They form a singular presence in our inner-cities: young,
African-American men hanging out aimlessly on stoops at mid-day,
seven days a week.
Meet the urban dropouts. These days about half of all young
black men in the U.S. drop out of high school. In Detroit and
Cleveland the rate is
73 percent. Here in St. Louis, 62
percent of black males drop out. But that’s just half of the story.
When these young men drop out of school, they also drop out of
society. Long before they reach adulthood they have given up any
hope of leading successful lives and, instead, have consigned
themselves to lives of poverty and alienation and
meaninglessness.
Talk about a Lost Generation.
Dropouts give various reasons for leaving school, but the
general theme
is they “follow what they see,” and that, because they are black
and from the ghetto, they never had a chance to succeed anyway.
Others drop out because, being functionally illiterate, they found
school embarrassing and a waste of time.
While middle class youths have their sights set firmly on the
future, urban dropouts live only for the present. Education and
self-improvement are things one does for the future, a future they
cannot even imagine. “Extreme present-orientedness, not lack of
income or wealth, is the principal cause of poverty in the sense of
‘the culture of poverty,’ wrote Edward Banfield in his 1970 urban
study
The Unheavenly City.
Such a world view is completely foreign to middle and upper
class youths who are taught early the importance of education,
sacrifice and hard work, to delay gratification and to plan for the
future. In fact, most of us in the middle class are too
future-oriented, so much so that we read self-help books about
mindfulness techniques to learn how to “live in the moment.”
At an age when middle class kids are just beginning to
contemplate all the possibilities life has in store — whether they
will attend college or perhaps go into the family business — these
adolescents have decided life is already over for them. The rest of
their days will be spent with other dropouts, hanging out on the
stoop, smoking weed and listening to degrading rap music. And there
is no one around to encourage them to think or act differently.
Their biological fathers (or inseminators) are missing in action.
Their mothers suffer the same pathologies. Besides, if mom gets on
their case too often about working they’ll go “stay” somewhere
else. After all, grandma will always take you in. For a while,
anyway.
Conservative thinkers have long distinguished between two
radically different types of poverty: the temporary, hard luck
kind, and the permanent culture of poverty which affects the
multi-generational underclass. While the working class may
experience occasional economic hardship or destitution due to
certain external factors (a recession, layoffs, death of
breadwinner, illness), the underclass suffers immutable poverty due
to internal factors, such as a radical present-orientedness, low
cognitive skills, disdain for education, high rates of teenage
pregnancies, low rates of marriage, a high degree of
disorganization, marginalization from organized civic life, and
strong feelings of fatalism, dependence and inferiority.
DESPITE THESE OBVIOUS and intractable problems, many leftist
intellectuals insist all that is needed is a transfer of wealth to
the underclass, because, after all, money can buy anything. These
intellectuals would do well to read Banfield or Susan Mayer’s
What
Money Can’t Buy, both of which make convincing cases that
doubling the income of the underclass does nothing to improve their
situation; they simply spend the extra cash on luxuries or gambling
and not on, say piano lessons or books. Nor will doubling one’s
income magically transform bad mothers and fathers into good,
diligent, industrious, caring parents, which is, more than any
other factor, what poor children need to be successful.
Not having grown up amidst the Culture of Poverty, I am
admittedly puzzled by such utter hopelessness. To a working class
person very few things are entirely hopeless. Just stay in school,
get your G.E.D. Learn a trade. Get some kind of job. Work hard and
you’ll rise in the world, guaranteed. It’s not all that difficult.
That is, unless you have already given up.
