There is no single answer. Much of the solution lies in a more determined and better use of government resources, Part of it lies in so-called self-help efforts–things such as mentoring programs that put young African-Americans in close contact with successful black adults. But perhaps the hardest part lies in breathing life into an almost faded dream–of an America that is truly integrated instead of divided into warring worlds. This week, African-Americans will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the March on Washington, which did much to make people aware of the need to bring together the two Americas. That need has not gone away.
Government obviously is doing a crummy job of meeting the needs of poor single mothers and their children. Daniel Patrick Moynihan tried to improve matters in 1988 by pushing through a welfare-reform package that provided for structured programs and support to allow welfare-dependent mothers to get training and work. Despite scattered signs that the approach can be effective, that initiative remains grossly underfunded; for though states relish kicking people off welfare, they hate paying the tab for enabling recipients to fend for themselves.
Maybe Bill Clinton will do better. His Working Group on Welfare Reform, Family Support and Independence held hearings last week in Washington, searching for a program that will, among other things, make welfare dependency a transitional rather than permanent state. But any real reform will have to survive attacks from the left and right, and its prospects are by no means assured.
Making welfare work would be only a beginning. For the black family’s problems do not revolve around welfare. The very fact that so many people are on public assistance means that something has gone seriously wrong. That “something” concerns jobs. According to figures compiled by sociologist William Julius Wilson and his colleagues, in 1980 there were only 56 employed black men for every 100 black women in the Northeast between the ages of 20 and 44. A significant number of the “missing” men are either in prison or prematurely dead; an even larger number, however, simply can’t find (or are no longer looking for) work. Private employers are not exactly rushing to recruit urban-ghetto dwellers; and big government jobs programs have gone out of style. But unless the country can figure out a way to provide jobs for those out-of-work black men (or unless interracial marriages become the norm), many black women will continue to search in vain for desirable mates to accompany them to the altar.
But as Margaret Simms, of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, observes, there are some underlying problems that even full employment couldn’t solve. “if we got all of these [unemployed] people jobs, would they get married?” she rhetorically asks. It’s a safe bet that many would not. For one thing, not only poor blacks but Americans of all colors and classes are increasingly avoiding (or ending) marriages. Add to that trend an attitude evident among a certain segment of the ghetto population that holds “traditional values” in disdain, and you have a prescription for social disorder.
Conservatives argue that government programs, by giving people something for nothing, eliminated the incentive to work in inner cities and created an amoral “culture of dependency.” That argument, I believe, is largely nonsense. But there is another “cultural” argument that cannot be easily dismissed, which contends that morality among some people was indeed lowered-not by government programs but by the ghetto itself. Sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton argue that the very act of segregating blacks in lower-class ghettos created conditions in which alienation thrives. Inevitably, some people made to live in such places say, “To hell with what people in the mainstream think.” Massey and Denton, in short, blame segregation for the creation of an “oppositional culture that devalues work, schooling and marriage.”
One of the central attributes of that culture is what could be called a no-fault attitude, a conviction that “nothing I do is my fault, since the white man created the awful conditions in which I live.” White America is largely responsible for so many poor urban blacks being trapped in racially segregated ghettos. It was not black Americans, after all, who decided to segregate cities and leave the worst neighborhoods to blacks. Some people relegated to such communities take that truth, marinate it with undigested civil-rights rhetoric and use it as a rationalization for irresponsibility. Whatever objectionable actions they may commit (from child abandonment to rape to murder), they end up protesting, like Flip Wilson’s Geraldine, “The Devil made me do it.” As Milton Morris, vice president for research of the joint Center, notes, “When black young people slaughter other black young people on the street…they all come back to ‘Look what the white people make us do’.”
If Massey and Denton are correct, society’s success at providing a pathway out of inner-city misery may depend less on government programs (or even so-called self-help projects) than on whether whites are willing to welcome blacks to their neighborhoods. At this point, many blacks have abandoned hope that such a day will ever come. Given how skittish some whites get when even well-to-do blacks try to move into certain white areas, the skepticism is more than justified. Nonetheless, redemption for those blacks who have rejected mainstream values may be possible only if they can be convinced that they have mainstream options.
To understand that is to understand a larger point: that black culture is not separate from white society and that effective solutions to so-called ghetto pathologies cannot be crafted by blacks walled off from a larger America. This is not to say that self-help programs don’t work. Some work stunningly well. But the debate over whether help must come from blacks themselves or from the larger society is, in great measure, a phony debate. Common sense dictates that solutions be appropriate to the problems they are supposed to solve. Blacks themselves can solve only some facets of some of the problems in black urban communities. As the Joint Center’s Committee on Policy for Racial Justice noted, blacks cannot “create jobs on the scale needed; nor can we restore the economy to include more jobs of moderate skill and decent pay…This is pre-eminently the work of government.”
One can quibble over whether the government should have the “pre-eminent” role; but clearly the government must be deeply involved, in everything from designing jobs programs that work to enforcing open-housing laws. These days, of course, it is popular to say that government is too incompetent to do much of anything well. We accept such a prognosis at our peril. For barring a new American revolution, no other entity exists to deal with so many of the problems that the United States confronts.
As the nation grapples with this latest social crisis, it’s worth keeping two other facts in mind. One is that for all the handwringing over unmarried mothers, single parenthood is not necessarily dysfunctional. MacArthur Prize Fellow and Joint Center president Eddie Williams notes that he himself is the product of a single-parent household, that his father died when he was 5 and his mother never remarried, and that he doesn’t think he turned out so bad. The other fact is that nothing anyone is likely to do will return America to the 1950s. Moreover, even during the 1950s, when values were supposedly better, teen births soared. As Stephanie Coontz points out in “The Way We Never Were,” “Young people were not taught how to ‘say no’ they were simply handed wedding rings.”
Even if we cannot return to a simpler time, we should be able to come up with social policies that work better than those now in place. The political system, we must remember, is intended not to change the nation’s morality but to reflect it. And though the society is far from agreement on what to do about marriage, everyone agrees that children deserve a chance. If parents are increasingly unable to give them one, we must find more ways for government to help.
We should also remember, however, that the black family has seen dark days before. As Coontz points out, “In almost every decade, for 200 years, someone has ‘discovered’ that the black family is falling apart.” Yet even during slavery and in the decades thereafter, as historian Herbert Gutman and others have established, blacks demonstrated an abundance of what are now called family values. Those precise values may in some respects, be changing. But the strength of character that allowed blacks to survive still exists, as shown by countless black people who (whether from double- or single-parent households) manage to lead richly productive lives. As a nation, we might well be better off if we searched as diligently for lessons in the lives of those survivors as we probe for insights into those who, for whatever reason, fail.
How important are the following reasons young black people today do not get married?
(Percent saying very important) 51% Women can’t find enough eligible men they would want to marry 49% They don’t have enough money between them to set up a household 41% Men don’t want to be tied down 34% It’s easier to support a child with welfare if the woman stays single 34% It’s easier just to live together THE NEWSWEEK POLL, AUGUST 12-15, 1993
