The Problem of Race in America

http://www.fredoneverything.net ^

[DR GIBBOUS T HILL]

The Problem of Race in America

We do not speak of the black underclass. We need to begin.

For over five years now I have gone as a reporter with the police, into the cities and the suburbs, into Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver. I have visited prisons and jails, spent night shifts in the precincts where whites don't go. What I have seen of the vast festering hordes of the black forgotten is grim. White America doesn't grasp the magnitude of the underclass, its isolation, its hopelessness, its resistance to change. Or its anger.

Go into the sprawling necrotic wastelands of the urban conglomerations. As you cross the racial divide, the world turns black, English changes, people walk differently, body language alters. In eight hours in a police car you will never see a white face. Broken windows in abandoned buildings gape at the night, home to crackheads and derelicts. Lean young men gaze at police cars with blank hostile eyes.

Go, say, to South Chicago (actually, don't: you wouldn't last an hour) where the city warehouses unwanted blacks in huge high-rise projects, ugly megaliths erupting from bleak concrete, with their own police stations and terrible schools with dropout rates of seventy-five percent. Go into homes where in mid-afternoon a half-dozen men sit listlessly before the television, along streets where they sit for hours on stoops, doing nothing. There is nothing for them to do.

The isolation of these people from the surrounding country, from anything at all except the ghetto, is near absolute. For months on end black kids here never see a white face, except on television. Nothing connects them emotionally with the greater society. They have nothing in common with the European heritage of the United States, know little of it. These are people who don't know that the English Channel separates England and France, can't tell you within a hundred years when World War I was fought or who fought it, aren't aware of ever having heard of the Bill of Rights, have never read an entire book. About anything. Ever.

If you think I'm exaggerating, think again.

Not European, not American in the usual sense, neither are they African, though they sometimes grasp at African-ness so as to have a sense of belonging. They can't name two African countries, or find Africa on an outline map of the world. They aren't African. They are urban blacks of the deep city.

The underclass does not change. Nice suburban whites hear of the growth of the black middle class, marvel at the sight of black men dating blonde Anglo women, and think that the country moves toward interracial amity. Don't kid yourself. The center of gravity of black America is the ghetto. It doesn't shrink as some few of its residents pull themselves into the middle class and leave. Maybe it grows.

The underclass is so large, so insular, that the slight mixing around the edges can't diminish it. The ghetto is self-sustaining, a world unto itself. The United States has become a first-world European nation with Kenya distributed throughout it.

The cultural gap probably widens. White America races ahead, measuring its advance in megahertz and the colonization of cyberspace. The black middle class largely keeps pace. The underclass barely knows how to read. Welfare and television, our latter-day bread and circuses, keep the lid on. Explosions come, as witness the riots in Los Angeles, but they are few. In the short term they will likely remain few. We have learned how to sedate the ghetto.

We have not learned what to do about it.

The newspapers, seldom much aware of what happens around them, speak of prejudice and oppression. Blacks of the huge, rotting, unseen downtown do not suffer from discrimination or oppression. Rather they suffer from abandonment. Nobody needs or wants them. They cannot do anything that anyone wants done. Whites feed them, talk solicitously when they remember the city at all, and live elsewhere.

If whites can do nothing about the underclass, neither can the underclass. The culture of the ghetto resists change. Many whites think of black culture as meaning an embarrassing incompetence that needs only to learn the superiority of advanced European ways. No. Black culture exists. It is rich, warm, vibrant, classy, pungent, and it is the same from Philadelphia to San Diego. Blacks like it. They don't want to be white. They don't speak the bastardized English of downtown because they couldn't learn to say, "He is" instead of, "He be." Even to white eyes there is a certain gelded quality to a black executive speaking precise white English.

We have become two nations sharing a country.

Economics works against change. No academic urge is found in the ghetto, no entrepreneurial vitality, none of the traits that make for success in a techno-industrial society. The ghetto is permanent. Hispanics seem to be pulling themselves up the ladder in the long tradition of America's immigrants, Asians do it readily, but the forgotten blacks of the ghetto don't.

