Furthermore, the way the unemployment rate is calculated makes it a misleading indicator in poor areas. The only people counted as unemployed are those who are still actively looking for a job, that is, those people who register at unemployment offices. Uncounted are all those too disabled to work, those in prison, those working in the underground economy, and those who have given up even looking for a job.
It is also possible to measure the rates of people “not working,” including those in all of the above-uncounted categories. Looking at all American men of working age, 27 percent are not working. Among African-American men, over 35 percent are not working. And among African-American men who have not completed high school, 63 percent are not working. At the end of the longest period of prosperity ever measured, with unemployment at historic lows, five out of eight black men who dropped out of school are not working.19
Economists speak of “labor force attachment.” Quite obviously, too many inner-city residents—especially men—are not attached to the labor force. The problem is a self-reinforcing one. Without a reliable work history, one appears to be a less desirable employee. Once an adult male has been out of work for a significant length of time, he may no longer consider himself part of the work force at all. He sees little chance of ever getting a decent job, and the hopelessness he feels only strengthens his unemployability. He no longer “sees” even the jobs that might be available.
DESCENT INTO HELL
Joblessness and consequent poverty, low levels of education and consequent hopelessness, and segregation and consequent alienation from middle-class norms all combine to create a fertile field for nurturing workers in the drug trade. Young men can earn more in hours than their peers in low-paying jobs do in weeks. Children are recruited as “runners” because of their relative immunity from prosecution, and mothers with no other source of income may look the other way when their sons come home with gifts of money, food, clothing, and other needed items.
With the illegal drug trade comes violence. In addition, during the 1980s and the first years of the 1990s, a staggering increase in the availability of guns, including sophisticated, high-powered, rapid-fire assault weapons, sent the murder rate in the inner cities skyrocketing. As guns became the accepted way of resolving drug disputes, more and more people uninvolved in drug trafficking also acquired and began using them, sometimes for protection, sometimes simply to resolve private disputes.
These weapons have terrorized the wider community. Author Geoffrey Canada, who grew up in an impoverished part of the Bronx and now works with and advocates for youth, reminds us that physical violence has long been a way of settling disputes within the ghetto.20 Before the proliferation and easy availability of the guns, however, this violence was linked to physical strength, cleverness, courage, and the degree of gang organization, which provided a natural check on the level of violence. Violence was largely a way of establishing a pecking order within a gang or between gangs. Once the new individual in the neighborhood had fought to secure his place, or one gang had demonstrated a convincing superiority over another, a certain tenuous stability would be established that kept the violence under some degree of control. With assault weapons, however, it is not only easier to maim and kill, but it also takes little courage and no strength or skill. Anybody can kill anybody anytime, and there are no natural limits. According to 1998 data, a fifteen-year-old African-American male from Washington, D.C., faced a one-in-twelve chance of being murdered before reaching his forty-fifth birthday.
Although still higher than they were a generation ago, the levels of violence and crime in the cities have fallen dramatically since the mid-1990s. Everyone wants to take credit, of course, and it is not entirely clear what the cause or causes have been. Local police departments, most notably in New York, point to their “zero tolerance” policies, instituted in the early 1990s after some studies indicated that even minor deterioration within a community led to increased crime and violence (the “broken window effect”). Under zero tolerance, people committing minor crimes like loitering or defacing property with graffiti are arrested and prosecuted. Critics, however, have noted that crime and violence rates seem to have fallen just as strikingly and just as fast in cities without such policies. They further note that these policies have led to selective enforcement of laws, with young people of color bearing the brunt of police intervention.
Advocates of the unprecedented expansion of the prison system over the last twenty years have also taken credit, pointing to longer sentences as the major reason for the decrease in crime. And it is likely that just removing certain people from the streets—what criminologists call the “incapacitation effect”—has indeed served to decrease “high-rate offenses” like burglary and robbery, where incapacitation of offenders might make a difference. But closer study of the statistics shows little or no relationship between the severity of a state’s laws and decreases in murder, rape, or assault in that state and only a modest effect on the rates of robbery.21
There is general agreement that two factors have had at least some role in reducing crime and violence. One is the fading of the ghetto crack epidemic. The popularity of any particular drug has a natural cycle lasting fifteen to twenty years. When cocaine recycled back into popularity in the early 1980s, it entered the ghetto in the form of crack because it was cheap and easy to sell in small doses. But cocaine is a stimulant, and smoking crack leads to especially intense though brief (thirty minutes) stimulation. The intensity of the stimulation leads directly to higher levels of violence, while the brevity of the high puts the addict almost immediately back out in the street needing more. That epidemic has now receded, crack having been replaced again by the depressant heroin, lowering the levels of drug violence.
