Piecework

You too have seen the ravages of drugs. Heroin has been with us since the 1950s; in New York alone we have 220,000 heroin addicts — the equivalent of eleven army divisions. We had friends who died of overdoses; together we mourned Charlie Parker and Fats Navarro and Billie Holiday; we saw others virtually decompose before our eyes, their teeth rotting, arms scarred or abscessed by tracks, stealing from their families, hurrying always from one connection to another. Heroin was one of the first plagues we saw together. But other drugs are everywhere now in the ghettos of the Underclass: pot and pills and most of all these days, crack. Every day, thousands of girls turn tricks to get their share of this superpotent, highly addictive, easily smokable form of cocaine; for their supply, teenagers bash old men on the heads. These stupid kids seem to have no grander ambition than to get high. Crack, we are told, gives them illusions of power; heroin smothers their pain. There seems to be no vision that includes working toward power, or confronting personal pain like men and overcoming it. Instead we hear the steady whining complaint about Whitey and the System and the Man.

“Racial issues get a big reaction in the press,” says black congressman Floyd Flake of Queens, New York, “but it’s drugs that is bringing us down.”

Every day we see young people from a proud, tough race, nodding out on sidewalks or in public parks, wandering the streets at all hours, frequently homeless, or joined in the numb Fraternity of the Lost, in shooting galleries, abandoned houses, empty lots. We should not be surprised. These are kids who have been shaped in whole or in part by welfare or television. That is to say, to the habit of passivity and dependence, where nothing requires work. To read a book, to absorb it, to agree with it or quarrel with it: this takes work. But according to a 1986 Nielsen Media Research survey, blacks watch TV 39 percent more than all other American households. That means they are consuming a steady diet of slick crap, charged with violence, crawling with cheap emotions. The cumulative message of TV is that solutions should be easy. After all, if the Equalizer can confront a crime, overcome villains, come up with a solution in less than an hour, why should anyone have to master trigonometry?

Television is also the favored medium of the illiterate. Older generations of poor Americans learned to read in order to entertain themselves; some never got past dime novels, some discovered the glories of the world’s literature and history. The poor no longer must read to be entertained. Television provides entertainment easily and seductively. And while transmitting its grand distractions, the medium inevitably provides models for behavior. In television shows, virtually nobody is ever shown working — except cops. And even in cop shows, the emphasis is on action, not the tedious process of analysis and deduction.

So I’m no longer surprised when black high school students tell me they have never heard of James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Jean Toomer, or Ralph Ellison, to mention only a few extraordinary black writers. They don’t know that Alice Walker wrote The Color Purple. They have never heard of Romaire Bearden or Max Roach or Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker. They don’t even know Aesop’s fables or the Old Testament or the tales of the Greek gods. Go to a jazz club and listen to Wynton Marsalis: the audience is white. Young blacks are listening to the puerile doggerel of rap music. I find many white kids equally ignorant these days, but most of them don’t have to fight their way out of the Underclass. Hundreds of thousands of black American kids are growing up in complete ignorance of the basic elements of Western culture and the culture of black America. Increasingly, they are not even acquiring the tools required to cure the ignorance.

The black high school dropout rate in large cities is approaching 60 percent. Many such kids can’t speak a plain American language, never mind aspire to the eloquent mastery of Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. For a while some tried to make this a virtue; they argued that black English was a separate language of enormous strength and value and should even be codified and used in school. Alas, that was just another elaborate rationalization. Obviously, the American language has been enriched by black English and the argot of music and the street. But it will not lead the way to MIT. In a recent article in Harper’s, Julian Bond remembered: “My little girl brought a note home from school that said, ’J^uua be late too often.’ What kind of teacher wrote that note? Is he teaching my daughter how to read and write? I’m talking about a public school in Atlanta. …”