You and I have met such teachers in New York; they exist all over the country now, passing on their own incomplete skills to the young. And the young are leaving. Wilson cites the appalling situation in the Chicago public schools. Of 25,000 black and Hispanic students who enrolled in the ninth grade in 1980, only 9,500 finished four years later; of these, only 2,000 could read at the twelfth-grade level. In the predominantly black and Latino New York public-school system, 39.7 percent of all sixth graders failed to meet the standard in reading, and 43.7 percent failed mathematics. By the time these kids get to eighth grade, the failure rate is 60 percent. One third of the city’s one million students drop out before graduation (the percentage is much higher among blacks and Hispanics). Those who do graduate are often not much better off. They aren’t ready for the real world of the last decade of the twentieth century, and nobody knows this better than the corporations in the city itself.
The New York Telephone Company reports that only 16 percent of the applicants for entry-level jobs are able to pass simple exams in vocabulary and problem solving. When J.C. Penney and Mobil Oil announced they were moving their corporate offices out of New York, they cited the lack of a quality work force as one of their major reasons. More than half the freshmen entering City University from public schools fail the writing and math courses. Last summer, four New York banks reserved 250 jobs for high school graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds. They were to be given crash courses in job preparation and had to pass some entry-level tests simple enough for a “bright sixth grader.” Only one hundred of these high school graduates could pass the tests, which included such rigorous questions as, “How many quarters are there in seventeen dollars?”
So in a time when the old barriers to blacks have fallen, when the doors of the establishment have at least partially opened, we are seeing that too many young blacks can’t even walk in the door. There was a time when some of us thought that the education problem could be solved by integration; that is no longer possible in most big-city schools because there simply aren’t enough white students to integrate with. In New York, white public-school enrollment declined more than 45 percent from 1968 to 1980; in Chicago it was 60 percent, in Detroit 75 percent. Much of this exodus was the result of white flight, which superficially resembles racism; alas, it’s more complicated than that.
Again, the issue is class. White parents pull their kids from the public schools, placing them in parochial or private schools (or leaving the city for its suburbs) because they want their children to be educated. It’s as simple as that. The black middle class does the same thing for the same reason. They don’t feel they can educate their children in schools that are violent, drug-ridden, seething with anger, or dominated by the anti-intellectual ethos of the Underclass.
You blame the schools and their administrators. So do I, to some extent. There are too many incompetent teachers, too much flab in the curricula, too slovenly a set of standards for students. But in the end, a school can’t educate a human being; an education is not something “given” to somebody like a suit of clothes. You cannot absorb learning passively, as if it were the check arriving every two weeks in the mailbox. You must work at an education, generally for your entire life; like anything worth having, you must earn it. You must take it. Humble origins are no excuse for surrender. The mother of Camus was illiterate; he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
So I’ve come to believe that if there is to be a solution to the self-perpetuating Underclass, it must come from blacks, specifically from the black middle class. Blacks might have no other choice.
Whites — liberal or otherwise — have not been emotionally committed to the cause of black Americans since the triumph of the civil rights revolution, which culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Around the same time, white liberals were pushed out of the movement by the Black Power crowd; the ignorant lies of black anti-Semitism drove out other whites, depositing some in the chilly precincts of neoconservatism; the preposterous visions of black separatism convinced others that it was time to take a walk. To equate “black pride” with the hatred of whites was reverse racism; it was dumber politics.
So whites will pay taxes, which in turn will support welfare and rotten schools and second-rate hospitals; whites will see to it that the police and the firemen and the sanitation men do their work in the ghettos. But it might be a long time before whites will cry again the way they did for Emmett Till or the little girls who died in the Birmingham bombing. Or for Medgar Evers. Or Malcolm. Or King.
So salvation (if it’s possible) will be up to the black middle class — for several reasons. One simple reason is that the departure of the black middle class from the ghetto helped intensify and concentrate the Underclass. In one sense, that exodus was itself the most obvious symbol of the triumph of the civil rights movement. For more than a decade, middle-class and working-class blacks have been heading downtown (or uptown, or out of town, depending upon the city), renting better apartments, buying houses or condos, seeking out better and safer schools for their kids, less melodramatic lives for themselves. According to a study by Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen, some 13 percent of black families now have incomes over $25,000; 44 percent of that group own their own homes; 8 percent are headed by a college graduate (compared with 19 percent of whites), 17 percent hold managerial or professional jobs. Middle-class blacks have not yet achieved parity with whites, but in a very important way, they are part of a splendid success story.
But they have left behind the growing catastrophe. You know this to be true. In the bad old days, when you were young, the ghettos were populated by a broad range of black Americans. There were black doctors and lawyers, clergymen, and musicians to be seen — and emulated — by the young. You know that Harlem was never paradise (to mention the most famous black ghetto); it always had its share of unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, broken marriages, and welfare. But when you and I were young, the middle class was still there, serving as what William Julius Wilson calls “a social buffer.”
The young saw every day that there was great diversity in black life, socially and economically, and plenty of reason for pride. As writer Nicholas Lemann has pointed out, there were healthy role models for the young: people who worked, didn’t commit crimes, use drugs, or aim only to get high on a Saturday night, thousands who were not reduced to welfare (except as temporary relief) and thought of it as a shameful condition. These people didn’t wait for the landlord to sweep the stoop or change a light bulb; they didn’t have to be dragged in protest to school or a library; they didn’t sneer at “dead-end” jobs. Such families wouldn’t give racists the satisfaction of seeing them in degraded conditions. They were too proud for that. And too proud to depend upon the kindness of strangers. A true man was someone who housed, clothed, and fed his family. There was no other definition.
And because such people lived in the ghetto, everybody gained. This was the ironic by-product of the racism that created the ghetto in the first place. You remember how you got your first jobs: someone heard they were hiring at American Can, or there was a slot open at the A & P, or the bottling plant needed help. The news came from people you knew on the streets or who lived in the same building, men and women who were working themselves and knew of other jobs. The barbershop was a communications center, or the candy store, or the corner bar, or the church. In addition, there were black people in the ghettos who could inspire the young. This kid stayed in school and studied hard because he wanted to be like that lawyer. We will never know how many kids in Harlem were inspired to play music by the regal sight of Duke Ellington walking on Lenox Avenue or Art Tatum getting out of a new car in front of Minton’s. We can’t count the number who wanted to speak like Adam Clayton Powell. Or be as hip as Miles Davis or as elegant as Sugar Ray Robinson.