Most important in reducing crime and violence, however, has been the growth in the economy and the falling rates of unemployment. If one believes that a major cause of inner-city violence is desperation, then an expanding economy—as limited as its effect on the inner city may be—reduces that desperation.
Substance abuse, including a general increase in the use of illicit drugs, is a major problem everywhere in our society, but its damage is especially obvious in the inner city. There, hopelessness and despair are endemic, leading to an intense desire to escape and a sense that one has little to lose. Intoxication provides a seemingly easy, affordable route “out,” and drugs are ubiquitous and easily available. Even young children know where drugs are sold. To complete a vicious cycle, as drug use in the ghetto becomes more common, social prohibitions relax. Increasingly, children have addicted people for role models.
Social disorganization and a consequent loss of parental control also help to create a fertile environment for the development of addiction. With less family-imposed structure, young people become even more susceptible to the peer pressure that is everywhere powerful during adolescence. Middle-class adolescents “experiment” with drugs and alcohol, too, and lots of them become addicted. It’s more than coincidental, of course, that our language usage has middle-class kids “experimenting” with drugs and using them “recreationally.” We use no such mitigating language when speaking about drug use among black ghetto adolescents and young adults.
Finally, of course, affluent people who do become addicted have access to addiction treatment programs not available to those from the ghetto. Most cities do offer some limited kind of public drug treatment program, but these tend to be outpatient programs that send the addict back every night to the very environment that produced the problem in the first place. The few inpatient programs in place are generally too short-term to give sobriety enough time to take hold before the recovering person returns home.
To make addictive behavior even more damaging to poor communities, it has played a major role in spreading that modern plague, AIDS. HIV infection is not, of course, a behavior, but high incidences of drug addiction and sexually transmitted diseases among the urban poor mean that a disproportionate number of those infected with HIV are
African American. Difficulties in accessing health care mean that a disproportionate number of them will develop full-blown AIDS. Although African Americans are only 12 percent of the population, they now account for nearly half (47 percent) of new AIDS diagnoses. In the United States in 2000, almost two-thirds of women and almost two-thirds of children reported with AIDS were African American. Among infected young people (ages thirteen to twenty-four) almost two-thirds are African American.22 While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not break down its AIDS statistics by economic class, its reports make it all too clear that poverty, and not race, is the determining factor in this disproportionate rate of HIV infection among African Americans.23
Increasingly, AIDS is becoming a disease of the poor.
“WHY DON’T THEY JUST GET JOBS?”
The poor are frequently criticized for their lack of initiative and motivation, but after eighteen years in the inner city, I must disagree. Most inner-city residents are hard working, scratching out a living for themselves and their families by stacking several part- or full-time jobs at minimal wages one on top of another. In fact, it always surprises me that so many of them are as motivated than as seem to be. Given all the strikes against the poor, any realistic look into the future is bound to seem grim indeed. In the end, though, high aspirations usually collide with the reality of limited vocational options. Like most people in our individualistic culture, the poor ultimately blame themselves for their lack of success, and can easily lose whatever self-confidence they have been able to muster. What little public assistance exists is often administered in ways that make it difficult to move back into the world of self-sufficiency, especially when self-sufficiency is defined as a series of exhausting jobs that don’t pay a living wage.
Middle- and upper-class perceptions that ghetto residents lack proper motivation have many sources, not the least of which is our belief that anybody can “make it” in America, which leads directly to the assumption that there must be something wrong with anyone who doesn’t. But as their dialect indicates,24 black inner-city residents are severely isolated from the rest of society and so, not surprisingly, can lack certain social and job-related skills necessary for life in the wider society. If one has seen relatively few people get up in the morning and go to work on a regular basis, if one has not lived in an environment where punctuality is important or necessary, if one has not learned “appropriate” deference toward superiors, if one has not even learned how to deliver excuses in a sincere and believable manner, then one will be misunderstood. Most of us could not say where we learned such skills, but we have learned to dress well for a job interview even if the place to which we are applying has few employees who dress well, even if the job we are applying for will not require us to dress well. We will make sure that we are absolutely on time at work each and every day during the first weeks or months on the job, a probationary period during which we know that even reasonable excuses for tardiness are likely to be dismissed. During that probationary period we know we should take few breaks and appear eager to work. If one has not learned such behavioral skills, one’s behavior may very well be misread as disrespectful, lazy, or slovenly.
The middle-class perception of many poor people is that “they don’t want to work.” In my experience, that is rarely the case, but cross-cultural miscommunication is easy.
