(1986-06-15) Lemann Origins Of Underclass

Nicholas Lemann explores the Origins of the Under Class. The way that the two versions of black life since the sixties fit together is through the idea of the bifurcation of black America, in which blacks are splitting into a middle class and an underclass that seems likely never to make it. The clearest line between the two groups is family structure (Single Parent Family)... Why, during a period of relative prosperity and of national commitment to black progress, has the bifurcation taken place?

The black underclass did not just spring into being over the past twenty years. Every aspect of the underclass Culture in the ghettos is directly traceable to roots in the South -- and not the South of slavery but the South of a generation ago. In fact, there seems to be a strong correlation between underclass status in the North and a family background in the nascent underclass of the Share Cropper South.

What happened to make the underclass grow so much in the seventies can best be understood by thinking less about welfare or unemployment than about demographics -- specifically, two mass migrations of black Americans. The first was from the rural South to the urban North, and numbered in the millions during the forties, fifties, and sixties, before ending in the early 1970s. This migration brought the black class system to the North virtually intact, though the underclass became more pronounced in the cities. The second migration began in the late sixties -- a migration out of the ghettos by members of the black working and middle classes, who had been freed from housing discrimination by the civil-rights movement. Until then the strong leaders and institutions of the ghettos had promoted an ethic of assimilation (if not into white society, at least into a black middle class) for the underclass, which worked up to a point. Suddenly most of the leaders and institutions (except criminal ones) left, and the preaching of assimilation by both blacks and whites stopped. What followed was a kind of free fall into what sociologists call social disorganization.

The best solution for the ghettos would be one that attacks their cultural as well as their economic problems, and that takes place away from the ghettos. One such idea would be to bring back the Work Projects Administration (WPA)... A new federal program like the WPA would create jobs where Workfare programs only require people to find them.