The Audacity of Hope (31 page)

One of my favorite restaurants in Chicago is a place called MacArthur’s. It’s away from the Loop, on the west end of the West Side on Madison Street, a simple, brightly lit

space with booths of blond wood that seat maybe a hundred people. On any day of the week, about that many people can be found lining up—families, teenagers, groups of matronly women and elderly men—all waiting their turn, cafeteria-style, for plates filled with fried chicken, catfish, hoppin’ John, collard greens, meatloaf, cornbread, and other soul-food standards. As these folks will tell you, it’s well worth the wait.

The restaurant’s owner, Mac Alexander, is a big, barrel-chested man in his early sixties, with thinning gray hair, a mustache, and a slight squint behind his glasses that gives him a pensive, professorial air. He’s an army vet, born in Lexington, Mississippi, who lost his left leg in Vietnam; after his convalescence, he and his wife moved to Chicago, where he took business courses while working in a warehouse. In 1972, he opened Mac’s Records, and helped found the Westside Business Improvement Association, pledging to fix up what he calls his “little corner of the world.”

By any measure he has succeeded. His record store grew; he opened up the restaurant and hired local residents to work there; he started buying and rehabbing run-down buildings and renting them out. It’s because of the efforts of men and women like Mac that the view along Madison Street is not as grim as the West Side’s reputation might suggest. There are clothing stores and pharmacies and what seems like a church on every block. Off the main thoroughfare you will find the same small bungalows—with neatly trimmed lawns and carefully tended flower beds—that make up many of Chicago’s neighborhoods.

But travel a few blocks farther in any direction and you will also experience a different side of Mac’s world: the throngs of young men on corners casting furtive glances up and down the street; the sound of sirens blending with the periodic thump of car stereos turned up full blast; the dark, boarded-up buildings and hastily scrawled gang signs; the rubbish everywhere, swirling in winter winds. Recently, the Chicago Police Department installed permanent cameras and flashing lights atop the lampposts of Madison, bathing each block in a perpetual blue glow. The folks who live along Madison didn’t complain; flashing blue lights are a familiar enough sight. They’re just one more reminder of what everybody knows—that the community’s immune system has broken down almost entirely, weakened by drugs and gunfire and despair; that despite the best efforts of folks like Mac, a virus has taken hold, and a people is wasting away.

“Crime’s nothing new on the West Side,” Mac told me one afternoon as we walked to look at one of his buildings. “I mean, back in the seventies, the police didn’t really take the idea of looking after black neighborhoods seriously. As long as trouble didn’t spill out into the white neighborhoods, they didn’t care. First store I opened, on Lake and Damen, I must’ve had eight, nine break-ins in a row.

“The police are more responsive now,” Mac said. “The commander out here, he’s a good brother, does the best he can. But he’s just as overwhelmed as everybody else. See, these kids out here, they just don’t care. Police don’t scare ’em, jail doesn’t scare ’em—more than half of the young guys out here already got a record. If the police pick up ten guys standing on a corner, another ten’ll take their place in an hour.

“That’s the thing that’s changed…the attitude of these kids. You can’t blame them, really, because most of them have nothing at home. Their mothers can’t tell them nothing—a lot of these women are still children themselves. Father’s in jail. Nobody

around to guide the kids, keep them in school, teach them respect. So these boys just raise themselves, basically, on the streets. That’s all they know. The gang, that’s their family. They don’t see any jobs out here except the drug trade. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve still got a lot of good families around here…not a lot of money necessarily, but doing their best to keep their kids out of trouble. But they’re just too outnumbered. The longer they stay, the more they feel their kids are at risk. So the minute they get a chance, they move out. And that just leaves things worse.”

Mac shook his head. “I don’t know. I keep thinking we can turn things around. But I’ll be honest with you, Barack—it’s hard not to feel sometimes like the situation is hopeless. Hard—and getting harder.”

I hear a lot of such sentiments in the African American community these days, a frank acknowledgment that conditions in the heart of the inner city are spinning out of control. Sometimes the conversation will center on statistics—the infant mortality rate (on par with Malaysia among poor black Americans), or black male unemployment (estimated at more than a third in some Chicago neighborhoods), or the number of black men who can expect to go through the criminal justice system at some point in their lives (one in three nationally).

But more often the conversation focuses on personal stories, offered as evidence of a fundamental breakdown within a portion of our community and voiced with a mixture of sadness and incredulity. A teacher will talk about what it’s like to have an eight-year- old shout obscenities and threaten her with bodily harm. A public defender will describe a fifteen-year-old’s harrowing rap sheet or the nonchalance with which his clients predict they will not live to see their thirtieth year. A pediatrician will describe the teenage parents who don’t think there’s anything wrong with feeding their toddlers potato chips for breakfast, or who admit to having left their five- or six-year-old alone at home.

These are the stories of those who didn’t make it out of history’s confinement, of the neighborhoods within the black community that house the poorest of the poor, serving as repositories for all the scars of slavery and violence of Jim Crow, the internalized rage and the forced ignorance, the shame of men who could not protect their women or support their families, the children who grew up being told they wouldn’t amount to anything and had no one there to undo the damage.