VICTIMS TO BLAME
The poverty and hopelessness of life in the ghetto make it difficult for residents to develop self-esteem by conforming to the values and ideals of the larger society or to gain prestige in a socially acceptable fashion. When asked by pollsters, many ghetto residents continue to hold to the values of the wider culture, though they may find it impossible to live by them. They consider education important, but inferior schools and other obstacles to formal learning mean that less than half of them graduate from high school and only a fraction go on to vocational school or college. Marriage has been a goal, but all the issues discussed above lead to single-parent families. People have respect for the law, but for those on welfare bureaucratic rules make staying within the letter of the law virtually impossible, the lack of adequate jobs makes illicit work alluring, and the militarization of law enforcement that turns the ghetto into a battleground foments anger and resentment toward the law and its representatives.
Trying to live up to a set of values without real hope becomes painful. Gradually, within the ghetto, a parallel status system has developed, particularly among the young, in opposition to wider cultural norms. Perhaps oversimplifying, Massey and Denton nevertheless come close to the truth:If whites speak Standard American English, succeed in school, work hard at routine jobs, marry, and support their children, then to be “black” requires one to speak Black English, do poorly in school, denigrate conventional employment, shun marriage, and raise children outside of marriage. To do otherwise would be to “act white.”25
The extent of this oppositional value system varies. Raising children outside of marriage, for instance, has certainly become the norm. Similarly, learning Standard English is not very high on anyone’s priority list. On the other hand, only certain subgroups publicly aspire to do poorly in school or avoid conventional employment. The growth of an oppositional value system in the ghetto has received an enormous amount of attention in the media, so the young man lounging on the street corner unwilling to work has become for the wider public the face of the ghetto. But it is also true that, as poverty continues to strangle generation after generation, this oppositional culture has become ever more established, and members of the ghetto who continue to hold the values of the wider society come under increasing pressure to change.
Are individual behaviors an important factor in inner-city poverty? Of course. But historically, the negative structural forces came first and have never gone away. Fifty years ago, before urban renewal and the interstate highway program, before the jobs moved away, before the upper and middle class moved out, before a multitude of societal forces struck with devastating effect, the African-American ghetto was a far different place. In attacking poverty we certainly must confront the realities of “ghetto-related behavior,” but we must not become confused about root causes. Mere survival within the “surround” indicates enormous strength and resilience. Observe carefully in any inner-city neighborhood, and you will see many strong, resourceful, independent people who are not only keeping their heads above water but doing their best to strengthen the community as well. The problem is that these people are swimming against an overwhelming current of forces that constantly threatens to overpower even the strongest.
Four
WELFARE IN MODERN AMERICA
There is an enduring myth that earlier in our history government stayed out of the business of welfare. When people were in trouble, according to the myth, extended families and neighbors helped out. When that wasn’t enough, charities stepped in to see a person through. Part of the problem today, we’ve come to believe, is that we depend on the state to do things that family, friends, and charity used to take care of.
In fact, the care of Americans in need has always involved some combination of state aid, private institutional support, and purely voluntary assistance. In both England and colonial America, local governments provided assistance to the destitute, and this practice continued well into the nineteenth century. In order to stave off riots or other civil disturbances, city governments often provided food or shelter during hard economic times. From the beginning, there was public concern about the cost of this relief and its effects on taxes. The publicly supported poorhouses of the nineteenth century were spectacularly unsuccessful attempts to reduce the financial burden on government. Local governments hoped to reduce welfare costs by bringing everyone who required support under one roof and creating economically self-sustaining communities. Far from being self-sustaining, however, the cost of the poorhouses to the government was considerably more than the previous meager welfare payments. Even the federal government got involved in
an early form of welfare after the Civil War, offering pensions to veterans of that war and their surviving families. These benefits were later extended to veterans of all wars. The first “widows’ pensions” were available to the wives of those veterans. Before the program was discontinued prior to World War I, its cost had risen to 18 percent of the total federal budget, far greater than any comparable program since.
In the late nineteenth century, some employers became part of the welfare state by offering pensions to employees. Later, as part of a “welfare capitalism” movement in the decades before the Great Depression, some larger companies experimented with pensions and other benefits as a way of maintaining company loyalty and retiring older, less productive employees. These benefits could never be counted on, however, because they depended upon the continuing economic health and largesse of an employer. It was only with the growth of unions during the early decades of the twentieth century that employers were brought firmly into the administration of the welfare state through pensions, disability insurance, and health coverage.
But to say that some mixed forms of public assistance have always existed is not to say that they were ever adequate. While some employers have continued to provide good pensions and health benefits, concern that the “undeserving poor” would take advantage of too generous programs and fear that the cost of providing adequate welfare services would be exorbitant have generally left public programs at levels that did little more than keep people from starvation and utter destitution.
Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen Page 7