Piecework

But America is older now and so are we and something has changed between us. Now irony isn’t enough. Nor is bebop. Nor Camus. There is no longer any sensible way to avoid a bitter truth: in the past few years, a shadow has fallen on the once sunny fields of our friendship.

The heart of the matter is the continued existence and expansion of what has come to be called the Underclass. You know who I mean: that group of about five million black Americans (of a total of thirty million) who are trapped in cycles of welfare dependency, drugs, alcohol, crime, illiteracy, and disease, living in anarchic and murderous isolation in some of the richest cities on the earth. As a reporter, I’ve covered their miseries for more than a quarter of a century. Moving among them, from the rotting tenements to the penal corridors of public housing to the roach-ridden caves of welfare hotels, I’ve seen moral and physical squalor that would enrage even Dickens. I’ve spoken to the damaged children. I’ve heard the endless tales of woe. I’ve seen the guns and the knives and the bodies. And in the last decade, I’ve watched this group of American citizens harden and condense, moving even further away from the basic requirements of a human life: work, family, safety, the law.

For years I chose to ignore the existence of a permanent Underclass, dismissing it as the fevered dream of neoconservatives and apostate liberals; there were too many signs of genuine racial progress in this country, and I was certain that what Langston Hughes called “a dream deferred” could not be deferred forever. I believed that because you had convinced me of it. Now we both recognize the existence of the Underclass, in all its fierce negative power, but you refuse to look at this ferocious subculture for what it is: the single most dangerous fact of ordinary life in the United States.

Instead, you have retreated defensively into the clichés of glib racialism. Your argument is simple: the black Underclass is the fault of the white man. Not some white men. All white men. You cite various examples of a surging white racism: the antibusing violence in liberal Boston, the Bernhard Goetz and Howard Beach cases in liberal New York, a resurgent Klan in some places, continued reports of whites using force to keep blacks from moving into their neighborhoods, white cops too quick to arrest, abuse, or shoot down black suspects, persistent examples of racial steering in middle-class housing, the Al Campanis controversy. Certainly racism continues to be real in the United States; only a fool would deny it.

But I insist on stating that in the course of our lives much has changed. When I was a kid in the Navy, stationed in Pensacola in 1954, the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education and banned segregation in the public schools. At the time, if you possessed the Congressional Medal of Honor and were black, you could not swim at the white beaches of Florida. Throughout the South, you could not sit in just any seat on just any bus; you could not walk through the front door of any American movie house, sit at any counter in just any American restaurant. There were separate washrooms and drinking fountains for blacks and whites. The White Citizens Councils seemed to own the night. In many places blacks were denied the right to vote through poll taxes, gerrymandering, or terrorism. Blacks could not attend “white” public schools, including white state universities that they helped support with taxes. Blacks and whites could not marry each other in many states and could not even fight each other in boxing rings in others. Radio stations segregated black music. Blacks seldom appeared on television and were cast in movies as domestics or feets-get-movin’ buffoons of the Stepin Fetchit variety. When I tell this to my children, they find it hard to believe.