An understandable wish to avoid appearing racist, and to avoid offending minority voters, prevents most political leaders from addressing the question of race as it affects the crime epidemic and in its many other dimensions. This cultural gag order must be lifted if the United States is to overcome the centrifugal forces of fear and envy that threaten to tear it apart. What is truly racist is to avoid addressing the problems of black America for the sake of avoiding offending people’s sensibilities.
We cannot effectively address our nation’s most pervasive social problems unless we face up to the fact that the urban underclass, where the breakdown of the family is worst, is primarily responsible for the plagues of violent crime and drug abuse on the streets of our great cities. Blacks are not the only members of this underclass, but they are the largest proportion of it. In 1992, half of all murder victims in the United States were black. Ninety percent were killed by other blacks. There can be no more dramatic evidence of a culture’s deficiencies of values, discipline, and hope than when it turns against itself, as elements of urban America have in recent years.
The cop-out of blaming crime on poverty is morally corrupt and intellectually vacuous. When I was growing up during the Depression, there was far more poverty but far less crime. The difference was that our families and communities enforced civilized standards. We now are reaping the whirlwind stirred up by an age in which the self-appointed cultural elites sneered at the standards that helped people overcome the problems diversity can bring rather than wallow in them.
Arsonists, looters, muggers, and rioters burn, rob, and brutalize not because they are poor but because they are rotten. As Eric Hoffer has noted, “If poverty were indeed the fundamental cause of crime, history would be about almost nothing else, for the vast majority of people in world history have lived in poverty.” Today’s vicious young predators show only cold-blooded contempt for their victims. They kill not for food but for a pair of fancy sneakers. They have to be shown firmly, determinedly, and relentlessly that we will not compromise in our defense of civilized standards and values. These are not negotiable.
Another harsh but uncomfortable reality is that many of these young Americans are virtually beyond hope. A collapsed bridge can be replaced, an unsafe building torn down. But human infrastructure is not subject to quick fixes, despite the routine wheedlings of the professional povertarians, who seize on any outbreak of violence as a pretext to plead for more public funds for themselves. Continuing to take seriously these pious proclamations, frequently wrapped in threats of “long hot summers” of violence if the payoffs are not made, is not an answer to the problem but an avoidance of the problem.
To renew America, we must resolve as a matter of national policy that another lost generation will not take to the streets at the beginning of the next century. But that does not mean the federal government should take the lead role. It should never be forgotten that government helped spark the crisis by fostering a climate of dependency that still hangs over our cities. It can best right its wrong by cutting the deficit, reducing the size of government, and building a strong, growing economy so everyone in urban America who is willing to work has the opportunity to do so.
The other answer can be found inside these urban communities themselves—in the homes, the churches, the community associations, the nonprofit sector, and, where a carefully circumscribed role can be fashioned, the government. Human beings gathered into sophisticated social groupings with their own values and rules long before the welfare office and the Department of Health and Human Services opened for business. If tomorrow night, in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, New York, a man raises his hand to strike his neighbor and then lowers it again, it will not be because Congress passed a poverty program. It will be because his heart told him he should, an impulse that more likely than not was informed by a caring mother, father, or spiritual leader who took the time, free of charge, to teach him the difference between right and wrong.
To their great credit, responsible black leaders are facing up to the problem. Washington Post correspondent William Raspberry, from whom I received very constructive counsel when we met in the Oval Office, writes courageously, “The essence of black America’s problem today is behavioral and only black Americans can do anything about it. The leadership in curbing black-on-black crime, redeeming our communities, and rescuing our children must be ours.”
Racism remains a major problem in America. Most legal barriers between the races have been torn down, but powerful psychological ones remain. Many suburban whites are understandably frightened by what they see in the cities. Many members of minority groups are understandably resentful when whites are better off. Crime in the cities and the gap between rich and poor cannot be voted out of existence by Congress; each will shrink only as the economy grows. In the meantime, political, religious, and cultural leaders of all backgrounds have the responsibility to dampen the impulses of fear and envy that can fuel racism and to remind their constituencies that America can be renewed only by the common pursuit of freedom and equality that made America great.
Regrettably, some black leaders today endorse a neosegre-gationist line that could spark new interracial resentments and turn a new generation of black young people away from America. The extent of the new separate-but-equal movement on some campuses is so ridiculous that even a popular liberal comic-strip artist felt obliged to lampoon it in a series of drawings. Civil rights leaders who fought and died for their cause in the 1960s would wonder if it had been worth it to see separate dining-room tables and separate dormitories for whites and blacks. Any leader who is dismayed, as everyone should be, at the way ancient ethnic hatreds have brought brutal violence and suffering to the former Yugoslavia should want to do everything in his power to prevent ours from being the era in which such numbing hatreds take hold in America.