What now? Do we expect things to remain stable forever? Have we, as seems to be the case, decided that no solution exists, and therefore we might as well ignore the problem? I think so. The enthusiasms of the era of civil rights have waned. Whites have moved on to other things. My circle of acquaintances, sophisticated in the ways of politics, seldom mention the chasm and, when they do, it is to concede its utter intractability.

People don't say it, not often, but they think it: There is nothing we can do. Meanwhile hatred gathers in the urban blasted heath. The riots of Los Angeles could have happened anywhere. The people of the ghetto believe that whites are the cause of their misery, and they are, just under the surface, very angry. One day this is going to bite us.

[gieriscm]

The riots of Los Angeles could have happened anywhere.

BS! "You Loot We Shoot" is universally understood.

[BTCM]

My solution is to end all welfare and assistance programs to able bodied individuals and families of all colors. End the food stamp program as it exists. Give commodities to the needy as we once did. Powdered milk, flour, corn meal, grits lard, powdered eggs, dried beans and a little baking powder. Thats it. Get your lazy ass out of bed and cook breakfast for your illegitimate (bastard)brood. No more potato chips, soft drinks and prepared food from the deli.

[headsonpikes]

The so-called 'underclass' is an artifact of the modern Welfare State.

The various agencies of a modern government develop client bases of those requiring 'services', and just like their private sector equivalents, are eager for repeat business from customers who say, "Super-Size me!"

Dismantle the Welfare institutions and bureaucracies, and Voila! - no underclass.

[Little Ray]

Meanwhile hatred gathers in the urban blasted heath. The riots of Los Angeles could have happened anywhere. The people of the ghetto believe that whites are the cause of their misery, and they are, just under the surface, very angry. One day this is going to bite us.


That is what they make machine guns and napalm for...

We don't owe these people anything. They OWE us for shelter, food, etc., none of which they have earned.

[Fenris6]

Built and funded by liberal democrats under the "Great Society Programs" - welcome to the Plantation!

Exactly. We've lost two generations of blacks to liberal social programs designed to increase their dependency on race hustlers and political grifters.

[layman]

The enthusiasms of the era of civil rights have waned.

It's hard to remain enthusiastic when best efforts continue to fail. I think more black spokesmen like Bill Cosby and fewer black spokesmen like Jesse Jackson would accomplish much more than Welfare and Affirmative Action have accomplished. And successful blacks, of which there are many, must work harder to influence their communities regarding education and family responsibility. The answer, in other words, lies within the black community itself.

[varon]

The ghetto is permanent. Hispanics seem to be pulling themselves up the ladder in the long tradition of America's immigrants, Asians do it readily, but the forgotten blacks of the ghetto don't.

The Hispanics and Asians are even a smaller minority, yet they manage to move up the ladder.

The blacks have had a head start on Hispanics and Asians with government sponsored and enforced affirmative action programs, lowering of standards and implementing of shortcuts to provide a "leg up" to the blacks, yet to no avail.

It is not lack of opportunity or lack of caring or willingness to help. It is the lack of desire that is the problem.

The Hispanics and especially Asians have a drive, respect and understanding of rewards that hard work and education will bring. They hold up academic achievers as role models while blacks hold them up to ridicule.

Even manual labor would pull many blacks out of poverty which begs the question why Mexicans can get and do those jobs and blacks can't/won't?

To be very simplistic, the problem can be defined by one word, ATTITUDE!!!

[Kay Syrah]

Well, it seems to be a racial problem, but your essay ignores the successes of immigrant blacks. You do support your thesis that it is the unique American ghetto culture that is the problem tho, but you don't address the "root" cause.

At the bottom of all of this is the government intrusion into the traditional means for the poor to get ahead. They used to open door stoop businesses, accumulate a few bucks, buy and old building become slum lords, accumulate wealth, start new business move up and out of poverty. Regulation and government competition in the cheap housing market pretty much strangle the small initiatives from which better things come. Ownership becomes nearly impossible, and job creation becomes the duty of the goverment.

Even to white eyes there is a certain gelded quality to a black executive speaking precise white English.

