The Millions More Movement rally kicked off in Washington, D.C.
Saturday morning with Congressman Mel Watts (D-N.C.) declaring that
the gathering’s goal was “finding a way to eliminate poverty in the
richest country in the world.”
This is a straightforward, altogether commendable objective, and
the fact that Watts was followed to the podium by the usual clown
circus does not diminish its seriousness. Indeed, if you set aside
the brotha-ing and sistah-ing, the solidarity chanting and
separatist ranting, the new-covenant-huckstering and
crypto-socialist fist-pumping, and of course the Farrakhan fringe
— in other words, if you set aside the next six hours of rhetoric
on the Mall — you are left with Watts’s basic question: What can
we do to reduce, and eventually eradicate, poverty?
On an individual level, the solution to poverty is by now well
established: 1) Finish high school; 2) Don’t get married while
you’re a teenager; 3) Don’t have a baby until you’re married. If
you follow these three steps, the odds that you’ll wind up
impoverished are less than 8%. If you don’t follow them, your odds
rise to 80%.
But of course the solutions Watts and his cohorts are truly
interested in are collective ones, federal policies designed to
hoist impoverished people out of the miseries that beset them. The
poignancy of such a demand is impossible to ignore, especially in
the wake of last month’s disaster in New Orleans. The images of
predominantly black victims of the Hurricane Katrina struggling to
survive its aftermath tugged at our hearts, and we wanted to know
why the government didn’t do more to help them.
Maybe, however, our focus shouldn’t have been on what the
government didn’t do for the poor black residents of New Orleans
but on what the government couldn’t do for the poor black residents
of New Orleans: It couldn’t make them more disciplined, or more
resourceful, or more law-abiding. Bearing in mind the three steps
an individual can take to avoid poverty, it must be noted that 68%
of births to black women nationwide are out-of-wedlock. In
Louisiana, that number is 76%. The rate among black women in New
Orleans is still higher, perhaps as high as 85%. (By comparison,
the out-of-wedlock birth rate among all American women now stands
at 34%.) Which means that even if New Orleans is rebuilt better
than before, even if every displaced resident is returned to a
spanking new home, their daily lives will still be burdened with
the pathologies — street crime, substance abuse, gang violence,
illiteracy, and promiscuity — associated with poverty. (Street
crime, substance abuse, gang violence, illiteracy and
promiscuity… sounds like a checklist of hip hop virtues, doesn’t
it?) The main thing government cannot do for the poor, in other
words, is this: It can’t keep them from screwing up their lives. It
can’t separate them from the culture of dependency and the mindset
of entitlement handed down through the Great Society programs of
the 1960s — the country’s last concerted effort to reduce and
eradicate poverty. (In 1965, the black illegitimacy rate was 26%.)
What government can’t do for the poor black residents of New
Orleans is strip them of their personal autonomy and rescue them
from the poverty of their life choices.
If the government could do such a thing, if it could strip
people of their personal autonomy, reducing or even eradicating
poverty wouldn’t be such an intractable problem. Indeed, if the
government were not circumscribed by a commitment to inalienable
human rights, the most constructive social policy it could
implement for African Americans specifically, and for all Americans
generally, would be to clamp the surgical or pharmacological
equivalent of chastity belts on boys and girls from the onset of
puberty through high school graduation. After all, why should we
allow kids to dig themselves a socio-economic hole from which
they’ll likely never climb out?
The answer, of course, is that pesky little passage about
self-evident truths and inalienable rights in the Declaration of
Independence. The government has a definite interest in preventing
kids from screwing up their lives, but it has no right to do so.
That right belongs, initially, to the kids’ parents. And it
belongs, finally, to the kids themselves.
The solution to poverty, therefore, doesn’t lie in a collective
movement. It lies in the will and discipline of individual people
who dedicate themselves to living moral lives, striving to improve
their circumstances, and providing greater opportunities for their
children. By that measure, the great betrayer of African Americans
is not their government but their groins.
That message, of course, will never be heard from the Millions
More Movement.
Mark Goldblatt (Mgold57@aol.com) is the author of
Africa Speaks, a satire of black urban
culture.
