’s life nothing is said about these matters.

  According to Anderson, the code of the street is also built in opposition to the normal code of getting ahead in society, for example, through hard work or education. Instead, Anderson writes, gangs help to create an “oppositional culture” in which it is considered cool not to go to school, not to hold a steady job, but rather to make money through theft, extortion, selling drugs and manipulating the system of federal handouts. To play the system is, in Anderson’s words, and in the title of another of his books, to be “streetwise.”

  Perhaps the most interesting section of Anderson’s urban anthropology focuses on how streetwise males take pride in seducing women with extravagant but dishonest promises of commitment and marriage, getting them pregnant and then abandoning them contemptuously and repeating the process with other women. “The girls have a dream,” Anderson writes, “the boys a desire.”

  In Anderson’s account, “The man derides family values and . . . feels hardly any obligation to his string of women and the children he has fathered. In fact, he considers it a measure of success if he can get away without being held legally accountable for his out-of-wedlock children. To his hustling mentality, generosity is a weakness . . . Self-aggrandizement consumes his whole being and is expressed in his penchant for a glamorous lifestyle, fine clothes and fancy cars.”

  The sexual conquest begins with the “rap,” which constitutes the “verbal element of the game . . . Among peer-group members, raps are assessed, evaluated and divided into weak and strong. The assessment of the young man’s rap is, in effect, the evaluation of his whole game.” The winnings of the game are described as “hit and run” or “booty.” Moreover, “The young man not only must ‘get some,’ he must also prove he is getting it.”

  At first, Anderson writes, the impregnated women feel crushed because they realize they have been betrayed. Yet they soon discover that, in the culture of the urban plantation, having a baby becomes “a rite of passage to adulthood.” Suddenly these young women discover they have something they can call their own, and “the teenage mother derives status from her baby.” They become part of what Anderson calls the “baby club”; many similarly placed women welcome the newcomer into their fold.

  Welfare is not the reason for getting pregnant, Anderson insists. But it affords “a limited but steady income” that becomes the means for teenage women to escape the often painful circumstances of their own homes and to establish their own single-parent household. Sometimes this brings the deadbeat back, seeking the woman’s attention, not because he now cares for her but because he has his eye on her welfare check. Some men maintain a virtual harem of impregnated women whom they inveigle for money. And even when the actual father stays out of the picture, Anderson reports, the welfare check can still serve as a mechanism to “attract other men who need money.”

  Sometimes the father of the child is willing to provide as best he can. This happens rarely because “to own up to a pregnancy is to go against the peer-group street ethic of hit and run.” But in these cases too, Anderson says, welfare often provides an incentive for young women to deny the paternity of the child’s father, because “a check from the welfare office is often more dependable than the irregular support payments of a sporadically employed youth.” Because of the relative security that births to unwed mothers bring in this way, Anderson argues that illegitimacy has lost its earlier stigma and become “socially acceptable.”5

  WORST PLACES ON THE PLANET

  Reviewing these accounts of the urban plantation, I have to say that it is one of the worst places on the planet. Obviously there are more impoverished places in the Third World, such as in the favelas of Brazil or the slums of Mumbai. Crime and corruption are rife. But if you take a poor slum kid from Asia or South America and transplant him to a place with jobs and opportunity, mostly likely he or she would flourish.

  The school I attended in India, St. Stanislaus in the outskirts
of Mumbai, had day-schoolers like me who commuted from home but also a boarding population mostly of orphans who lived on campus and were under the care of the missionary priests who ran the school. The priests served as a kind of surrogate family for these boarding school students. Lacking every decent amenity that we day-schoolers took for granted, many of the boarders went on to careers as doctors, engineers and corporate executives.

  How was this possible? As I discovered, middle-class kids had lots of games and distractions but these poor kids studied four to five hours a day. They put in an hour before school started and another three or more after school let out. This more than compensated for the family advantage that I had, coming from a home with literate and relatively cultured parents. I had to work hard to compete with these students on tests and examinations.

  My experience illustrates the point that kids around the world lack money and they lack education, but the vast majority want to succeed and they want to learn. Give them education and they will eagerly seize it. Offer them employment and they will work hard and save money in order to rise up. What this means is that even the poorest communities typically sustain a culture of work and family—sometimes a surrogate family—that is necessary to survive under dire conditions and that helps produce upward mobility, perhaps even success, under more favorable circumstances.

  Not so with the urban plantation. Here there is a dearth of jobs, but what type of business would want to move into areas that are so dysfunctional and dangerous? Moreover, one does not get the sense that even if there were jobs they would attract the young men that Coates and Anderson describe with their gold chains and pimp walks and confrontational mannerisms. Can we envision these guys showing up for work at Ford or Procter & Gamble, maintaining a disciplined routine, taking instructions from authority, conducting product inventory, working the assembly line, or interacting with customers?

  Pastor Eugene Rivers worked for decades in the inner cities of the Northeast. His answer to this question is a resounding no. Almost twenty years ago Rivers published an article in the Boston Review in which he made the startling observation that “unlike many of our ancestors, who came out of slavery and entered this century with strong backs, discipline, a thirst for literacy, deep religious faith, and hope in the face of monumental adversity, we have produced . . . a ‘new jack’ generation, ill-equipped to secure gainful employment even as productive slaves.”

  Rivers’ point is that the slaves had real skills, as carpenters, plumbers, weavers, masons, mechanics, cooks and so on. However reluctant they may have been to work without pay, they did work, and consequently they developed the habits of work. Once slavery ended, such people knew how to do things and they had the work ethic to hold down a job. But this does not seem to be true of the new generation on the urban plantation. These young people are so nihilistic, so lacking in skills and motivation, that in Rivers’ searing words they “would be ineligible to qualify for slavery.”6

  This is one critical respect in which the urban plantation differs from the slave plantation. The slaves all worked while many modern urban plantation dwellers don’t, nor do they aspire to do so in the normal, productive economy. To the extent they do have jobs, those jobs are criminal assignments, and unsurprisingly many young men have been convicted of a variety of offenses, from burglary to assault to drug crimes, and have served time.