There was a time, of course, when such deep intergenerational poverty could still shock a nation—when the publication of Michael Harrington’s The Other America or Bobby Kennedy’s visits to the Mississippi Delta could inspire outrage and a call to action. Not anymore. Today the images of the so-called underclass are ubiquitous, a permanent fixture in American popular culture—in film and TV, where they’re the foil of choice for the forces of law and order; in rap music and videos, where the gangsta life is glorified and mimicked by white and black teenagers alike (although white teenagers, at least, are aware that theirs is just a pose); and on the nightly news, where the depredation to be found in the inner city always makes for good copy. Rather than evoke our sympathy, our familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of fear and outright contempt. But mostly it’s bred indifference. Black men filling our prisons, black children unable to read or caught in a gangland shooting, the black homeless sleeping on grates and in the parks of our nation’s capital—we take these

things for granted, as part of the natural order, a tragic situation, perhaps, but not one for which we are culpable, and certainly not something subject to change.

This concept of a black underclass—separate, apart, alien in its behavior and in its values—has also played a central role in modern American politics. It was partly on behalf of fixing the black ghetto that Johnson’s War on Poverty was launched, and it was on the basis of that war’s failures, both real and perceived, that conservatives turned much of the country against the very concept of the welfare state. A cottage industry grew within conservative think tanks, arguing not only that cultural pathologies—rather than racism or structural inequalities built into our economy—were responsible for black poverty but also that government programs like welfare, coupled with liberal judges who coddled criminals, actually made these pathologies worse. On television, images of innocent children with distended bellies were replaced with those of black looters and muggers; news reports focused less on the black maid struggling to make ends meet and more on the “welfare queen” who had babies just to collect a check. What was needed, conservatives argued, was a stern dose of discipline—more police, more prisons, more personal responsibility, and an end to welfare. If such strategies could not transform the black ghetto, at least they would contain it and keep hardworking taxpayers from throwing good money after bad.

That conservatives won over white public opinion should come as no surprise. Their arguments tapped into a distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor that has a long and varied history in America, an argument that has often been racially or ethnically tinged and that has gained greater currency during those periods—like the seventies and eighties—when economic times are tough. The response of liberal policy makers and civil rights leaders didn’t help; in their urgency to avoid blaming the victims of historical racism, they tended to downplay or ignore evidence that entrenched behavioral patterns among the black poor really were contributing to intergenerational poverty. (Most famously, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was accused of racism in the early sixties when he raised alarms about the rise of out-of-wedlock births among the black poor.) This willingness to dismiss the role that values played in shaping the economic success of a community strained credulity and alienated working-class whites— particularly since some of the most liberal policy makers lived lives far removed from urban disorder.

The truth is that such rising frustration with conditions in the inner city was hardly restricted to whites. In most black neighborhoods, law-abiding, hardworking residents have been demanding more aggressive police protection for years, since they are far more likely to be victims of crime. In private—around kitchen tables, in barbershops, and after church—black folks can often be heard bemoaning the eroding work ethic, inadequate parenting, and declining sexual mores with a fervor that would make the Heritage Foundation proud.

In that sense, black attitudes regarding the sources of chronic poverty are far more conservative than black politics would care to admit. What you won’t hear, though, are blacks using such terms as “predator” in describing a young gang member, or “underclass” in describing mothers on welfare—language that divides the world between those who are worthy of our concern and those who are not. For black Americans, such separation from the poor is never an option, and not just because the

color of our skin—and the conclusions the larger society draws from our color—makes all of us only as free, only as respected, as the least of us.

It’s also because blacks know the back story to the inner city’s dysfunction. Most blacks who grew up in Chicago remember the collective story of the great migration from the South, how after arriving in the North blacks were forced into ghettos because of racial steering and restrictive covenants and stacked up in public housing, where the schools were substandard and the parks were underfunded and police protection was nonexistent and the drug trade was tolerated. They remember how the plum patronage jobs were reserved for other immigrant groups and the blue-collar jobs that black folks relied on evaporated, so that families that had been intact began to crack under the pressure and ordinary children slipped through those cracks, until a tipping point was reached and what had once been the sad exception somehow became the rule. They know what drove that homeless man to drink because he is their uncle. That hardened criminal— they remember when he was a little boy, so full of life and capable of love, for he is their cousin.

In other words, African Americans understand that culture matters but that culture is shaped by circumstance. We know that many in the inner city are trapped by their own self-destructive behaviors but that those behaviors are not innate. And because of that knowledge, the black community remains convinced that if America finds its will to do so, then circumstances for those trapped in the inner city can be changed, individual attitudes among the poor will change in kind, and the damage can gradually be undone, if not for this generation then at least for the next.

Such wisdom might help us move beyond ideological bickering and serve as the basis of a renewed effort to tackle the problems of inner-city poverty. We could begin by acknowledging that perhaps the single biggest thing we could do to reduce such poverty is to encourage teenage girls to finish high school and avoid having children out of wedlock. In this effort, school- and community-based programs that have a proven track record of reducing teen pregnancy need to be expanded, but parents, clergy, and community leaders also need to speak out more consistently on the issue.

We should also acknowledge that conservatives—and Bill Clinton—were right about welfare as it was previously structured: By detaching income from work, and by making no demands on welfare recipients other than a tolerance for intrusive bureaucracy and an assurance that no man lived in the same house as the mother of his children, the old AFDC program sapped people of their initiative and eroded their self-respect. Any strategy to reduce intergenerational poverty has to be centered on work, not welfare— not only because work provides independence and income but also because work provides order, structure, dignity, and opportunities for growth in people’s lives.

But we also need to admit that work alone does not ensure that people can rise out of poverty. Across America, welfare reform has sharply reduced the number of people on the public dole; it has also swelled the ranks of the working poor, with women churning in and out of the labor market, locked into jobs that don’t pay a living wage, forced every day to scramble for adequate child care, affordable housing, and accessible health care, only to find themselves at the end of each month wondering how they can stretch the last few dollars that they have left to cover the food bill, the gas bill, and the baby’s new coat.