Piecework

There are no simple answers. We are seeing the culmination of fifty years of American history, the consequences of some social policies that succeeded and many that failed. The Underclass has been a long time forming, since about the time that the great black migration to the North began during and after World War II. This was caused by the mechanization that changed the economy of the South; where once a hundred black men toiled in a cotton field, now there was one machine and ten men and all the others were heading north. But when they arrived in places like New York and Chicago, they soon discovered that there might be jobs at Young & Rubicam, but not any were for men and women who’d spent their lives chopping cotton. By the late 1950s, the jobs that supported my father and other European immigrants began to vanish, too, jobs in small factories, jobs that didn’t require much formal education. Soon welfare became the dismal alternative to all those glittering visions of renewal. Soon despair was general.

I would like to see the black middle class return in great waves to the urban ghettos to attack the roots of that despair and to work at the restoration of genuine pride and lost dignity. I am speaking here of you and your friends, of course, along with all those younger than you, the bright young men and women with their M.B.A.’s and BMWs. Obviously, I don’t mean that you must move your family back to the ghetto. Or that your friends should do the same. That simply isn’t going to happen in the immediate future. But in important ways, such a drastic commitment isn’t necessary. After all, back in the 1950s, it wasn’t necessary for the freedom riders to live permanently in the South, either. But just as the sit-ins and freedom rides were directed from the North against the institutions of the segregated South, this campaign would come from the outside, from the suburbs, from downtown, and yes, from the South.

It would help to consider the Underclass as a Third World country within the borders of a First World nation. Members of the black middle class are now citizens of that First World country. But if Bob Geldof can help Ethiopia, you and other suburban and downtown blacks can surely help those who’ve been left behind in the Third World. To begin with, you could mount the most widespread private literacy campaign in the history of this country, drawing on the experiences of Cuba and Nicaragua, utilizing all the skills you have gained in the wider world of business, communications, journalism, marketing. You could force Eddie Murphy to make some TV commercials about the importance of reading, thus redeeming himself for once bragging to Barbara Walters that he never reads (given the nature of the catastrophe in the black Underclass, this was surely the most disgusting single public statement by a black man in the past decade). You could publicly destroy a hundred or so TV sets to symbolize the need for the Underclass to remove itself from the hypnotic glow of the tube and begin functioning again as active participants in life instead of as a passive audience.

You could teach black teenagers about birth control — clearly, graphically, intelligently — and then supply birth-control devices to everyone. You could make clear to young black men that they aren’t men at all if they abandon their women and children. You could instruct young women that when they make the momentous decision to have a child, they must be prepared to support it for the rest of their days and not leave that awesome task to the state. You could demand through lawsuits, demonstrations, sheer moral force, and the use of the media that the police round up the crack dealers and smack peddlers. These vicious bastards should then be tried and jailed, instead of being sent back to the streets where they smirk at the impotence of the law and wink at the unwary young. This would require cooperation with the police and an end to the incessant knee-jerk portrayal of the police as the enemy.