  So pervasive is this problem that, according to the Sentencing Commission, nearly one in three young African American men is at any given time in prison, on probation or on parole.7 Conviction and incarceration make their lives even more difficult, as I found out myself after my felony conviction on the campaign finance issue. It was harder for me to get health insurance and life insurance, even though my offense was a white-collar one, posing no dangers to my health or life chances. For these young men, a felony conviction makes businesses reluctant to hire them even when they are released from captivity, so the prospect of lawful work becomes even more unlikely.

  So let’s draw out the analogy between the old slave plantation and the new urban plantation. In both cases we have a group that doesn’t work, refuses to work, is sexually dissolute and obsessed with luxurious display, status and respect, and gets into duels—sometimes lethal duels—over petty objects like a pair of sneakers or insults. Just to be clear, I am not making a predictable comparison between the inhabitants of the urban plantation and the slaves. Rather, I am making one between the inhabitants of the urban plantation and the slave-owners.

  The Democratic planter class, after all, was made up of people who did nothing, whiling away their time in duels, sexual chicanery, card games, cockfights and luxurious displays. And they could get by with doing nothing because they relied on the slaves to do all the work. While their ideology proclaimed the slaves to be dependent on them, they were in fact dependent on the slaves. On the urban plantation, too, inhabitants do little or no productive work. And most of them can manage without employment because in one way or another they are dependent on the federal government.

  Another similarity between the old Democratic plantation and the new is that in both of them the family structure is in complete disarray. On the Democratic slave plantation, the slave-master was typically married, but this did not stop him from carrying on with the female slaves. As for the slaves, they might cohabit, but they could not legally marry, and their offspring were the property not of the parents but of the master. On the Democratic urban plantation, marriage, though legal, is virtually unheard of, and illegitimacy rates of 75 to 90 percent are common.

  It is tempting to attribute the breakdown of the black family today to the legacy of slavery, and many progressive scholars and pundits do exactly this. The classic work here is E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States, published in 1939. Frazier argued that the matriarchal family structure under slavery persisted into the twentieth century. Others, including diplomat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who worked for Nixon but went on to become a Democratic senator from New York, built on Frazier’s analysis to blame slavery for the modern black family in which children typically grow up without a father.8

  Let’s think about why the matriarchal model of black family life was adaptive during slavery. Slavery as an institution depreciated the role of the man as provider and protector. During slavery, fathers did not feed, clothe or put a roof over the heads of their children. The plantation owner did this. Nor could fathers protect their spouses and daughters from being humiliated or violated by the man in the Big House. Slave mothers, by contrast, not only gave life to their children but also looked after them. Consequently, the father as father became a dispensable figure, and the black family in enslavement became a matriarchal household.

  Still, the black family outlasted slavery. Recent work by scholars, notably the progressive historian Herbert Gutman, show that despite the enormous strains that slavery placed on the black family, blacks worked hard to reunite and rebuild their families after slavery, and they did so not on a matriarchal model but rather on that of the traditional “nuclear” family, which was the prevailing norm for African Americans through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century.

  Gutman’s work is confirmed by the data. In 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois estimated the illegitimacy rate for blacks to be around 25 percent. Du Bois attributed this mostly to slavery. The rate stayed roughly constant from 1900 through the early 1960s, when it soared to over 50 percent. Then it soared even more through subsequent decades so that today the illegitimacy rate for blacks is a staggering 75 percent.

  This is probably the single factor most responsible for retarding the development of young people on the urban plantation. As anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski put it in Sex, Culture and Myth, it is a “universal sociological law” that “no child should be brought into the world without a man—and one man at that—assuming the role of sociological father, that is, guardian and protector, the male link between the chil
d and the rest of the community.”9

  Malinowski’s statement was not controversial at the time. Many other anthropologists, including Margaret Mead, made the same point.10 Today, however, anyone who says that children should not be raised without fathers is routinely attacked by progressive and left-wing activists. These activists have become intellectual apologists for the expanded Democratic plantation. They have no problem with high illegitimacy rates for blacks and other minorities and resist those who treat this problem as a problem.

  The dramatic increase in black illegitimacy from 25 to 75 percent occurred during and after LBJ’s Great Society. We cannot blame it on slavery. We must attribute it to things that happened during this period, notably the emergence of an urban plantation culture that produced widespread illegitimacy and a federal government willing and ready to subsidize (and thus encourage) it. In other words, we can’t fault the Democrats of the Jacksonian era; we must fault the Democrats from LBJ’s time to our own. These Democrats have been not merely the enablers but also the cheerleaders of family breakdown on the modern plantation.

  LEARNED HELPLESSNESS

  We are now in a position to answer some of the questions raised at the outset of this chapter. Why don’t inhabitants of the urban planation get up and leave? The answer is that the culture of the plantation breeds a kind of “learned helplessness.” The term was coined by psychologist Martin Seligman, who accidentally discovered the phenomenon while doing research on dogs. Seligman and a colleague saw that dogs subjected to electric shock turned passive and made no effort to escape even though they could easily avoid subsequent shocks by jumping over a small barrier.

  Seligman subsequently applied the concept of learned helplessness to individuals. Children who do poorly on math tests begin to feel helpless about their chances for learning math. Women who are habitually shy never want to venture out into social situations because they are resigned to perpetual shyness. Torture victims develop a passivity that makes them inured to being tortured.