But travel a few blocks farther in any direction and you will also experience a different side of Mac’s world: the throngs of young men on corners casting furtive glances up and down the street; the sound of sirens blending with the periodic thump of car stereos turned up full blast; the dark, boarded-up buildings and hastily scrawled gang signs; the rubbish everywhere, swirling in winter winds. Recently, the Chicago Police Department installed permanent cameras and flashing lights atop the lampposts of Madison, bathing each block in a perpetual blue glow. The folks who live along Madison didn’t complain; flashing blue lights are a familiar enough sight. They’re just one more reminder of what everybody knows — that the community’s immune system has broken down almost entirely, weakened by drugs and gunfire and despair; that despite the best efforts of folks like Mac, a virus has taken hold, and a people is wasting away.
“Crime’s nothing new on the West Side,” Mac told me one afternoon as we walked to look at one of his buildings. “I mean, back in the seventies, the police didn’t really take the idea of looking after black neighborhoods seriously. As long as trouble didn’t spill out into the white neighborhoods, they didn’t care. First store I opened, on Lake and Damen, I must’ve had eight, nine break-ins in a row.
“The police are more responsive now,” Mac said. “The commander out here, he’s a good brother, does the best he can. But he’s just as overwhelmed as everybody else. See, these kids out here, they just don’t care. Police don’t scare ’em, jail doesn’t scare ’em — more than half of the young guys out here already got a record. If the police pick up ten guys standing on a corner, another ten’ll take their place in an hour.
“That’s the thing that’s changed…the attitude of these kids. You can’t blame them, really, because most of them have nothing at home. Their mothers can’t tell them nothing — a lot of these women are still children themselves. Father’s in jail. Nobody around to guide the kids, keep them in school, teach them respect. So these boys just raise themselves, basically, on the streets. That’s all they know. The gang, that’s their family. They don’t see any jobs out here except the drug trade. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve still got a lot of good families around here…not a lot of money necessarily, but doing their best to keep their kids out of trouble. But they’re just too outnumbered. The longer they stay, the more they feel their kids are at risk. So the minute they get a chance, they move out. And that just leaves things worse.”
Mac shook his head. “I don’t know. I keep thinking we can turn things around. But I’ll be honest with you, Barack — it’s hard not to feel sometimes like the situation is hopeless. Hard — and getting harder.”
I hear a lot of such sentiments in the African American community these days, a frank acknowledgment that conditions in the heart of the inner city are spinning out of control. Sometimes the conversation will center on statistics — the infant mortality rate (on par with Malaysia among poor black Americans), or black male unemployment (estimated at more than a third in some Chicago neighborhoods), or the number of black men who can expect to go through the criminal justice system at some point in their lives (one in three nationally).
But more often the conversation focuses on personal stories, offered as evidence of a fundamental breakdown within a portion of our community and voiced with a mixture of sadness and incredulity. A teacher will talk about what it’s like to have an eight-year-old shout obscenities and threaten her with bodily harm. A public defender will describe a fifteen-year-old’s harrowing rap sheet or the nonchalance with which his clients predict they will not live to see their thirtieth year. A pediatrician will describe the teenage parents who don’t think there’s anything wrong with feeding their toddlers potato chips for breakfast, or who admit to having left their five- or six-year-old alone at home.
These are the stories of those who didn’t make it out of history’s confinement, of the neighborhoods within the black community that house the poorest of the poor, serving as repositories for all the scars of slavery and violence of Jim Crow, the internalized rage and the forced ignorance, the shame of men who could not protect their women or support their families, the children who grew up being told they wouldn’t amount to anything and had no one there to undo the damage.
There was a time, of course, when such deep intergenerational poverty could still shock a nation — when the publication of Michael Harrington’s The Other America or Bobby Kennedy’s visits to the Mississippi Delta could inspire outrage and a call to action. Not anymore. Today the images of the so-called underclass are ubiquitous, a permanent fixture in American popular culture — in film and TV, where they’re the foil of choice for the forces of law and order; in rap music and videos, where the gangsta life is glorified and mimicked by white and black teenagers alike (although white teenagers, at least, are aware that theirs is just a pose); and on the nightly news, where the depredation to be found in the inner city always makes for good copy. Rather than evoke our sympathy, our familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of fear and outright contempt. But mostly it’s bred indifference. Black men filling our prisons, black children unable to read or caught in a gangland shooting, the black homeless sleeping on grates and in the parks of our nation’s capital — we take these things for granted, as part of the natural order, a tragic situation, perhaps, but not one for which we are culpable, and certainly not something subject to change.
This concept of a black underclass — separate, apart, alien in its behavior and in its values — has also played a central role in modern American politics. It was partly on behalf of fixing the black ghetto that Johnson’s War on Poverty was launched, and it was on the basis of that war’s failures, both real and perceived, that conservatives turned much of the country against the very concept of the welfare state. A cottage industry grew within conservative think tanks, arguing not only that cultural pathologies — rather than racism or structural inequalities built into our economy — were responsible for black poverty but also that government programs like welfare, coupled with liberal judges who coddled criminals, actually made these pathologies worse. On television, images of innocent children with distended bellies were replaced with those of black looters and muggers; news reports focused less on the black maid struggling to make ends meet and more on the “welfare queen” who had babies just to collect a check. What was needed, conservatives argued, was a stern dose of discipline — more police, more prisons, more personal responsibility, and an end to welfare. If such strategies could not transform the black ghetto, at least they would contain it and keep hardworking taxpayers from throwing good money after bad.
That conservatives won over white public opinion should come as no surprise. Their arguments tapped into a distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor that has a long and varied history in America, an argument that has often been racially or ethnically tinged and that has gained greater currency during those periods — like the seventies and eighties — when economic times are tough. The response of liberal policy makers and civil rights leaders didn’t help; in their urgency to avoid blaming the victims of historical racism, they tended to downplay or ignore evidence that entrenched behavioral patterns among the black poor really were contributing to intergenerational poverty. (Most famously, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was accused of racism in the early sixties when he raised alarms about the rise of out-of-wedlock births among the black poor.) This willingness to dismiss the role that values played in shaping the economic success of a community strained credulity and alienated working-class whites — particularly since some of the most liberal policy makers lived lives far removed from urban disorder.