That's a particularly offensive statement. And tells me you probably aren't as well intentioned as you would like to seem in your essay. Learning the language of the dominant culture is a tool for freedom, not a symbol of oppression. We all relax on our own turf with our own language and culture. They shouldn't be at war, and aren't except to those who hate the dominant culture and blame it instead of themselves for failure. Ownership is freedom, and it is discouraged, by those that say they want to improve things and those that are benefitting from the underclass industry. Now who can afford to or would want to buy the ugly high rise warehouses called gov't housing and begin to recraft a new neighbourhood. The massive interference of the gov't is the problem. They get crappy schools, crappy housing, crappy services, and they have no control over changing the situation. That is the root of rage.

[CasearianDaoist]

Do you think it might have something to do With unrestricted immigration? Irresposible social programs? Sociatal breakdown?

Do you think that there was not always this element, that is is just the color that has changed?

What do you sugtgest we "do" about it/ More government intervention.

This sort of "underclass" rhetoric is just a trojan horse for socialism. In fact, the term "underclass" comes right from the jargon of Marxism.

[avg_freeper]

This article is chocked full of the purple journalism ("necrotic wastelands of the urban conglomerations", "ugly megaliths erupting from bleak concrete") and tired old cliches one expects from Fred's site.

Black America isn't synonymous with the big-city socialist hellholes liberals have constructed for them. Away from these "ugly megaliths" there are "black communities" that I'd feel safe strolling through barefoot at midnight. Just as there's "white neighborhoods" I wouldn't be caught sprinting through at 3:00pm (I used to live in one of those).

This train of thought, that a race of people are bound to their regression and incapable of change for the better is held widely by liberals. I think this was stated best by Professor Bunyip writing about our success in the middle east:

"How dare they foist democracy, an end to tyranny, property rights and freedom of speech on those quaint little brown-ish people, whose station in life is to remain basket cases so that superior types at the Silly and other news organs will always have someone to patronise?"

So liberals use the prejudice of lowered expectations to make their selves feel better. I believe the author of this piece uses it to make him feel worse or at least frighten others into similar dejection.

[CasearianDaoist]

You keep using this term: "permanent underclass." What evidence do you offer that it is a "class?" What eveidence do you have that it is "permenant?"

Why do you insist on using Marxist terms and rhetoric?

[Steve_Seattle]

"You keep using this term: "permanent underclass." What evidence do you offer that it is a "class?" What eveidence do you have that it is "permenant?""

I'm not using "class" in a Marxist sense, only as "a group of people." I call them "permanent," because I think there have always been people like this, and always will be. Read the novels of Dickens, or histories of the Middle Ages, or the Bible; there have always been the poor, the chronically sick, the lame, the crazy, the marginal, the misfits.

[Steve_Seattle]

"Do you think it might have something to do With unrestricted immigration? Irresposible social programs? Sociatal breakdown?"

Partially; those factors might contribute to it or make it worse. But this is not just a modern problem, something that started in the 1960s because of social programs, but a perennial problem. There will always be people who can't or won't take care of themselves, or whose mental and/or physical abilities are so limited as to make them marginally employable or unemployable.

[CasearianDaoist]

Why do you assume that the people that your are talking about have mental or physical disabilities?

You seem be talking about a wholly different phenomena than this article is discussing. These inner city people are walking around with 100 dollar sneakers.

Do the physically and mentally infirmed have a "a vibrant culture." Are you saying that the street culture of the inner city - a culture promoted, and to a degree even created by the Leftist media - is some sort of clinical manifestation of this disability? Is there some sort of aspect to their dispabilites that cauase them to end up in urban, liberal areas run by corrput political machines? Is there a clinical aspect to this as well

Well, of course you are not suggesting any such thing. That would absurd. \

Yes, there will always be the infirmed, but is this what is really unde rdiscusision here. Is this not a rhetorical dodge of the Left? Society has always understood your point - that is why there is such a thing as charity.

The problems outlined in this article, however, are of a different sort altogether. They are the direct result of the social and racial policies of the Left that have been implemented over the last 50 or so years.

The charitable amongst us would call the results a "failure" of those policies; many others would say that this sort of rot is in fact the whole point of those policies.

