The truth is that such rising frustration with conditions in the inner city was hardly restricted to whites. In most black neighborhoods, law-abiding, hardworking residents have been demanding more aggressive police protection for years, since they are far more likely to be victims of crime. In private — around kitchen tables, in barbershops, and after church — black folks can often be heard bemoaning the eroding work ethic, inadequate parenting, and declining sexual mores with a fervor that would make the Heritage Foundation proud.
In that sense, black attitudes regarding the sources of chronic poverty are far more conservative than black politics would care to admit. What you won’t hear, though, are blacks using such terms as “predator” in describing a young gang member, or “underclass” in describing mothers on welfare — language that divides the world between those who are worthy of our concern and those who are not. For black Americans, such separation from the poor is never an option, and not just because the color of our skin — and the conclusions the larger society draws from our color — makes all of us only as free, only as respected, as the least of us.
It’s also because blacks know the back story to the inner city’s dysfunction. Most blacks who grew up in Chicago remember the collective story of the great migration from the South, how after arriving in the North blacks were forced into ghettos because of racial steering and restrictive covenants and stacked up in public housing, where the schools were substandard and the parks were underfunded and police protection was nonexistent and the drug trade was tolerated. They remember how the plum patronage jobs were reserved for other immigrant groups and the blue-collar jobs that black folks relied on evaporated, so that families that had been intact began to crack under the pressure and ordinary children slipped through those cracks, until a tipping point was reached and what had once been the sad exception somehow became the rule. They know what drove that homeless man to drink because he is their uncle. That hardened criminal — they remember when he was a little boy, so full of life and capable of love, for he is their cousin.
In other words, African Americans understand that culture matters but that culture is shaped by circumstance. We know that many in the inner city are trapped by their own self-destructive behaviors but that those behaviors are not innate. And because of that knowledge, the black community remains convinced that if America finds its will to do so, then circumstances for those trapped in the inner city can be changed, individual attitudes among the poor will change in kind, and the damage can gradually be undone, if not for this generation then at least for the next.
Such wisdom might help us move beyond ideological bickering and serve as the basis of a renewed effort to tackle the problems of inner-city poverty. We could begin by acknowledging that perhaps the single biggest thing we could do to reduce such poverty is to encourage teenage girls to finish high school and avoid having children out of wedlock. In this effort, school- and community-based programs that have a proven track record of reducing teen pregnancy need to be expanded, but parents, clergy, and community leaders also need to speak out more consistently on the issue.
We should also acknowledge that conservatives — and Bill Clinton — were right about welfare as it was previously structured: By detaching income from work, and by making no demands on welfare recipients other than a tolerance for intrusive bureaucracy and an assurance that no man lived in the same house as the mother of his children, the old AFDC program sapped people of their initiative and eroded their self-respect. Any strategy to reduce intergenerational poverty has to be centered on work, not welfare — not only because work provides independence and income but also because work provides order, structure, dignity, and opportunities for growth in people’s lives.
But we also need to admit that work alone does not ensure that people can rise out of poverty. Across America, welfare reform has sharply reduced the number of people on the public dole; it has also swelled the ranks of the working poor, with women churning in and out of the labor market, locked into jobs that don’t pay a living wage, forced every day to scramble for adequate child care, affordable housing, and accessible health care, only to find themselves at the end of each month wondering how they can stretch the last few dollars that they have left to cover the food bill, the gas bill, and the baby’s new coat.
Strategies like an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit that help all low-wage workers can make an enormous difference in the lives of these women and their children. But if we’re serious about breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty, then many of these women will need some extra help with the basics that those living outside the inner city often take for granted. They need more police and more effective policing in their neighborhoods, to provide them and their children some semblance of personal security. They need access to community-based health centers that emphasize prevention — including reproductive health care, nutritional counseling, and in some cases treatment for substance abuse. They need a radical transformation of the schools their children attend, and access to affordable child care that will allow them to hold a full-time job or pursue their education.
And in many cases they need help learning to be effective parents. By the time many inner-city children reach the school system, they’re already behind — unable to identify basic numbers, colors, or the letters in the alphabet, unaccustomed to sitting still or participating in a structured environment, and often burdened by undiagnosed health problems. They’re unprepared not because they’re unloved but because their mothers don’t know how to provide what they need. Well-structured government programs — prenatal counseling, access to regular pediatric care, parenting programs, and quality early-childhood-education programs — have a proven ability to help fill the void.
Finally, we need to tackle the nexus of unemployment and crime in the inner city so that the men who live there can begin fulfilling their responsibilities. The conventional wisdom is that most unemployed inner-city men could find jobs if they really wanted to work; that they inevitably prefer drug dealing, with its attendant risks but potential profits, to the low-paying jobs that their lack of skills warrants. In fact, economists who’ve studied the issue — and the young men whose fates are at stake — will tell you that the costs and benefits of the street life don’t match the popular mythology: At the bottom or even the middle ranks of the industry, drug dealing is a minimum-wage affair. For many inner-city men, what prevents gainful employment is not simply the absence of motivation to get off the streets but the absence of a job history or any marketable skills — and, increasingly, the stigma of a prison record.
Ask Mac, who has made it part of his mission to provide young men in his neighborhood a second chance. Ninety-five percent of his male employees are ex-felons, including one of his best cooks, who has been in and out of prison for the past twenty years for various drug offenses and one count of armed robbery. Mac starts them out at eight dollars an hour and tops them out at fifteen dollars an hour. He has no shortage of applicants. Mac’s the first one to admit that some of the guys come in with issues — they aren’t used to getting to work on time, and a lot of them aren’t used to taking orders from a supervisor — and his turnover can be high. But by not accepting excuses from the young men he employs (“I tell them I got a business to run, and if they don’t want the job I got other folks who do”), he finds that most are quick to adapt. Over time they become accustomed to the rhythms of ordinary life: sticking to schedules, working as part of a team, carrying their weight. They start talking about getting their GEDs, maybe enrolling in the local community college.