As our nation’s minority populations grow, greater efforts must be made in schools, churches, and other organizations to encourage a sense of national unity. It is fine to promote minority studies, for instance, but it is dangerously wrong to teach that studying the dominant culture is illegitimate. Scholars at our most prestigious universities argue with a straight face that European history, even though it is part of the continuum that resulted in the establishment of the United States, has nothing to say to America’s black, Latino, or Asian students. And yet we need only consider a prominent black such as General Colin Powell to see that in this country—where skin color and national origin are supposed to be utterly irrelevant in determining a person’s status—it is quintessentially American for a member of a minority group, even a man from a poor neighborhood in the South Bronx, not only to embrace the dominant culture but to become his era’s most celebrated defender of it.
The new separate-but-equal doctrine is just as despicably racist as the old-fashioned one, the new color bar just as insidious as the old. We seldom see Serbian-Americans lobbying for Serbian studies at the expense of Plato, or Italian-Americans saying that it is wrong to consider George Washington the father of their country since he did not come from Sicily. But minority-culture lobbyists say that blacks, Latinos, and Asian-Americans should venerate their own political and historical antecedents rather than “dead white males.”
It is essential that all people have the opportunity to study their own roots, which make our national tree so strong. But those who say that skin color alone entitles minority groups to an alternative set of national icons strike at the heart of what it means to be an American. In coming from other places to participate in our vast continuing experiment, our miraculous community of immigrants, Americans enter into a special kind of social contract. Being American is not about being white and Christian, or black and Muslim, or Asian and Buddhist. It is about being dedicated to a country that in principle offers virtually limitless opportunity to all, regardless of their background. That we have failed to turn this principle into reality in every respect does not mean we should abandon it, especially if in d
oing so we restore divisions between races and peoples that will undermine our potential to complete the task of building a truly pluralistic, strong, prosperous nation.
Abraham Lincoln fought the Civil War with a relentless and at times even a ruthless will to victory because he knew a house divided itself could not stand. His image of a single American home is one of the most enduring political metaphors ever voiced. Today there are influential voices raised in intellectual America in favor of tearing down the single roof over us all, of sending whole communities to live, in a symbolic sense at least, somewhere else. They are the ones who say it is racist to teach Shakespeare instead of African poets to black children, and racist to force Latino children to learn standard English. Such social critics mouth a humanist line whose implications are utterly unnatural and cruel. They risk taking away from innocent schoolchildren the tools they will need to be productive Americans—to say nothing of the joy and inspiration of a heritage of great minds. They threaten to tear apart the greatest social experiment in the history of man. They should be exposed for what they are: incubators of disunity, distrust, and, ultimately, hatred.
THE CORRUPTIONS OF POPULAR CULTURE AND DRUGS
Other enemies of American renewal in the cities are those in the entertainment industry who promote violence for profit, and those who propose we raise the flag of surrender in the war against drugs.
It is encouraging that the television industry is taking preliminary steps to respond to the public’s outrage at the revolting violence and sex in entertainment aimed at young people. Children whose neighborhoods are unsafe should at least have safe homes. Instead, when they watch television or listen to their stereos, the violence from the streets and schoolyards floods directly into their living rooms. Cartoon characters set things afire, rap lyrics extol the virtues of armed robbery and cop-killing, and movies make high body counts a badge of honor. They all promote violence. The vast power of our entertainment industry should be used instead to promote healing and a sense of community.
Hollywood elites claim that they are simply reflecting America and that America is sick. What they are doing is looking in the mirror. Hollywood is sick. Its values are not those of mainstream America. The depiction of violence and explicit sex sells, and Hollywood is in the business of making money. But by forgoing its responsibility to observe basic standards of decency, Hollywood has accelerated the decline of these standards in the community at large. By celebrating violence, it undermines whatever efforts families and community-based institutions are making to try to stem the tide of violence in the streets. Americans are right to be outraged at this profiteering. Unless Hollywood does even more self-censoring, it will envitably face censoring by government.
Government itself is to blame for recent signals that it is considering throwing in the towel in the fight against drugs. Late last year Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders sparked a firestorm by suggesting the possibility that drugs should be legalized. Her statement, and the administration’s failure to flatly repudiate it, set back the efforts of five successive administrations over two decades to combat the sale and use of illegal drugs. An administration that includes a number of officials who have records of casual drug use cannot credibly be the one that promotes the fight against drugs—particularly because the permissiveness toward drugs of the 1960s generation has left an ugly residue on the urban underclass, a class that did not enjoy the same possibilities for extricating itself from the poison of drug dependency.
Joe Califano, Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary in the Johnson administration, observed recently, “Putting the stamp of legality on snorting cocaine and smoking crack would increase the number of addicts severalfold. Exercising their right to free speech, Madison Avenue hucksters would make it as attractive to do a few lines as to down a few beers.” As a former cigarette smoker, Califano understands the cycle of addiction intimately. Legalization would not be a noble act of enlightened policy. It would be surrender.
