Piecework

The living face even greater hazards. One third of black New Yorkers between the ages of five and nineteen are victims of homicide, and nationally the leading cause of death for black men between the ages of sixteen and thirty-four is murder. Not smallpox. Not tuberculosis. Not influenza. Not one of the ancient plagues of the earth. Murder.

Last year, AIDS killed more black junkies in New York than it did homosexual men, and nationally blacks now account for 24 percent of all AIDS cases (roughly twice the proportion of blacks in the general population). Blacks account for half of the heterosexual AIDS cases. Half the female AIDS victims are black; two of three infants born with AIDS are black. According to the Centers for Disease Control, a black woman is thirteen times more likely to contract AIDS than a white woman. Of the fifty thousand women in New York City who are infected with the AIDS virus (but as yet free of the symptoms of the disease), 80 percent are black or Hispanic. Doctors expect that eventually all will die. AIDS researcher Beny J. Primm said at last year’s national convention of the Urban League: “My friends are afraid that they will be called racist if they cite these statistics. But I have said it is better to be called a racist now than to be called a conspirator in a conspiracy of genocide five or ten years from now, when many, many blacks will die because of your silence today.” In a speech last year, Dr. Donald R. Hopkins, then deputy director of the CDC, summed it up: “This disease is the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse in our nation’s minority communities.”

But the extraordinary hazards of black life in the Underclass are not limited to murder and AIDS. Blacks have more heart disease than whites, more cancer, more cirrhosis. Fifty percent of older black women are obese (compared with one third of the whites), and blacks have hypertension and strokes at twice the rate of whites. As you might expect, whites live about six years longer than blacks.

The grim numbers go on and on. In the late 1950s, 30 percent of poor black families were headed by women; today it is more than 70 percent. In 1959 only 15 percent of black births were out of wedlock; by 1982 it was 57 percent (five times the white rate). In i960, 42 percent of babies born to black teenagers were illegitimate; by 1983 it was 89 percent. From 1970 to 1984 the number of black families headed by women increased 108 percent (it was 63 percent for whites). Of the 27,178 families with children living in projects run by the Chicago Housing Authority, only 8 percent are headed by a husband and wife.

What goes on here? When you and I were growing up in the slums of New York, this simply didn’t happen very often. If a young man got a young woman pregnant, her father, brothers, or uncles would come knocking on his door. Today, in the urban wilderness of the Underclass, too many young black men apparently think nothing of getting women pregnant and then moving on, leaving the children’s care, feeding, clothing, and housing in the indifferent hands of the paternalistic state. After all the work done by blacks and whites to destroy the stereotype of the shiftless, irresponsible black man, here come these characters.

“There is, even now, a lot of anger within the black community toward the young black man,” said black psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint (an adviser to The Cosby Show) in a recent issue of The Black Scholar. “And increasingly, if he continues to deteriorate in his ability to function well, he is going to be rejected by black women. That is happening already. Even low-income black females perceive the black male as a loser, as trouble: dangerous and violent. …”

Poussaint believes that some young black males are compensating for feelings of inferiority in the larger society. “Sometimes, if you feel impotent in terms of society, you react by stressing your sexual role. That’s why many of them will see getting someone pregnant as proof of manhood, rather than having a child and being a responsible father to that child.”

Since 1981, unwed motherhood has replaced marital breakup as the leading cause for welfare eligibility (among blacks and whites), but the true cause might be incomprehensible ignorance. In the past few years, I’ve interviewed black women who can’t remember the full names of the fathers of their children and others who can’t spell their kids’ names. Many of these women seem to learn nothing from the experience of the first illegitimate child. They just have more babies. One result, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, is “mothers in their early teens, grandmothers in their late twenties, and great-grandmothers in their early forties.”