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August 05, 2005

War On Poverty, Racism Turning To Hopeless Quagmire?

Ever notice that though it took the Left just a few weeks to start calling the Iraq War a quagmire, we've been in Bosnia (a war unsanctioned by the UN) for longer than we were in Vietnam?

Where is the outrage?

Where are all the progressive studies of how our tax dollars could have been better spent?

More importantly, how long has it been since Lyndon Baines Johnson declared War On Poverty? Like Vietnam, that was a Democrat war. By my reckoning, it's been well over 40 years. How long before we admit that the War On Poverty is a miserable failure? How many more taxpayer dollars must we throw at an intransigent social issue that's not going to get any better?

The sad thing is, the answer has been staring us in the face for 40 years. We just didn't want to hear it then:

Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Times series “Class Matters” and you still won’t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.

By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto “baby mamas.” Not so; it is a largely low-income—and disproportionately black—phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal—one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.

So why does the Times, like so many who rail against inequality, fall silent on the relation between poverty and single-parent families? To answer that question—and to continue the confrontation with facts that Americans still prefer not to mention in polite company—you have to go back exactly 40 years. That was when a resounding cry of outrage echoed throughout Washington and the civil rights movement in reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Department of Labor report warning that the ghetto family was in disarray. Entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the prophetic report prompted civil rights leaders, academics, politicians, and pundits to make a momentous—and, as time has shown, tragically wrong—decision about how to frame the national discussion about poverty.

The big irony here is that Moynihan was a Democrat - the last of the great liberals. But like all classic liberals, he was also a realist:

Moynihan, then assistant secretary of labor and one of a new class of government social scientists, was among the worriers, as he puzzled over his charts. One in particular caught his eye. Instead of rates of black male unemployment and welfare enrollment running parallel as they always had, in 1962 they started to diverge in a way that would come to be called “Moynihan’s scissors.” In the past, policymakers had assumed that if the male heads of household had jobs, women and children would be provided for. This no longer seemed true. Even while more black men—though still “catastrophically” low numbers—were getting jobs, more black women were joining the welfare rolls. Moynihan and his aides decided that a serious analysis was in order.

Moynihan went beyond the numbers to look at the structure of the family. He challenged the orthodoxy of race relations. He dared to hypothesize that the same pathology at play in the 19th-Century Irish underclass might be at work in the fractured black family:

He also described, through pages of disquieting charts and graphs, the emergence of a “tangle of pathology,” including delinquency, joblessness, school failure, crime, and fatherlessness that characterized ghetto—or what would come to be called underclass—behavior. Moynihan may have borrowed the term “pathology” from Kenneth Clark’s The Dark Ghetto, also published that year. But as both a descendant and a scholar of what he called “the wild Irish slums”—he had written a chapter on the poor Irish in the classic Beyond the Melting Pot—the assistant secretary of labor was no stranger to ghetto self-destruction. He knew the dangers it posed to “the basic socializing unit” of the family. And he suspected that the risks were magnified in the case of blacks, since their “matriarchal” family had the effect of abandoning men, leaving them adrift and “alienated.”

The answer, he concluded, was strong families that could mold children's characters. Only marriage would produce the kind of secure economic environment needed to bring about parity with whites:

...marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to “shape their children’s character and ability” in ways that lead to upward mobility. Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality.

Oddly enough, Johnson fully backed Moyhihan, showing great courage by announcing that "Negro poverty is not the same as white poverty" and coming up with a plan to address it differently. But the civil rights and feminist establishments, seeing their paths to power eroding before their eyes, attacked swiftly. And thus this promising liberal movement, which might have born great fruit, came to nothing.

Moynihan was not the only one to note the similarities between poor black and Irish underclass families. Thomas Sowell has also noted that the values found in black culture mirror those of poor whites in the South:

"The cultural values and social patterns prevalent among Southern whites included an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by strident rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery." These were transmitted, Sowell argues, to southern blacks--although, in fact, most colonial blacks lived in the southern tidelands, which Fischer says were settled by rather different folk from the West Country of England, people more like Thomas Jefferson than Andrew Jackson. But leave that aside. Sowell makes a convincing case that the folkways described by Grady McWhiney in Cracker Culture are similar to those of ghetto blacks today: "What is painfully ironic is that such attitudes and behaviors are projected today as aspects of a distinctive 'black identity,'" he writes, "when in fact they are part of a centuries-old pattern among the whites in whose midst generations of blacks lived in the South."

This is not the only place where Sowell challenges the currently received version of the history of blacks in America and presents his own alternative. Among American academic and media elites it is taken as given that American slavery was motivated by anti-black racism, and was a peculiarly and uniquely vicious institution. Nonsense, says Sowell. Slavery existed everywhere in the world up through the 19th century, and peoples of all kinds--Europeans as well as Africans, Asians as well as Slavs (who gave their name to slavery), white Americans captured by the Barbary pirates--were enslaved at one time or another. Whites were indentured servants in colonial America. Slavery in America produced racism, he argues, not the other way around.

But more important than the origin of black cultural pathology is the interesting fact that there was a Black Renaissance after Reconstruction, though the civil rights establishment does not like it to be spoken of, or taught in schools. How this flowering of learning and economic development came to pass, in an era of rampant and institutionalized racism, is both admirable and unexplained:

And despite that racism, American blacks moved forward after Emancipation. Sowell writes at some length of the practical difficulties faced by southern slaveholders--especially George Washington and John Randolph of Roanoke--who wanted to free their slaves. But he concentrates less on what he calls white treatment of blacks and more on the actions of blacks themselves.

He describes the rapid advances in literacy and learning made by blacks in the "missionary schools" established by New Englanders in the South. He records the brilliant achievements of Dunbar High School in Washington from 1870 to 1955. He argues that there was less difference between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, and more mutual respect, than is generally thought. He points out that northern blacks outscored southern whites in armed forces tests in World War I, and that the sharp differences in black and white test scores so common today did not exist then, when there were sharper differences between the scores of various groups of whites.

Sadly, that trend was not to continue. The Civil Rights Era, which should have been a Golden Age for blacks, produced not just freedom, but a sense of grievance and entitlement:

The real disaster came, in Sowell's view, in the 1960s. The high incidence of unmarried parenthood among blacks was not a legacy of slavery or segregation. The expansion of welfare encouraged single parenthood; weak law enforcement resulted in high crime that destroyed housing values in black neighborhoods; cultivation of a sense of grievance encouraged "redneck" patterns of behavior, "the counterproductive attitudes toward education found even in middle-class black communities."

After 40 years of throwing money and intrusive legislation at the twin problems of black poverty and racial discrimination, when are we going to admit the the solution lies, not on the pull end, but on the push end?

That government cannot "pull" blacks out of poverty? That now that the major obstacles have all been removed, blacks must put forth the effort to "push" themselves out of poverty?

Forty years of refusal to face reality have made the problem worse, not better. Black families do not operate under some alternate form of reality: to pretend they do is to inflict an insidious form of racism on them. To treat them as less intelligent than we are, less industrious, less than fully human - less than fully responsible for their own actions.

And that is not the right response. Because when you look down on another human being, it makes it hard for him to look himself squarely in the mirror with any sort of respect.

Posted by Cassandra at August 5, 2005 08:42 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Van Helsing at August 5, 2005 01:13 PM

Posted by: Old Testament Liberal at August 5, 2005 07:44 PM

Posted by: Old Testament Liberal at August 5, 2005 08:25 PM

Posted by: model_1066 at August 11, 2005 12:54 PM

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