In the long run we will not control crime until criminals stop being lionized by their peers. They will not stop being lionized by their peers until their own communities put their feet down and make civilized behavior the community standard.
Our first priority in fighting crime is to beef up the criminal justice system: police, prisons, and courts. In most cities across America, the once-familiar policeman on the beat has become almost invisible. What used to be a conspicuous and reassuring presence has become an ominous absence. Some cities are experimenting with what they now call community policing—actually returning patrolmen to the beat, where they can see and be seen, get to know the people, win the confidence of the law-abiding, and deter the predators. It works.
For decades social reformers viewed prisons primarily as places to save souls, raise up the downtrodden, and transform inmates’ lives for the better. This conception, embodied in the euphemism “houses of correction,” has not worked. Rehabilitation, for the most part, has been a failure. As long ago as 1975 one landmark study of more than two hundred attempts to measure the effects of rehabilitation programs concluded that these efforts had “no appreciable effect on recidivism.” According to U.C.L.A. professor James Q. Wilson, “It did not seem to matter what form of treatment in the correctional system was attempted. Indeed, some forms of treatment . . . actually produced an increase in the rate of recidivism.”
Some of the huge amounts spent in an unsuccessful effort to keep drugs out of the country should instead be spent to support nongovernment drug rehabilitation centers. There are some exciting examples. In 1988 I visited Daytop Village, a privately operated drug treatment center in Swan Lake, New York. It was heartwarming to see what Monsignor O’Brien and his colleagues were accomplishing in introducing young former addicts to a new drug-free life. The rate of recidivism was only ten percent. Phoenix House, another highly successful private program, puts addicts through a tough two-year boot camp. Thousands have emerged as productive citizens.
Even with a visible police presence and enough prison space to hold the criminal convicts, the system will not work unless judges let it work. Yet for thirty years the courts have been the institutions most directly responsible for undermining police protection for law-abiding citizens. The best way to change the character of the courts is to pick judges who are as dedicated to restraining the guilty as they are to protecting the innocent.
On a subway platform in New York in the summer of 1984, two muggers knocked a seventy-one-year-old man down to the floor, beat him viciously, and choked him as they rifled his pockets. The victim’s screams attracted two transit police officers, who rushed to help. The muggers ran, ignoring orders to stop. When the officers fired, one mugger, a career criminal, was left crippled—and he sued the Transit Authority. The courts of the State of New York recently upheld a $4.3 million damage award to the injured mugger, ultimately to be paid, of course, by those subway riders he had not yet gotten around to mugging. The victim’s claim for replacement of his shattered spectacles was rejected. If this points up the absurdity of the law’s current approach to crime and criminals, it also points up the grotesque inversion of civilized values that now characterizes life in our great cities.
We cannot successfully address the fearful increase in violent crime without restoring punishment rather than rehabilitation as the central premise of our criminal justice system. In the name of compassion, liberal judges and lawyers have reduced sentences, absolved criminals of responsibility by blaming their actions on society, and granted parole even to violent criminals. They have helped undermine the system of law and order essential to a free society. Blaming society rather than the criminal is a 1960s philosophy still in vogue today.
The shocking reaction of many in the media to Vietnam protestor Katherine Power’s case is an example of going overboard in expressing as much sympathy for the criminal as for the victim of the crime. There was honest disagreement about whether the United States should have been involved in Vietnam. But our underst
anding of those who demonstrated against the war should not lead us to excuse those who resorted to violence. In opposing war against an enemy abroad, these people waged war against innocent people at home. As syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer put it: “This was not a flower child caught up some wild afternoon in a robbery. She was found to have in her apartment three rifles, a carbine, a pistol, a shotgun and a huge store of ammunition. She is accused of having firebombed a National Guard Armory. She took part in a bank robbery in which a hero cop, father of nine, was shot dead. This is someone very hard who has now softened out of feelings of loss, principally for herself.” Newsweek’s reaction was typical of the response of much of the liberal media: “After all these years, it is hard to know whom to feel the most sympathy for. The nine children who lost a father or the young woman who lost her way in the tumult of the sixties.” In the media, buckets of tears were shed because of the psychological trauma Power went through in coming forward after having avoided trial for twenty years under a new identity in Oregon. Very few tears were left over for the nine children who lost a father who was shot in the back trying to arrest a bank robber.
Contrary to the myths of the media, tough but fair judges and sentencing based on the principle of individual accountability are not racist but benefit poor minorities, who represent 80 percent of the victims of violent crime. The poor cannot extricate themselves from poverty unless they are secure from physical violence and unless the incentive system in their community rewards good behavior and reliably punishes criminal behavior.
Politicians often complain that the money is simply not there for more police and prisons. Yet the entire criminal justice system—police, prisons, courts, prosecutors, and public defenders, local, state, and federal—accounts for less than 4 percent of government spending. That means that shifting just 2 percent of other government spending to public safety would increase the funds available for the criminal justice system by more than 50 percent. If we have the will, we do have the resources.
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