[gregwest]

About 20 years ago, I was contemplating the very things Dr. Hill writes about while I was composing a song called "Effingham Street." Effingham Street used to be a lively downtown commercial district in Portsmouth, Virginia. My grandmother used to haul me down there with her while she tried on dresses and shopped for shoes at some fancy ladies stores. I was always bored stiff waiting for her to get done, but I enjoyed going downtown, getting a some candy at the Leggett store kiosk, and sometimes riding the bus down the street (it only cost a dime back then).

Portsmouth's Effingham Street today is the dividing line between the fashionable "Old Town" district where upscale whites and blacks live in restored 19th century homes and stroll along the waterfront while the sun shines. At night, you only go outside to go somewhere else with your car doors locked. From Effingham Street outward for several miles is nothing but urban blight and the individuals Dr. Hill described. It's a shame.

Similarly, I grew up not far away in an urban neighborhood in Norfolk called Fairmount Park. It was a nice place back then, but the blacks moved in and the whites moved out. Today, there are nightly shootings, drugs, vandalism, etc. I'm sure there are a lot of you who can tell the same story.

Is it racism that creates ghettos? Years ago I would have said yes, but as I get older, I come to think of it as a security problem, not a racial one. As a young man without a family, I was concerned only for my own safety, and of course I thought I was "immortal." Now as a mid-40s guy with kids, I've had to worry about the safety of predominantly black high school where my son was beat up by black students and robbed for $20 and a movie pass. My daughter graduates from there this year. She's the last of my children in public schools. (We home school the younger two).

I've seen racism. My parents came from an era when the last vestiges of segregation were hanging on. Once, when I was 10, I brought home a new classmate who had moved into the neighborhood. He happened to be what we called Negro back then. When he left the house a couple of hour later, my mom told me to never invite him back and threw away the glass he drank some milk from.

Racism can be overcome. Even my mother, in her later years, moderated her prejudices and befriended African-Americans who worked with my father when his job in the Coast Guard took him to Alaska. Racism is a product of fear. Once my parents were out of an environment where they felt threatened by black people, they were willing to embrace them as individuals.

Remembering my mother's poor example (but appreciative of the changes in her attitudes later on) I raised my children to be "color blind." As I worked in the Air Force, I served side-by-side with people of all races. I lived in Air Force family housing and my kids made no differences in race when choosing their friends. Of course, for the most part, that's a very controlled, secure, and safe environment. Many of the African-Americans I knew said they joined the service because it offered them a way out of the ghetto.

I spent much of my time in the service in Germany and Alaska. In Germany, if a black serviceman went jogging before sunrise or after dark, the German police would arrest them. The German's assumption was, if you're black, outside after dark, and running, you must be up to no good. In Alaska, the biggest complaint that black service members had was lack of hair care items in the local stores. (The servicemembers were outsiders to the local racial issues between Alaskan Natives and non-natives).

When we returned to Virginia in 1998, I knew what I was coming back to. This time I was bringing a family. I worried about the safety of my color-blind kids. I didn't want to impart any racist sentiments into them, because they really didn't have any racial prejudices at all. I had successfully insulated them from having to face that particular evil.

The big question was, how could I teach my kids to be wary of the black underclass for their own protection and not impart prejudice? They had black, middle-class friends. They would be "babes in the woods" if I didn't do something.

I decided to just explain to them that they would encounter a different culture and that they'd have to assess individuals on their own merits. They'd have to discern between people who shared the moral values we had taught them and those whose morality taught them that ignorance, intimidation, violence, and crime were acceptable as long as you didn't get caught. I prepared them as gently as I could.

After a couple of months back in Virginia, as they finished up the school year, I asked them how it was going, to see if they'd had any problems. At this time, my oldest was like 12 or 13. He said that the black kids in middle school cut in front of white kids in the lunch line and dared them to challenge them or report it to the teacher. Coercion and threats were used to occasionally muscle kids for their lunch money, pencils, lined paper, etc. In short, it hadn't changed at all.

As my oldest kids finished their school years, they learned coping skills, disarming potential adversaries with goodwill and humor. They learned, however, to be careful. Two of my kids' best friends were African-American kids who were people of high standards, good manners, ambition, and respect. I was glad to see it. Nevertheless, my kids have learned to be "wise as serpents but harmless as doves" like Jesus said.

