Piecework

So salvation (if it’s possible) will be up to the black middle class — for several reasons. One simple reason is that the departure of the black middle class from the ghetto helped intensify and concentrate the Underclass. In one sense, that exodus was itself the most obvious symbol of the triumph of the civil rights movement. For more than a decade, middle-class and working-class blacks have been heading downtown (or uptown, or out of town, depending upon the city), renting better apartments, buying houses or condos, seeking out better and safer schools for their kids, less melodramatic lives for themselves. According to a study by Reynolds Farley and Walter Allen, some 13 percent of black families now have incomes over $25,000; 44 percent of that group own their own homes; 8 percent are headed by a college graduate (compared with 19 percent of whites), 17 percent hold managerial or professional jobs. Middle-class blacks have not yet achieved parity with whites, but in a very important way, they are part of a splendid success story.

But they have left behind the growing catastrophe. You know this to be true. In the bad old days, when you were young, the ghettos were populated by a broad range of black Americans. There were black doctors and lawyers, clergymen, and musicians to be seen — and emulated — by the young. You know that Harlem was never paradise (to mention the most famous black ghetto); it always had its share of unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, broken marriages, and welfare. But when you and I were young, the middle class was still there, serving as what William Julius Wilson calls “a social buffer.”

The young saw every day that there was great diversity in black life, socially and economically, and plenty of reason for pride. As writer Nicholas Lemann has pointed out, there were healthy role models for the young: people who worked, didn’t commit crimes, use drugs, or aim only to get high on a Saturday night, thousands who were not reduced to welfare (except as temporary relief) and thought of it as a shameful condition. These people didn’t wait for the landlord to sweep the stoop or change a light bulb; they didn’t have to be dragged in protest to school or a library; they didn’t sneer at “dead-end” jobs. Such families wouldn’t give racists the satisfaction of seeing them in degraded conditions. They were too proud for that. And too proud to depend upon the kindness of strangers. A true man was someone who housed, clothed, and fed his family. There was no other definition.

And because such people lived in the ghetto, everybody gained. This was the ironic by-product of the racism that created the ghetto in the first place. You remember how you got your first jobs: someone heard they were hiring at American Can, or there was a slot open at the A & P, or the bottling plant needed help. The news came from people you knew on the streets or who lived in the same building, men and women who were working themselves and knew of other jobs. The barbershop was a communications center, or the candy store, or the corner bar, or the church. In addition, there were black people in the ghettos who could inspire the young. This kid stayed in school and studied hard because he wanted to be like that lawyer. We will never know how many kids in Harlem were inspired to play music by the regal sight of Duke Ellington walking on Lenox Avenue or Art Tatum getting out of a new car in front of Minton’s. We can’t count the number who wanted to speak like Adam Clayton Powell. Or be as hip as Miles Davis or as elegant as Sugar Ray Robinson.

Well, the middle class left the ghetto and that, of course, was their right, perhaps even their obligation. But for the kid in the Underclass, today’s role models are a harder sort: crack dealers, pimps, stickup men. In spite of a tentative move toward gentrification in places such as Harlem, bad guys are the only visible symbols of black success. There is no stigma to welfare. Even prison holds no terrors; it functions as part of a puberty rite, the institution where the bad blades and homeboys receive their higher educations on their way to early graves.

You ask the immemorial question: What is to be done?