Transatlantic Zeppelin: Forty lost years

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July 27, 2005

Forty lost years

When a Nor'easter shut down New York City in late January, I walked home to find a Harlem father in the street having a snowball fight with his two sons. I don't know why I found this scene so quaint. Maybe it was because it reminded me of my own childhood in Indiana, a bit of Norman Rockwell on West 122nd St. Or maybe it was because the scene was one of the few times in this neighborhood that I've seen a father tending his children rather than smoking weed at midnight outside the bodega at 123rd & Malcolm X.

City Journal's new Summer edition [via] has an interesting essay that covers the evolution of the family in ghettos like Central Harlem: "The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies." The essay argues that much of the reason for the existance of a permanent underclass can be summed up by noting two facts:

1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.
By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto “baby mamas.” Not so; it is a largely low-income—and disproportionately black—phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal—one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.

Before the collossal failure called the War on Poverty began, Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a prophetic report noting how the ghetto family was in disarray. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" wrote a prescription for resolving the growing existance of a black underclass, but black pride and feminism prevented an adequate response.

More than most social scientists, Moynihan, steeped in history and anthropology, understood what families do. They “shape their children’s character and ability,” he wrote. “By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.” What children learned in the “disorganized home[s]” of the ghetto, as he described through his forest of graphs, was that adults do not finish school, get jobs, or, in the case of men, take care of their children or obey the law. Marriage, on the other hand, provides a “stable home” for children to learn common virtues. Implicit in Moynihan’s analysis was that marriage orients men and women toward the future, asking them not just to commit to each other but to plan, to earn, to save, and to devote themselves to advancing their children’s prospects. Single mothers in the ghetto, on the other hand, tended to drift into pregnancy, often more than once and by more than one man, and to float through the chaos around them. Such mothers are unlikely to “shape their children’s character and ability” in ways that lead to upward mobility. Separate and unequal families, in other words, meant that blacks would have their liberty, but that they would be strangers to equality. Hence Moynihan’s conclusion: “a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure.”

Over the course of the next 40 years, Moynihan's predictions proved themselves true.

Throughout the 1980s, the inner city—and the black family—continued to unravel. Child poverty stayed close to 20 percent, hitting a high of 22.7 percent in 1993. Welfare dependency continued to rise, soaring from 2 million families in 1970 to 5 million by 1995. By 1990, 65 percent of all black children were being born to unmarried women.
In ghetto communities like Central Harlem, the number was closer to 80 percent. By this point, no one doubted that most of these children were destined to grow up poor and to pass down the legacy of single parenting to their own children.

By the mid-1990s, the ghetto's problems finally bottomed-out as the national conversation turned to traditional family values.

All told, the nation is at a cultural inflection point that portends change. Though they always caution that “marriage is not a panacea,” social scientists almost uniformly accept the research that confirms the benefits for children growing up with their own married parents. Welfare reform and tougher child-support regulations have reinforced the message of personal responsibility for one’s children. The Bush administration unabashedly uses the word “marriage” in its welfare policies. There are even raw numbers to support the case for optimism: teen pregnancy, which finally started to decline in the mid-nineties in response to a crisper, teen-pregnancy-is-a-bad-idea cultural message, is now at its lowest rate ever.
And finally, in the ghetto itself there is a growing feeling that mother-only families don’t work. ...

If change really is in the air, it’s taken 40 years to get here—40 years of inner-city misery for the country to reach a point at which it fully signed on to the lesson of Moynihan’s report. Yes, better late than never; but you could forgive lost generations of ghetto men, women, and children if they found it cold comfort.

Forty years after the Moynihan report, perhaps we will start to see more Norman Rockwell in Central Harlem.

Posted by adrianjo at July 27, 2005 12:39 AM