This year, my daughter will graduate with honors. Some of her black school mates will go on to college with scholarships. Many more will join the military or go to work in the shipyards or other useful professions. Yet a large number of her class, perhaps at least a third, will head into the correctional system in the next couple of years.

Perhaps this isn't the appropriate forum for such a discussion. Baring your soul on such an issue can be dangerous. I can't say I have any solution to the problem, just some observations. Most of all, I just want to say that it's not my fault.

I never owned a slave.
I never oppressed anyone or denied anyone his rights.
It isn't my fault that some blacks reject the same free education that set my kids on the path to success.
It's not my fault that someone's mother slept with five guys and had five children by different men, all of whom abandoned them and left them in poverty.
It's not my fault that one out of four black men in Virginia can't vote because they have felony convictions.

White people can't fix the consequences of bad choices by blacks. We face the same challenges. Could it be that a higher percentage of whites simply make better choices? Do fewer white teenagers use drugs or have out-of-wedlock births? Perhaps it is racist that the business world has its own rules that make it difficult for a Shaneeqwa to get ahead, or someone with dreadlocks, or someone who walks around with the waistband of his trousers around his knees. We all make adjustments to succeed. Try going through basic training and refusing to get a haircut, shave, and wearing a uniform improperly. Success imitates success.

I once traveled to Beatty, Nevada on an Air Force mission to the test ranges in the desert. In that little town on the edge of Death Valley, there was a "help wanted" sign in every store and restaurant window. I have been in 39 of the 50 states. In every small town I passed through, there were farms needing farmhands, there were businesses hiring. There were opportunities to start and own businesses, even so humble as a hot dog stand on Main Street. The United States is a land of opportunity still.

If I was a poor, ghetto-bound black, I'd consider doing what some of my Air Force fellows had done. I'd get up and get out. The military has many opportunities for rewarding careers and education. If I was completely destitute, I'd panhandle enough cash to get on a Greyhound bus and go out to the heartland of America. There are jobs there. There is opportunity. Sure, you start at the bottom, but the road goes up from there. That's what most of us do. (In the Air Force, they called E-1's "jeeps." It stood for junior enlisted expendable personnel.)

I apologize for the length of this post. To conclude, the reason Effingham Street died as a commercial area and Fairmount Park blighted was not a black/white issue. It was a security issue. When blacks moved into those areas, whites didn't feel safe. Why didn't they feel safe? Because crime measurably increased. Why do crime, drugs, vandalism, robbery, rape, and violence increase when blacks move into a neighborhood? That's not for me to answer. That's for the Jessie Jacksons, Al Sharptons, and other black leaders to answer. Bill Cosby's "turn the mirror around" speech is a first step. Louis Farrakhan has been saying similar things for years.

When can real interracial dialog and healing begin? Let's sit down an talk once my youngest son can go to school without fear of getting shoved to the back of the lunch line or having his lunch money beaten out of him by a classmate from Fairmount Park. See you then.

[American Quilter]

My solution is to end all welfare and assistance programs to able bodied individuals and families of all colors.

I agree. I used to think this was a peculiarly American problem, but in England it's as bad or worse, for the same reasons. The physician Theodore Dalrymple (pen name) wrote a terrific book about the growing British underclass ("Life at the Bottom"). They're mostly white, have the same problems, and behave the same way as the black American underclass.

The reason? Bad choices. Lives empty of religion and meaning. Absolutely no awareness of any way of living outside their growing pools of poverty, violence, and hopelessness. A focus solely on any form of instant gratification, with no thought of goals or self-improvement. An absolute refusal to take responsbility for their lives, and an equally absolute expectation that the government will provide them with food, shelter, and money (all of which are supplied by the idiotic welfare state there).

This has absolutely nothing to do with race, and everything to do with culture.

[psychedelicate63]

BTCM 4 President!!! :0)

[ihv2bme]

-"The people of the ghetto believe that whites are the cause of their misery'-

They (they being ANYONE)want a better life get off your *sses and work for one!

I have grown very tired of hearing issues that deal with the "Black vs. White" The "White Male" has it the toughest in America! I AM A FEMALE and aware of this fact!